BIO of Ferid Murad

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Prof. Ferid Murad, is a Biochemist best known for his 1977 pioneering discovery work on nitric oxide and its role in increasing the diameter of the cardiovascular and other blood vessels for which he was awarded Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1998 along with Robert F. Furchgott and Louis J. Ignarro. The Nobel Committee evaluated that the identification of a biological role for nitric oxide was surprising for several reasons. Nitric oxide was known before the discovery mainly as a harmful air pollutant, released into the atmosphere from automobile engines and other combustion sources. In addition, it was a simple molecule, very different from the complex neurotransmitters and other signaling molecules that regulate many biological events. No other gas is known to act as a signaling molecule in the body. In addition to its use in cardiovascular drugs the work of Prof. Murad on nitric oxide led to the development of Viagra. Nitric oxide is the only gas known to act as a signaling molecule in the body, and regulates activities of the brain, intestines, kidneys, liver, lungs, stomach, and genitals.
Prof. Ferid Murad, attended DePauw University (1958), Western Reserve University (1965), and performed his internship and residency in medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital as and MD/PhD physician scientist. He worked as a clinical associate in the Heart Institute from 1967-70 at the National Institutes of Health. From 1970-1981, Prof. Murad was on the faculty at the University of Virginia, where he developed a new Clinical Pharmacology Division in the Department of Medicine as an Associate Professor in Medicine and Pharmacology. In 1981, he was appointed as Chief of Medicine of the Palo Alto Veterans Hospital, a Stanford-affiliated hospital. He also served as a Professor of Medicine and Pharmacology and the Associate Chairman of Medicine. Prof. Murad was acting Chairman of Medicine at Stanford University from 1986-1988. In 1988, Dr. Murad joined industry as Vice President at Abbott Laboratories, supervising approximately 1,500 scientists and staff. In 1993, he founded and served as President and CEO of Molecular Geriatrics Corporation. In April 1997, he joined the University of Texas-Houston as their first chairman of a newly-combined basic science department, Integrative Biology, Pharmacology and Physiology. There he also created a new Division of Clinical Pharmacology with his department and the Department of Medicine. In October 1998, Prof. Murad, along with his colleagues Robert F. Furchgott and Louis J. Ignarro, were awarded The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The award was given to them for their discoveries concerning nitric oxide as a signaling molecule in the cardiovascular system specific to blood vessel dilation. After accepting the award, Dr. Murad began working in the dual role of Chairman of the Department of Integrative Biology, Pharmacology and Physiology and Director of the Institute of Molecular Medicine at the University of Texas-Houston. In 2011, Dr. Murad accepted an faculty appointment at The George Washington University, where he leads a lab program in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Prof. Murad has been recipient of many Awards including the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award in 1996 for his discovery.
He is author of two books: Nitric Oxide: Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, and Therapeutic Implications (1995, with Louis J. Ignarro) and The Wellness Solution (2007, with Edward A Taub and David Oliphant).
As a Nobel Laureate, Dr. Murad has participated on panels with other Nobel Laureates to discuss methods to promote peace and education around the world.

