Richard L. Guerrant

Short Bio:

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.