For more than three decades, Dennis Kasper has conducted
research in microbiology, infectious diseases and public health while discharging
a broad range of administrative and educational responsibilities. Dr. Kasper is
the William Ellery Channing Professor of Medicine and a Professor of Microbiology
and Molecular Genetics at Harvard Medical School. As Director of the Channing
Laboratory, a research facility with a high international profile, he plays a
powerful role in shaping cutting-edge research programs in infectious diseases
and epidemiology.
Dr. Kasper has led studies on the molecular basis of
bacterial pathogenesis, focusing primarily on group B Streptococcus and Bacteroides
fragilis. He has applied the substantial body of knowledge gained in these studies
to elucidate the interactions of bacterial surface virulence factors with host
defenses. His work has centered around the biochemistry, chemistry, genetics and
immunology of polysaccharides. Years of basic and translational research have
culminatedin a group B streptococcal polysaccharide-protein conjugate vaccine,
targeting the most common bacterial cause of serious neonatal infections. Dr.
Kasper's research on B. fragilis has revealed how bacteria induce the hallmark
host response of abscess formation. This basic work has opened an avenue of investigation
into a novel class of immunomodulators to prevent intraabdominal abscesses and
adhesions.
In his term as Executive Dean for Academic Programs at Harvard
Medical School, Dr. Kasper worked to facilitate the translation of scientific
discoveries into clinical advances and to promote collaboration within and among
departments and institutions. He recently made the decision to step down from
this position in order to devote his full efforts to his research and to lead
the New England Regional Center of Excellence for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious
Diseases Research. Dr. Kasper has served as Chair of the NIAID's Board of Scientific
Counselors and as a key member of the Executive Committee of the International
Society for Infectious Diseases, whose presidency he assumed in 2002. For 8 years
he served as President of the International Society for Anaerobic Bacteria.
Dr.
Kasper is currently Editor-in-Chief of Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine.
He is a member of the Institute of Medicine. He is the author of more than 300
research and clinical publications encompassing an array of topics in infectious
diseases and microbiology.
Dr. Braunwald received his medical training at
New York University and completed his Medical Residency at the Johns Hopkins Hospital.
In 1955 he became a Clinical Associate in the (then) National Heart Institute.
Subsequently, he served as the first Chief of the Cardiology Branch and then as
Clinical Director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. After he left
the intramural program, Dr. Braunwald served as the founding Chairman of the Department
of Medicine at the University of California, San Diego and from 1972 to 1996 he
was Chairman of the Department of Medicine at the Brigham and Women's Hospital.
He was a founding trustee and Chief Academic Officer of Partners HealthCare System,
which incorporates the Brigham and Women's and Massachusetts General Hospitals.
Dr. Braunwald is the only cardiologist who is a member of the National
Academy of Sciences. He has served as President of the American Society for Clinical
Investigation and the Association of Professors of Medicine. He has received numerous
honors and awards including the Distinguished Scientist Award of the American
College of Cardiology, Research Achievement, and Herrick Awards of the American
Heart Association, the Williams Award of the Association of Professors of Medicine,
and the Kober medal of the Association of American Physicians. He is the recipient
of twelve honorary degrees from distinguished universities throughout the world.
Harvard University created the Eugene Braunwald Professorship in Medicine as a
permanently endowed chair. The American Heart Association created the Eugene Braunwald
Academic Mentorship Award as a permanent annual award. The living Nobel Prize
winners in medicine voted Dr. Braunwald as "the person who has contributed
the most to cardiology in recent years". In 1998 Science Watch listed Dr.
Braunwald as the most frequently cited author in Cardiology. The Brigham and Women's
Hospital dedicated a research facility as the "Eugene Braunwald Research
Center".
Dr. Braunwald is the author of more than 1,100 publications
and an editor of Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine, (Editor-in-Chief
of the 11th Edition and the current 15th Edition) and the founding editor/author
of Heart Disease, now in its 6th Edition. These two books are the leading texts
in internal medicine and cardiology respectively. Dr. Braunwald has been Chairman
of the TIMI trials since 1984 and he has led the SAVE and CARE trials.