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BIO of Richard L. Guerrant

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Dr. Guerrant is the Thomas H. Hunter Professor of International Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases and International Medicine at University of Virginia where he founded one of the first Trans-University Centers for Global Health. He was elected to the IOM/National Academy of Medicine and chaired its Board on Global Health. As president of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, he testified in the US Congress before Porter & Pelosi’s Appropriations Committee and before Callahan’s Foreign Affairs Committee for global health research support for NIH and CDC. .Having lived and worked in Congo, Bangladesh and Brazil and trained at Davidson College, UVa (AA), Harvard-BCH and Hopkins, his research is focused on understanding and ameliorating the long-term impact of diarrhea and repeated enteric infections in developing countries. With longstanding NIH support and colleagues in Fortaleza Brazil and South Africa, he and others have described the vicious cycle of diarrhea or enteric infections and malnutrition with long-term consequences for stunted growth, cognitive development, and metabolic syndrome, for which he has proposed the new terms of HAZdrop, COGhit and METsyn respectively.
Guerrant further discovered that the cognitive deficit most affected was Alzheimer-like semantic fluency impairment and then found that the major genetic allele associated with Alzheimer Disease, ApoE4, was actually protective in favela children against diarrhea and cognitive impairment, helping to explain the evolution of this troubling genetic disease. He holds a dozen US patents, including the stool diagnostic for inflammation and alanyl glutamine for oral rehydration and nutrition therapy (ORNT) for enteropathy as well as diarrhea. He is senior editor of 7 books including “Tropical Infectious Diseases,” “At the Edge of Development: Health Crises in a Transitional Society,” and is author of over 700 scientific articles (18 with UVa’s 3 Nobel Laureates, Gilman, Murad and Marshall) and reviews, and has recently published “Evolution of Evolution: The Survival Value of Caring.” He is past president of the ASTMH and recipient of its highest honor, the Walter Reed Medal; as well as the IDSA Mentor Award; Virginia Outstanding Scientist; UVa’s highest honor, the Thomas Jefferson Award, and the NFID Maxwell Finland Award. He was awarded Professor Honoris Causa by the Federal University of Ceará in Brazil and an honorary PhD in Public Health by the University of Venda in South Africa.

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BIO of William A. Petri

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William A. Petri, Jr., M.D., Ph.D. is a physician-scientist at the University of Virginia who studies how microbes cause disease. He discovered that the parasite Entamoeba histolytica invades the intestine by eating it alive in a novel process called trogocytosis, mapped genetic susceptibility to the receptor for the obesity hormone leptin, invented an FDA-approved test for diagnosis, and is developing a vaccine designed to promote mucosal immunity. In bacteriology, Petri studies C. difficile colitis, the most common hospital acquired infection, and has shown that gut eosinophils are critical in defense and a biomarker of survival. Petri’s longitudinal work in infants from the slums of Dhaka has identified enteric infections as a cause of chronic intestinal inflammation that has the collateral damage of malnutrition, impaired cognition and oral vaccine failure.
Finally during the global pandemic Petri has mobilized his research group to the study the SARS-CoV-2 virus, demonstrating that the type 2 cytokine IL-13 is causal in the immune dysregulation that leads to hypoxic respiratory failure, identifying the immune environment that leads to a delayed antibody response and failure to control viral replication, and participating in human clinical trials of anti-Spike monoclonal antibodies for post-exposure prophylaxis.
Petri has served as President of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, Editor of Infection and Immunity, and is currently Associate Editor for PLoS Pathogens, Clinical Infections Diseases and Trends in Molecular Medicine. He has served continuously since 1993 on advisory committees for the NIH.
His research has been honored with a MERIT Award from NIH, the Ben Kean Medal of the American Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, the Oswald Avery Award of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the Burroughs Wellcome New Investigator and Scholar Awards in Molecular Parasitology, and the Lucille P. Markey Scholar Award in Biomedical Research. This year he will receive the Maxwell Finland Award which is highest award for research of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases. The Governor of Virginia has awarded Petri the Virginia Outstanding Scientist Award in 2017 and the Outstanding Faculty Award in 2014 and the University of Virginia the Walter Reed Distinguished Achievement Award, Distinguished Researcher Award, All-University Teaching Award and Inventor of the Year.
Bill Petri received the MD and PhD (Microbiology) degrees from UVA, did medicine residency at Case Western and returned to UVA for infectious diseases fellowship. He rose through the ranks to serve for 17 years as Chief of the Infectious Diseases Division and is currently Vice Chair for Research of the Department of Medicine. He spends 3 months of every year caring for patients on the general medicine and infectious diseases services and the remainder is focused on research on infectious diseases, supported by grant funding from NIH, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Regeneron.
photo credit: UVA

