David G Russell Lorne Infection and Immunity 2014

David G Russell

David G. Russell, Ph.D., is the William Kaplan Professor of Infection Biology in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology in the College of Veterinary Medicine, Cornell University. He received his Bachelor of Science from St. Andrews University in Scotland and was awarded a Ph.D. from Imperial College, London University. He has held positions as Group Leader at the Max-Planck-Institüt in Tübingen, Assistant Professor at NYU Medical Center and as Associate and Full Professor in the Department of Molecular Microbiology at Washington University School of Medicine. He served as Chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the College of Veterinary Medicine, Cornell University from 2000 until 2010. He has spent his career looking at host/pathogen interplay and has authored over 190 publications on the subject, including papers in Science and Nature. Currently he serves on the editorial boards of 4 journals. He won the Burroughs Wellcome Senior Scholar Award in Molecular Parasitology in 1994, and was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2007. He currently serves on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation External Advisory Committee for Global Health. His research focuses primarily on the interplay between the macrophage and the pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis. On the macrophage side of the equation the lab has been developing real-time, functional readouts for the lumenal environment within the phagosome, such as hydrolytic activity and radical production, and how these are modified by immune stimuli and infection. On the bacterial side the group is interested in how the bacterium modifies its intracellular compartment to ensure its survival, and how the bacterium responds metabolically to this changing environment. This information has been used as the basis of a high-throughput screen to identify small molecules that kill M. tuberculosis inside its host cell. A project pursued in collaboration with Vertex Pharmaceuticals. Finally, at the level of the human host, the lab is studying how human alveolar macrophages respond to M. tuberculosis and how the infection site evolves to either contain the infection or progress to active disease and transmission. More recently his lab has started looking at the role of macrophages as a host cell in HIV infection and HIV/TB co-infections, and as an inflammatory mediator in human cerebral malaria. These human studies are pursued through collaborations with the University of Cape Town, South Africa and the Wellcome Trust Research Laboratories, Blantyre, Malawi. His work is supported by multiple grants from the National Institutes of Health and by Vertex Pharmaceuticals.