Summer Courses:

2005

Molecular Biology of Aging Summer Course 2005 - 2007
William T. Speck, M.D.
Marine Biological Laboratory

The Ellison Medical Foundation is funding the three-week summer course on the Molecular Biology of Aging at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, MA for the years 2005 through 2007. The 2005 course, directed by Drs. Steven Austad and Gary Ruvkun, will be held July 31 - August 20, 2005 at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, MA. Funds cover all expenses for attending students (graduate students, post-docs, junior faculty, and senior investigators). Morning lectures in Model Systems (yeast, Drosophila and C. elegans), DNA Mutations and Repair, Telomeres and Cellular Senescence, Mammalian Aging, and Evolutionary Considerations are followed by laboratory exercises. For additional information and application procedures, see: http://www.mbl.edu/education/courses/special_topics/bag.html.

2004

Biology of Parasitism Summer Course 2004 - 2007
William T. Speck, M.D.
Marine Biological Laboratory

The Ellison Medical Foundation has pledged up to $300,000 to help support the Biology of Parasitism Summer Course, Marine Biological Laboratory through 2007. The course for 2005 is directed by Dr. Jay Bangs, University of Wisconsin, and Dr. Patricia Johnson, UCLA, and offers lectures and modern approaches for studying protozoan and helminthic parasites. The Biology of Parasitism Course is designed for advanced graduate students, post-docs, and independent investigators and provides the opportunity for them to work alongside leaders in the field. For additional information, see http://www.mbl.edu/education/courses/summer/course_bio_para.html.

2001

Molecular Biology of Aging Summer Course
William T. Speck, M.D.
Marine Biological Laboratory

The Ellison Medical Foundation funded a three-week summer course on the Molecular Biology of Aging at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, MA for the years 2002 through 2004. The 2004 course, directed by Drs. Steven Austad and Gary Ruvkun, will be held August 2-21, 2004 at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, MA. Funds cover all expenses for attending students (graduate students, post-docs, junior faculty, and senior investigators). Morning lectures in Model Systems (yeast and C. elegans), DNA Mutation and Repair, Telomeres and Cellular Senescence, Mammalian Aging, and Evolutionary Considerations are followed by laboratory exercises. For additional information and application procedures, see: http://courses.mbl.edu. Course directors in previous years were Drs. Leonard Guarente and Douglas C. Wallace.

2000

Biology of Parasitism Course
William T. Speck, M.D.
Marine Biological Laboratory

The Ellison Medical Foundation contributed to the support of the Biology of Parasitism Summer Course, Marine Biological Laboratory from 2000 through 2003 and funded the purchase of laptops to be used in the course. Directors during this time were Christian Tschudi, Ph.D. and Elisabetta Ullu, Ph.D., both from Yale University, and Edward Pearce, Ph.D., Cornell University.

1999

Molecular Biology of Aging Summer Course
Leonard Guarente, Ph.D.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Douglas C. Wallace, Ph.D.
University of California - Irvine

The Ellison Medical Foundation funded a three-week summer course on the Molecular Biology of Aging at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, MA for the years 1999 through 2001. The course was directed by Drs. Leonard Guarente and Douglas C. Wallace. Funds cover all expenses for attending students (graduate students, post-docs, junior faculty, and senior investigators). Morning lectures in Model Systems (yeast and C. elegans), DNA Mutation and Repair, Telomeres and Cellular Senescence, Mammalian Aging, and Evolutionary Considerations are followed by laboratory exercises.

Training Awards:

2003

Caribbean Basin Research and Training Network on Infectious Diseases
Michael I. Goldberg, Ph.D.
American Society for Microbiology

The Ellison Medical Foundation has pledged up to $150,000 for a three-year training project, The Caribbean Basin Research and Training Network on Infectious Diseases. Training for graduate and postdoctoral students from the Caribbean Basin region will be provided through a series of infectious disease minicourses to be held in Mexico, Jamaica, and Costa Rica. The students will also be instructed in grantsmanship and will collaborate with researchers from the U. S. and the Caribbean Basin to develop joint research initiatives. The first International Minicourse “Genetics, Genomics and Epidemiology in the Study of Infectious Disease: Bacterial Agents” will be held November 8-19, 2004 at the Instituto de Biotecnología, UNAM, Cuernavaca, Morelos, México. For further information, see: http://www.asm.org/International/index.asp?bid=27007

Center for Global Health
Richard L. Guerrant, M.D.
University of Virginia

The Ellison Medical Foundation has pledged up to $810,000 for a three-year period to the interdepartmental Center for Global Health at the University of Virginia in order to provide support for student and faculty research on health threats in impoverished countries. This support, matched by the University of Virginia, will promote the international exchange of expertise by bringing in scientists and clinicians from developing countries and providing research opportunities for students and faculty going abroad. The funding will also support the development of interdisciplinary courses and an annual symposium on international health. The foundation will consider an additional 2 years of support upon completion of the initial award. For further information, see http://www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/internet/cgh/AbouttheCenter/aboutthecenter.cfm

