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Monday, April 5, 2004 WRITER: Phil Williams, 706-542-8501, phil@franklin.uga.edu PROFESSOR FROM UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS NAMED UGA’S FIRST BARBARA AND SANFORD ORKIN EMINENT SCHOLAR ATHENS, Ga. – Dr. Roberto Docampo, a professor of veterinary pathology at the University of Illinois, has been named the first Georgia Research Alliance Barbara and Sanford Orkin Eminent Scholar in Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases and Cellular Biology at the University of Georgia. Docampo will hold his academic appointment in the department of cellular biology. His wife, Dr. Silvia Moreno, will also join the faculty at UGA. In 2000, the Orkins, longtime Atlanta residents, gave UGA $750,000 to create the professorship to strengthen programs in tropical and emerging global diseases. “Barbara and Sanford Orkin’s goal in creating this chair was to help eradicate diseases that cause suffering and death for millions of people around the world,” said UGA President Michael F. Adams. “Dr. Docampo’s appointment will significantly bolster research at the University of Georgia to achieve that goal. We are grateful to Mr. and Mrs. Orkin for helping strengthen our biomedical initiative and for supporting work that has enormous scientific as well as humanitarian value.” Sanford Orkin expressed pleasure at the announcement. “Barbara and I are very excited about the hiring of Dr. Docampo,” he said. “The eradication of disease, especially in the Third World, is of enormous significance, and we are delighted to be a part of that important effort.” Other administrators on the UGA campus were equally enthusiastic. “We are extremely delighted to have attracted a candidate of Dr. Docampo’s stature to the University of Georgia,” said Wyatt Anderson, dean of the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. “We could not have accomplished this without the generosity of the Orkins and the support of the Georgia Research Alliance. I believe Dr. Docampo and Dr. Moreno will bring superb new ideas in our international efforts to fight diseases and understand their causes.” The Georgia Research Alliance is a consortium of business, industry and academic institutions that together work in cutting-edge solutions to numerous problems facing the state, country and world. The hub of the Georgia Research Alliance is the Eminent Scholars program. Renowned scientists are recruited to Georgia from many parts of the world to lead programs of research and development with high potential economic development impact for the state. To date, the GRA has recruited more than 40 Eminent Scholars. Areas of research are primarily in advanced communications and the biosciences and range from optical systems to structural biology. “Those of us in the center are very excited that Dr. Docampo will be joining us,” said Dan Colley, director of UGA’s Center for Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases (CETG) and a professor of microbiology. “ Roberto is globally recognized as an outstanding contributor to the field of tropical medicine and parasitology. Having Roberto and Silvia as colleagues will be wonderful for the center. Their focus on metabolic pathways of protozoan parasites and how to utilize such knowledge for their cutting-edge drug discovery and development will strongly complement the interests of our current faculty and open avenues along which to develop new interests. Furthermore, their participation in our burgeoning training programs for undergraduates, graduate students and post-doctoral fellows will be a major bonus of having them at UGA.” Joe Crim, head of the department of cellular biology likewise had high praise for Docampo. “Dr. Docampo’s ground-breaking research is strategically positioned at the interface of cell biology and parasitology,” said Crim. “The arrival of Dr. Docampo and Dr. Moreno at UGA clearly will offer many exciting opportunities for new, mutually beneficial collaborations with existing scientists in the biological sciences. Indeed, the impetus of their research has the potential to reverberate widely across South Campus, including valued colleagues in other colleges such as pharmacy and veterinary medicine.” Docampo is an international leader in the search for metabolic pathways in parasites that may be essential for their survival but may not find an equivalent counterpart in the host. Currently Docampo’s lab is concentrating its efforts on different biochemical mechanisms used by parasites that cause malaria, African sleeping sickness, leishmaniasis and Chagas’ Disease. Malaria is one of the planet’s deadliest diseases and one of the leading causes of sickness and death in the developing world. According to the World Health Organization there are 300 to 500 million clinical cases of malaria each year resulting in 1.5 to 2.7 million deaths. Docampo received his M.D. from the School of Medicine at the University of Buenos Aires in 1972 and a Ph.D. in microbiology from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in 1977. He also earned a Ph.D. in medicine from the University of Buenos Aires School of Medicine in 1979. He served on the faculty of the University of Buenos Aires from 1978-1990, when he accepted a position as an associate professor in the department of veterinary pathology in the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Illinois. He was promoted to professor there in 1995, and in 2002 became chair of the Division of Microbiology and Immunology at UL and also became scientific director of the Center for Zoonoses Research. A visiting professor at numerous universities, Docampo is the winner of many awards, including two awards from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. He has received several million dollars in extramural grants from such agencies as the National Institutes of Health, the American Heart Association and the World Health Organization. He has presented invited lectures worldwide and serves or has served on the editorial boards of numerous journals, including Molecular and Biochemical Parasitology and grant review panels, including the Tropical Medicine and Parasitology Study Section of the National Institutes of Health. He is the author of nearly 200 peer-reviewed research articles and has contributed a dozen chapters to edited volumes. With his wife, he is the author of Introductory Course of Chemistry, Vols. I-III, published in Argentina in 1981. Moreno is, likewise, an internationally recognized scientist who studies the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, which is the cause of toxoplasmosis. This pervasive parasite, which infects about 20 percent of the people in the United States, has a global, cosmopolitan distribution and can be an especially devastating disease in immunocompromised hosts, including patients with HIV/AIDS. Moreno’s master’s and doctoral degrees are both from the University of Buenos Aires, and she has worked with her husband for many years. Docampo and Moreno are highly praised teachers as well and arrive at UGA with high rankings from their former students. They will assume their positions at UGA in January. News Bureau |
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