A native of Brooklyn, New York, received his M.D.
degree from Cornell University Medical College in 1966. He then completed an internship
and residency at The New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center. In 1968, Dr. Fauci
came to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as a clinical associate in the
Laboratory of Clinical Investigation (LCI) at the National Institute of Allergy
and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). In 1974, he became Head of the Clinical Physiology
Section, LCI, and in 1980 was appointed Chief of the Laboratory of Immunoregulation,
a position he still holds. In 1984, Dr. Fauci became Director of NIAID, where
he oversees an extensive research portfolio of basic and applied research to prevent,
diagnose, and treat infectious and immune-mediated illnesses, including HIV/AIDS
and other sexually transmitted diseases, illness from potential agents of bioterrorism,
tuberculosis, malaria, autoimmune disorders, asthma and allergies. The budget
for NIAID for fiscal year 2003 is approximately $4 billion. Dr. Fauci serves as
one of the key advisors to the White House and Department of Health and Human
Services on global AIDS issues, and on initiatives to bolster medical and public
health preparedness against possible future bioterrorist attacks.
Dr. Fauci
has made many contributions to basic and clinical research on the pathogenesis
and treatment of immune-mediated diseases. He has pioneered the field of human
immunoregulation by making a number of basic scientific observations that serve
as the basis for current understanding of the regulation of the human immune response.
In addition, Dr. Fauci is widely recognized for delineating the precise mechanisms
whereby immunosuppressive agents modulate the human immune response. He has developed
effective therapies for formerly fatal diseases such as polyarteritis nodosa,
Wegener's granulomatosis, and lymphomatoid granulomatosis. A 1985 Stanford University
Arthritis Center Survey of the American Rheumatism Association membership ranked
the work of Dr. Fauci on the treatment of polyarteritis nodosa and Wegener's granulomatosis
as one of the most important advances in patient management in rheumatology over
the previous 20 years.
Dr. Fauci has made seminal contributions to the
understanding of how the AIDS virus destroys the body's defenses leading to its
susceptibility to deadly infections. He also has delineated the mechanisms of
induction of HIV expression by endogenous cytokines. Furthermore, he has been
instrumental in developing strategies for the therapy and immune reconstitution
of patients with this serious disease, as well as for a vaccine to prevent HIV
infection. He continues to devote much of his research time to identifying the
nature of the immunopathogenic mechanisms of HIV infection and the scope of the
body's immune responses to the AIDS retrovirus.
In 2003, an Institute for
Scientific Information study indicated that in the twenty year period from 1983
to 2002, Dr. Fauci was the 13th most-cited scientist among the 2.5 to 3 million
authors in all disciplines throughout the world who published articles in scientific
journals during that time frame. Dr. Fauci was the ninth most-cited scientist
in the field of immunology in the period from January 1993 to June 30, 2003.
Through
the years, Dr. Fauci has served as Visiting Professor at major medical centers
throughout the country. He has delivered many major lectureships all over the
world and is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards for his scientific accomplishments,
including 28 honorary doctorate degrees from universities in the United States
and abroad.
Dr. Fauci is a member of the National Academy of Sciences,
the American Philosophical Society, the Institute of Medicine of the National
Academy of Sciences (Council Member), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
and the Royal Danish Academy of Science and Letters, as well as a number of other
professional societies including the American College of Physicians, the American
Society for Clinical Investigation, the Association of American Physicians, the
Infectious Diseases Society of America, the American Association of Immunologists,
and the American Academy of Allergy Asthma and Immunology. He serves on the editorial
boards of many scientific journals; as an editor of Harrison's Principles of Internal
Medicine; and as author, coauthor, or editor of more than 1,000 scientific publications,
including several textbooks.
Steve Hauser is a graduate of Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (S.B., 1971, Phi Beta Kappa) and the Harvard Medical School (M.D.
1975, Magna Cum Laude). He trained in internal medicine at the New York Hospital
- Cornell Medical Center and in neurology at the Massachusetts General Hospital
- Harvard Medical School. Following postdoctoral fellowships in immunology at
Harvard Medical School (1980-1983) and the Institut Pasteur in Paris, France (1983-1986),
he joined the faculty at Harvard and established an independent laboratory at
the Massachusetts General Hospital.