International Clinical Research Training Program
Gerald T. Keusch, M.D.
Fogarty International Center, National Institutes of Health

The Ellison Medical Foundation has pledged up to $1,000,000 over 5 years to help support the Fogarty-Ellison International Clinical Research Training Program for U.S. and Developing Country Students of the Health Sciences. The training program will provide early career opportunities for U.S. medical or nursing students, or other graduate students in the health professions, to participate in a one-year program of mentored clinical research in infectious disease in developing countries. The U.S. student and a student from the host country will be paired to provide peer support and a mutually collaborative learning experience. Training programs will be available in countries such as Botswana, Brazil, Haiti, India, Kenya, Mali, Peru, South Africa, Thailand, Uganda, and Zambia. The first annual competition will begin in the fall of 2003 for training that will commence in July of 2004. Applications are due January 6, 2004. For further information and an application, see: http://www.aamc.org/overseasfellowship For NIH News press release, see: http://www.nih.gov/news/pr/may2003/fic-20.htm

Joint Global Field Epidemiology and Laboratory Training Program in Kenya
Ray Arthur, Ph.D., Co-PI
National Center for Infectious Diseases
Peter Nsubuga, M.D., Co-PI
Center for Disease Control

The Ellison Medical Foundation has pledged up to $2,817,182 for a four-year period to support in-country training in Kenya for epidemiology fellows and laboratory scientist fellows selected from the East African region. The fellows will be paired with mentors from the CDC and the U.S. Department of Defense laboratory programs in malaria, HIV, entomology, and select helminthes in an effort to build regional capacity to meet the challenge of emerging infectious diseases.

Post-doctoral Fellowship in Infectious Disease
Donald D. Brown, Ph.D.
Life Sciences Research Foundation

The Ellison Medical Foundation has pledged up to $153,000 to fund a three-year post-doctoral fellowship through the Life Sciences Research Foundation. The fellowship has been awarded to David M. Raskin, Ph.D. of Harvard Medical School. Dr. Raskin will be conducting research on Vibrio cholerae that will provide basic information about bacterial physiology, as well as identify novel drug targets and growth inhibitors.

Postdoctoral Fellowship in Tropical Infectious Diseases
Terri Taylor, D. O.
American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene

The Ellison Medical Foundation awarded $50,000 to the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene to enable them to fund a postdoctoral fellowship for Dr. Ajay Bharti, an infectious disease fellow in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. Working in the Loreto Department of Peru located in the Amazon Basin of northeastern Peru, Dr. Bharti will be identifying malaria patients, both symptomatic and asymptomatic, in the Hospital Apoyo de Iquitos for acute malaria patients, and within malarious villages outside Iquitos where a high rate of asymptomatic malaria parasitemia has been observed. The major hypothesis to be tested is that gametocytes from patients who have chronic malaria have higher parasite infectivity to mosquitoes compared to patients with acute malaria; and secondly, that nitric oxide-related modification of blood stage Plasmodium proteins would correlate with reduced gametocyte infectivity to mosquitoes.

Training Innovations in Parasitological Studies
Daniel Colley, Ph.D.
University of Georgia

The Ellison Medical Foundation has pledged up to $275,400 for a five-year period to provide funding for the Training Innovations in Parasitological Studies (TIPS) program at the University of Georgia. The multi-department program, developed and run by the Center for Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases and the center for Undergraduate Research Opportunities, will introduce undergraduate students to multidisciplinary approaches to global infectious diseases and will provide undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral research opportunities at well established collaborative research programs in developing countries. For further information, see http://www.ctegd.uga.edu/postpage.cgi?str=fellowships and http://www.uga.edu/news/artman/publish/040113ellison.shtml.

Workshops in India: Clinical Research & Evidence Based Medicine
T.V. Rajan, M.D., Ph.D.
University of Connecticut Health Center

The Ellison Medical Foundation awarded $32,000 to initiate a training program by funding the first Clinical Research & Evidence Based Research Workshop, to be held in Chennai, India in August 2003. Physicians, from within India and abroad who are engaged in clinical and epidemiological research, will hold annual workshops over a period of five years for a group of Indian medical students to provide instruction and mentoring in the fundamentals of clinical research. Each student will be asked to develop a clinical research protocol and will have the direct availability of mentors for this research.

2002

African Research Leadership Training Program Workshop: Multilateral Initiative on Malaria (MIM)
Gerald T. Keusch, M.D.
Fogarty International Center, National Institutes of Health

The Ellison Medical Foundation has awarded $25,000 to help support a leadership and management training workshop for African scientists who are directors or potential directors of African research institutes conducting research on malaria. This program was developed under the auspices of the Multilateral Initiative on Malaria. This pilot workshop will be held in Tanzania in the summer of 2002. Follow-up to the training is anticipated to include sabbatical placement of the participants at developed research institutions in other parts of Africa or elsewhere in the world for mentorship and/or development of scientific collaborations to strengthen the malaria research capability in Africa.

