INVITED SPEAKERS
Marta Rodriguez-Garcia, MD, PhD
Innate immune control of HIV infection in the genital mucosa
Dr. Rodriguez-Garcia obtained her MD from the University of Granada and PhD from the University of Barcelona (Spain). She completed her medical residency in Clinical Immunology and then moved to the USA for postdoctoral training, first at the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard, and then at Dartmouth to focus her research on reproductive immunology and HIV infection. She then became an Assistant Professor in the Department of Immunology at Tufts, and recently moved to Wayne State University as an Associate Professor in the Department of Biochemistry, Microbiology and Immunology and the C.S Mott Center for Human Research and Development. She serves as a standing member for the HIV Comorbidities and Clinical Studies (HCCS) NIH Study Section, she is the treasurer for the American Society for Reproductive Immunology (ASRI) and she recently became a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Investigator in the Pathogenesis of Infectious Diseases (PATH) awardee.
Her research, funded by NIH and the Burroughs Welcome Fund, focuses on understanding the early events of mucosal HIV acquisition in the female genital tract and how innate immune protection changes with age.
Vanessa Sperandio. DDS, PhD
The highs and lows of enteric pathogens-microbiota and host interactions
Dr. Sperandio is the Chair of the Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology in the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Robert Turell Professor. She was the Jane and Bud Smith Distinguished Chair in Medicine, and a Professor in the departments of Microbiology and Biochemistry at UT Southwestern Medical Center. She got her bachelors in biology, and her masters and PhD in Molecular Genetics in the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in Brazil. She was a Latin American Pew Fellow in Biomedical Sciences (1997), an Ellison Foundation New Scholar (2004), a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Investigator in the Pathogenesis of Infectious Diseases (2006), and a National Academy Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow (since 2007). She is the recipient of the ASM 2015 Eli Lilly and Company-Elanco Research award, and a winner of the 2014 GSK Discovery Fast-track challenge. In 2013 she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology (AAM) and is the Chair of the Board of Governors of the AAM. She was elected as an American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS) fellow in 2022. Her research investigates chemical, stress and nutritional signaling at the interface amongst the mammalian host, beneficial microbiota and invading bacterial pathogens. The main tenant of research in her laboratory is the study of how bacterial cells sense several mammalian neurotransmitters leading to rewiring and reprogramming of bacterial transcription towards host and niche adaptation. She has also identified several bacterial receptors to mammalian neurotransmitters and reported that invading pathogens hijack these inter-kingdoms signaling systems to promote virulence expression. She also translated these basic science concepts into strategies to develop novel approaches to anti-microbial therapy.
Work in the News:
As Goes Wisconsin podcast hosted by show founder Kritin Brey: Coked-Up Mice