Since 1992, he has served as chairman
of the Department of Neurology at UCSF. A neuroimmunologist, Dr. Hauser's research
has focused on the human demyelinating disease multiple sclerosis (MS). He was
responsible for one of the first clinical trials demonstrating a beneficial effect
of immunosuppression on the course of progressive MS. His early work identified
the CD4 T-cell as important in MS and also in experimental models of demyelination.
With colleagues, he developed the first animal model that faithfully reproduces
the neuropathology of MS and identified an autoantibody against a quantitatively
minor myelin protein (myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein or MOG) that mediates
myelin damage both in the model and in the human disease. This was the first demonstration
of a specific autoantibody in MS. He also leads a nationwide genomics consortium
to identify MS susceptibility genes.
His accomplishments in this area include
mapping of the chromosome 6p21 MS susceptibility region to the DRB locus, localization
of a second MS gene to chromosome 19q13, and identification of several genetic
modifiers. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the
American Association of Physicians, a member of the Institute of Medicine and
serves as an editor of the medical textbook Harrison's Principles of Internal
Medicine. He is currently President-Elect of the American Neurological Association.
Dr. Longo earned his bachelor of arts degree from
Washington University in St. Louis and his medical degree from the University
of Missouri-Columbia. During medical school, he obtained a year of pathology training
focused on hematology as a Post-Sophomore Fellow. He trained in internal medicine
at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital of Harvard Medical School. He obtained subspecialty
training in oncology at the National Cancer Institute and post-doctoral laboratory
training in the Laboratory of Immunology, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases.
After completing his training in 1980, he became a Senior Investigator
in the Medicine Branch of the National Cancer Institute. In 1985, Dr. Longo became
the Director of the Biological Response Modifiers Program of the National Cancer
Institute. In 1995, he became Scientific Director of the National Institute on
Aging. He has published nearly 700 papers and book chapters, is an associate editor
of Journal of the National Cancer Institute and Clinical Immunology, and is on
the editorial boards of several other journals. In addition to his work on Harrison's
Principles of Internal Medicine, he edits Cancer Chemotherapy and Biotherapy:
Principles and Practice with Bruce Chabner.
He has elucidated mechanisms
by which NK cells regulate hematopoiesis, tumors inhibit T-cell function, and
activation signals induce neoplastic cell death. He has developed treatments that
improve the survival of patients with lymphoma and Hodgkin's disease and pioneered
use of antibodies, cytokines, adoptive cellular therapies and vaccines for cancer
treatment.
Dr. J.
Larry Jameson is Irving S. Cutter Professor and Chairman of Medicine at the Northwestern
University Feinberg School of Medicine. He received an MD-PhD degree in 1981 from
the University of North Carolina before performing clinical training in Internal
Medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. He rose through the
faculty ranks at the Harvard Medical School to become Associate Professor of Medicine
and Chief of the Thyroid Unit at the Massachusetts General Hospital before moving
to Northwestern in 1993 as chief of the Division of Endocrinology, Metabolism,
and Molecular Medicine.
Dr. Jameson is internationally recognized for his
research, which has defined the genetic basis of more than a dozen different endocrine
disorders that affect reproduction and thyroid gland function. He has published
more than 200 scientific articles including reports in top-ranked journals such
as the New England Journal Medicine, Nature Genetics, Science, and the Journal
of Clinical Investigation, as well as several specialty journals in endocrinology.
Dr. Jameson is the standard bearer for molecular medicine in the field
of endocrinology. He is Co-Editor of the 4th edition of the authoritative text,
DeGroot and Jameson's, Endocrinology. His book, Principles of Molecular Medicine
received the Best Health Science Book of 1998 award. He was recently appointed
as an Editor of the 15th Edition of Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine
and is an Editor of Harrison's On-line. Dr. Jameson has trained more than 50 scientists,
many of whom have risen to leadership positions endocrinology.
He recently
served the President of The Endocrine Society, an organization with more than
10,000 members. Dr. Jameson has been the recipient of several awards including
the Oppenheimer Award from the Endocrine Society and the Van Meter Award from
the American Thyroid Association, and has served as a Visiting Lecturer at leading
institutions around the world. He has been elected to the American Society of
Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians.