Ellison Medical Foundation/AFAR Senior Post-doctoral Research Program
Stephanie Lederman,
American Federation for Aging Research

The Ellison Medical Foundation, in partnership with the American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR), created the Ellison/AFAR Senior Postdoctoral Fellows Research Program to encourage and further the careers of senior postdoctoral fellows with outstanding promise in the basic biological and clinical sciences relevant to understanding aging processes and age-related diseases and disabilities. The 2-year award is intended to provide significant support to permit M.D. and/or Ph.D. postdoctoral fellows to become established in the field of aging. Eligibility requires that these fellows will have at least three and not more than five years of prior postdoctoral training at the time of the award. Information on application requirements and applications may be obtained from AFAR, 70 West 40th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or from the AFAR website: http://www.afar.org/grants.html.

Program in Career Development, Research and Training in Global Infectious Diseases at Harvard University
Dan Hartl, Ph.D.
Harvard University
John Mekalanos, Ph.D.
Harvard Medical School
Dyann Wirth, Ph.D.
Harvard School of Public Health

The Ellison Medical Foundation has awarded $1,100,000 for the first year of a five-year award pledged to Harvard University to train a cohort of scientists, including pre-doctoral, post-doctoral, and advanced research /junior faculty trainees from both the United States and from disease endemic countries, in modern approaches to microbial pathogenesis with an emphasis on microbial evolution. In addition to training in basic science, there will be a focus on developing and applying new interventions, including vaccines and drugs. Depending upon career level, the scientists in the program will participate in training at Harvard University and/or a partner institution including the Centre for Health and Population Research in Bangladesh; Mahidol University, Faculty of Tropical Medicine in Thailand; National Institute of Cholera and Enteric Diseases in India; and Cheikh Anta Diop University in Senegal. One of the ultimate goals of the training and research collaborations is to establish sustainable research programs at several major universities in disease-endemic countries.

Resident Research Associateships Program in Molecular Pathogenesis and Global Infectious Disease Program
Judith K. Nyquist, Ph.D.
National Academy of Sciences

The Ellison Medical Foundation awarded $552,695 in 2002 to The National Research Council (NRC), National Academies of Sciences, to support the first year of a program for resident research associateships in molecular pathogenesis and global infectious disease coordinated by Judith K. Nyquist, Ph.D., of the NRC, in collaboration with the Naval Medical Research Center and the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. The Ellison Medical Foundation-NRC Postdoctoral and Senior Fellowships Program is offering competitive awards for research to be conducted on the molecular pathogenesis of infectious diseases in residence at the Army and Navy overseas laboratories located in Lima, Peru; Cairo, Egypt; Jakarta, Indonesia; Nairobi, Kenya; and Bangkok, Thailand. The focus is to employ molecular technology to better understand the infection process and the factors that determine and control the outcome of infections. The aim is to allow postdoctoral or senior scientists an opportunity to conduct such studies in disease-endemic regions. The ultimate goal of such research is to generate critical knowledge needed to develop prevention and treatment strategies for infectious disease. Duration of the fellowships is one year with potential for extension. The first call for applications appeared this summer with an August 15, 2002 deadline. Future deadlines will be posted on the NRC website at: http://www.national-academies.org/rap Questions about the future application process may be directed to the NRC at 202-334-2760.

Training Course on Molecular Techniques in Malaria
John E. Donelson, Ph.D.
University of Iowa

The Ellison Medical Foundation awarded $15,000 to the University of Iowa for a Training Course on Molecular Techniques in Malaria coordinated through John E. Donelson, Ph.D., with Dr. Thomas Egwang at the Molecular Biotechnology Laboratories in Kampala as the course organizer. The training course is being held September 1-30, 2002 in Kampala, Uganda. Selected students from several African countries are being trained by scientists from 6 African countries in malaria genome research, bioinformatics, and functional genomics with the objective of stimulating interest and enthusiasm in the application of molecular biology techniques to malaria research. It is expected that course participants will subsequently train others in each of their respective countries in post-genome research techniques for developing new tools for malaria control, thereby expanding access to this important technology within endemic regions.

2001

Targeted Advanced Fellowships to Strengthen Selected Regionally Important DevelopmentCountry Institutions for Research on Health Issues Related to Nutrition and Infection
Nevin Scrimshaw, Ph.D
International Nutrition Foundation, Inc.

The Ellison Medical Foundation has pledged up to $5,000,000 over a period of five years to fund targeted advanced fellowships to strengthen selected regionally important development country institutions in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. These institutions will provide training and leadership for indigenous health research related to nutrition and infection. For more information, see Powerpoint slides attached. Power Point Slides