American Academy of Microbiology Board of Governors Election
Candidates for Board of Governors:
Member, Board of Governors (Vote for one)
Graham C. Walker
Graham C. Walker is an American Cancer Society Research Professor and HHMI Professor in the Department of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Walker received his Honors B.Sc. from Carleton University (Ottawa, Ontario) and his Ph.D. from University of Illinois where he worked on nucleic acid synthesis and biochemistry. He then was a postdoctoral fellow with Bruce Ames at UC Berkeley where he developed his interest in mutagenesis and DNA repair. Since 1976, Dr. Walker has been a member of the faculty of the Department of Biology at MIT, where his lab has carried out basic research on how cells respond to damage to their DNA and on mechanisms they use to either repair or tolerate such DNA damage. For all of this time, Dr. Walker has used the bacterium Escherichia coli as a model system; several of the DNA repair genes Dr. Walker has worked on in E. coli have turned out to have human homologs that play roles in cancer prevention. After being named an American Cancer Society Research Professor in 2002, Dr. Walker extended his studies of DNA repair and mutagenesis to yeast and mammals and has recently obtained evidence that interfering with mutagenic translesion DNA polymerases could help improve chemotherapy. Dr. Walker’s lab also studies the symbiosis between legumes and the nitrogen-fixing bacterium Rhizobium. This line of research has also led to unexpected findings including the discovery of the “missing step” in vitamin B12 biosynthesis, commonalities between this symbiosis and the chronic intracellular infections caused by the human pathogen Brucella, and the discovery of new RNase that plays crucial roles in rRNA maturation and 70S ribosome quality control. Dr. Walker has been deeply involved in teaching throughout his career and in 2002, and again in 2010, was awarded a four-year HHMI Professorship to support his efforts in undergraduate education. He used those funds to establish an Education Group, whose accomplishments included the development of StarBiochem, an internationally used, freely available 3D protein viewer designed for education. For a total of 20 years, Dr. Walker has been in charge of the MIT undergraduate program in Biology and has directed MIT’s HHMI-funded program in undergraduate education in the biological sciences since its inception in 1989. Dr. Walker served as an Editor of the Journal of Bacteriology for 16 years, finishing his 10-year term as Editor-in-chief in 2001. Dr. Walker co-authored the major textbook DNA Repair and Mutagenesis published by ASM Press (1st Edition 1995, 2nd edition 2005). He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology (1994) and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2004), and AAAS Fellow (2009).
Member, Board of Governors (Vote for one)
Daniel G. Colley
Dan Colley is a Professor of Microbiology in the Department of Microbiology and Director of the Center for Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia. Dr. Colley earned his Ph.D. at Tulane University where he studied basic immunology in rats. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Microbiology at Yale University where he continued research on lymphocyte development. He then accepted positions at the Veterans Administration Medical Center and the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and rose through the ranks to Research Career Scientist and Professor. Between his postdoctoral position and starting at the VAMC and VUSM he spent 9 months in Recife Brazil where he began a long-standing interest in the immunology of experimental and human schistosomiasis. He has also investigated and published on human immunology of Chagas disease and trachoma. The primary themes of his research have been immunoregulation during these chronic infections and the mechanisms of human resistance to reinfection by schistosomes. In 1992 he moved to the Centers for Disease and Prevention (CDC) where he was the Director of the Division of Parasitic Diseases. In 2001 he moved to his current positions at UGA. He has established collaborative immunology research programs in Belo Horizonte Brazil, Castries St. Lucia, Warraq-el Arab Egypt and for the last 17 years has worked with colleagues at the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI) in Kisumu Kenya. In addition, Dr. Colley is the Director of the Schistosomiasis Consortium for Operational Research and Evaluation (SCORE) which is doing on-the-ground research in countries across Africa about how best to control schistosomiasis. Dr. Colley has published over 240 papers on human and experimental immunology of chronic infections and served on multiple grant review panels, editorial boards and technical committees for national and international organizations. Among his honors Dr. Colley has received the National Order of Scientific Merit of Brazil, Class “Gra-Cruz,” presented by the President of Brazil and the Distinguish Life Sciences Scientist Award from the Christopher Columbus Foundation and the US Chamber of Commerce. He is also a former President of the American Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, an Honorary Member of the Japanese Society of Parasitology and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.