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BIO of Scott Heysell

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Scott Heysell, MD, MPH, is an internal medicine physician specializing in infectious diseases. His primary focus is caring for people with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), tuberculosis and non-tuberculous mycobacterial diseases.
Heysell is an active researcher and supports partners worldwide in an effort to reduce tuberculosis-related deaths and correct factors that contribute to tuberculosis, including poverty, health system management and chronic medical conditions such as HIV and diabetes. His research group also studies how to maximize drug efficacy to improve treatment outcomes.
An English major as an undergraduate at Vanderbilt University, Heysell returned to his home state of Oregon to complete medical school at Oregon Health Sciences University. He went on to complete a Master’s of Public Health degree with a focus in epidemiology and biostatistics prior to attending Yale University for residency training in internal medicine.
It was time working in rural South Africa caring for people during an HIV and drug-resistant tuberculosis epidemic that most influenced Heysell’s career path and research interests. He completed his fellowship in infectious diseases at UVA Health, working within a division dedicated to eliminating the diseases of poverty.
Heysell is married to a fellow physician-scientist working with infectious diseases. They have two children who keep them busy, follow them around for work-related travel, but also provide an important connection to their community.

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BIO of Haruhiko Inufusa

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Dr. Haruhiko Inufusa was born Okayama Japan at 1957. After finished Medical School Kindai University at 1982, he starts work at Surgery department of Kindai University Hospital. At the period of post graduate school of Kindai University, he started research of cancer especially on metastasis phenomenon. He established various cancer cell lines, and one cell line had potential of metastasis in nude mouse. He achieved principal graduation by this research result at 1988. Cancer and glycolipid was his main research target during his post doctor fellowship position 1988-1990 at University Washington Seattle, Professor Sen-itchiro Hakomori laboratory,. Later, he found that Lewis Y glycolipid of cancer controls blood coagulation and metastasis as well.
In 2001, he was promoted professor at Kindai University School of Medicine (Department of Surgery) and Faculty of Agriculture (Department of Clinical Nutrition). Acting as a surgeon, he was one of first 15 doctors in Japan who started laparoscopic surgery for colorectal cancer, and his surgical video was widely used to educate young doctors.
In 2006 he resigned from his position of Director of Advanced Medical Technology and Medical Economics, at Kindai University School of Medicine. He starts research on alcohol, sugar, and fat metabolism at TIMA Japan Inc. which supported by TIMA foundation. After invention of anti-alcohol supplement SUPLAIV, he invented Twendee X that activate sugar and fat metabolisms. Strong anti-oxidant effects of Twendee X were found at 2011, he starts producing and marketing SUPAILV and Twendee X by the request of TIMA foundation. At 2013, Gifu university started his laboratory Division of Antioxidant Research. His present main invention is the successful treatment of various patients with Twendee X.

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BIO of Julietta Yedoyan

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Dr. Julietta Yedoyan was born in Yerevan, Armenia. She received her M.Sc. degree in pharmaceutical chemistry from Yerevan State University (Armenia), in 2012. She was an exchange student at Rostock University (Germany), from 2011-2012. Dr. Yedoyan earned her PhD in organic chemistry from the Institute of Organic Chemistry, University of Regensburg (Germany) as a DAAD scholar, in 2019. Her research was focused on developing an efficient and highly selective method for synthesis of valuable six-membered N- and O-heterocycles, widely occurring in numerous natural and synthetic products.
Dr. Yedoyan worked as a research assistant in the laboratory of biomimetic catalysis, Armbiotechnology Scientific and Production Center (Armenia), from 2013-2015. Later she joined the group of Michael P. Doyle (the Rita and John Feik Distinguished University Chair in Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Texas at San Antonio) as a research fellow at the UTSA (TX, USA), in 2015. Currently, Dr. Yedoyan works as a Product Safety Specialist and COOP Researcher at FLOGEN Technologies.
Dr. Yedoyan co-authored a number of publications in highly ranked scientific journals (including J. Am. Chem. Soc. and Angew. Chem. Int. Ed.). She was awarded numerous academic scholarships and travel grants (including DAAD, Calouste Gulbenkian Scholarship, Bayerische Chancengleichheits, GDCh). During the last several years she actively participated in different academic and political conferences and events, such as 67th Lindau Nobel Laureates meeting as well as 27th European GSI Summer School, Gustav Stresemann Institute.

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