Stanley Fields
Education: B.A., Biology, Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT; B.A., M.A., Ph.D., Molecular Biology, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and Cambridge Univ., Cambridge, U.K.; Postdoctoral Fellow, Univ. California San Francisco (with Ira Herskowitz). Present position: Professor, Departments of Genome Sciences and Medicine (and adjunct Microbiology) and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, Univ. Washington, Seattle. Honors and Awards: Fellow, AAM, American Association for the Advancement of Science; Member, National Academy of Sciences; Chiron Biotechnology Research Award; State University of New York Outstanding Inventor Award; Jacob Heskel Gabbay Award in Biotechnology and Medicine; Vollum Award for Distinguished Accomplishment in Science and Technology; Paul Janssen Prize in Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine; University of Washington Postdoc Association Mentor of the Year. Professional Activities: Editorial Board, Molecular and Cellular Proteomics, Genetics; Committee on Elections, AAM; Promega Biotechnology Research Award Selection Committee, ASM; Search Committee, NIGMS Director; Scientific Advisory Board, Adimab, Inc.
Current Committee on Elections members
Candidates for Committee on Elections:
Member, Committee on Elections (Confirm or Deny)
Virginia L. Miller
Virginia L. Miller, is a Professor of Genetics and of Microbiology & Immunology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Miller earned her Ph.D. in Microbiology and Molecular Genetics from Harvard University where she studied regulation of cholera toxin expression. After postdoctoral training at Stanford University, she joined the faculty at UCLA where she was granted tenure in 1994. She then moved to Washington University in St. Louis in 1996 and in 2008 she moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as Professor in the Departments of Genetics and Microbiology & Immunology, and Associate Dean of Graduate Education in the School of Medicine. She began her studies on the molecular analysis of Yersinia enterocolitica-host interactions as a postdoctoral fellow and has continued those interests in her own laboratory. The overall goals of her research are to understand the bacteria-host interaction at the molecular level to learn how this interaction affects the pathogenesis of infections, and to understand how pathogens co-ordinate the expression of virulence determinants during an infection. To do this her laboratory uses genetic, molecular and immunological approaches in conjunction with mouse models of infection. Currently her lab is focusing on studies of Yersinia enterocolitica, Yersinia pestis and Klebsiella pneumoniae. Dr. Miller has served as Chair of Division B for ASM, Councilor at Large, and currently serves as Divisional Group II Representative. She has served on the ASM Conferences Committee, as Vice-Chair and Co-Chair of the ASM Biodefense Research Meeting, and on the Editorial Boards of Infection & Immunity and Journal of Bacteriology. She previously served as Chair of the Distinguished Service Award Selection Committee for the American Academy of Microbiology.
Karen Nelson
Karen Nelson is the President of the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI). Prior to being appointed President, she was the Director of JCVI's Rockville Campus, and Director of Human Microbiology and Metagenomics in the Department of Human Genomic Medicine at the JCVI. Dr. Nelson received her undergraduate degree from the University of the West Indies, and her Ph.D. from Cornell University. She has extensive experience in microbial ecology, microbial genomics, microbial physiology and metagenomics. Since joining the JCVI legacy institutes, Dr. Nelson has led several genomic and metagenomic efforts, including the first human metagenomics study on fecal material derived from three individuals published in 2006. Additional ongoing studies in her group include metagenomic approaches to study the ecology of the gastrointestinal tract of humans and animals, studies on the relationship between the microbiome and various human and animal disease conditions, reference genome sequencing and analysis primarily for the human body, and other ‘omics studies. She has authored or co-authored over 100 peer reviewed publications and edited three books, and is currently Editor-in-Chief of the journals Microbial Ecology and Advances in Microbial Ecology. She also serves on the Editorial Boards of BMC Genomics, GigaScience, and the Central European Journal of Biology. Dr. Nelson is also a standing member of the NRC Committee on Biodefense, a member of the National Academy of Sciences Board of Life Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology.
Member, Committee on Elections (Confirm or Deny)
William Petri
William Petri is the Wade Hampton Frost Professor of Medicine, with joint appointments in the Departments of Microbiology and Pathology at the University of Virginia Medical School. He is Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases and International Health at UVa. In addition, he is President of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. Dr. Petri majored in chemistry at the University of Wisconsin. He received medical and philosophy degrees at the University of Virginia. He completed his internship and residency in internal medicine at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. He returned to the University of Virginia as a fellow in the infectious diseases division headed by Gerald Mandell, M.D. Dr. Petri's research interests are tropical medicine and biodefense. His current lab work is aimed at finding new means to prevent amebiasis. Dr. Petri's most recent publications include the cognitive effects of diarrhea, malnutrition and Entamoeba histolytica infection in school-age children in Dahaka, Bangladesh. He has also written recently about how diarrheal illness is negatively associated with the growth of preschool children.