Message from Infectious Diseases Division Chief Eric Houpt MD
Happy 2025! The Division of Infectious Diseases and International Health had a strong 2024, and we are pleased to share some updates in this newsletter. Our clinical workload has been extremely busy, particularly our ID consult services, and we are adjusting to accommodate this ever-increasing workload. Every consult patient is complex and time-consuming, and we deploy daily teams of 3 attendings, three fellows, three nurse practitioners, and students and residents to manage this complexity. Our research productivity has risen steadily over the last five years and reached $25.2M last year, the highest on record. I am even more impressed with number 12, the number of our faculty members who are PI or MPI on NIH R01 grants. We are hoping that the NIH budget for ID hangs in there next year. Our Infectious Diseases fellowship program remains strong, having an excellent match every year, and our fellows emerge with exceptional clinical and research training. Please read below for more details on the 34 faculty and 100+ staff in our Division.
Happy New Year, Eric Houpt MD
RESEARCH
Reported by Girija Ramakrishnan PhD, Research Associate Professor of Medicine
The Division of Infectious Diseases awarded one-year seed funding to promote research and scholarship to the following faculty in the Division:
Mayuresh Abhyankar, Matt Crawford and Molly Hughes, Carol Gilchrist, Li Chaofan, Chris Moore, and Cirle Warren.
The Division also has been holding well-attended monthly meetings where an ID faculty member presents their research.
By Patrick Jackson MD, Infectious Diseases Fellowship Director
Program Director Patrick Jackson and Associate Program Directors Stacy Park and Chris Moore lead the University of Virginia’s Infectious Diseases Fellowship. The ID fellowship is a three-year training program that aims to produce excellent clinicians, researchers, and educators. The program has been supported by NIH T-32 training grants for more than four decades and emphasizes rigorous clinical medicine and research training. The program has a unique structure in which first-year fellows dedicate their time exclusively to research. The second and third training years are divided between clinical and research time. During the clinical years, fellows see patients on the general and immune-compromised/transplant inpatient consult services. There are also opportunities to participate in outpatient HIV, general, transplant, mycobacterial, Clostridium difficile, travelers, and musculoskeletal infectious diseases clinics.
Fellows and their faculty mentors work one-on-one in a wide array of scientific projects encompassing basic, translational, clinical, and epidemiologic research at UVA and around the globe. Four fellows graduated from the program in June. Ghassan Ilaiwy is continuing at UVA as a researcher funded by a Burroughs Wellcome Fund/ASTMH Postdoc Fellowship in Tropical Infectious Diseases. Jacqueline Hodges began a faculty position at Duke, where she continues her work on HIV and substance use disorder. Maria Geba is bringing her ID expertise abroad in international relief work in southern Sudan. Catherine Bielick has appointments at Harvard and MIT, where she is conducting K08-funded research on HIV opportunistic infections utilizing machine learning. We welcomed three new fellows in July – Daniel Bailey (U of Vermont), Ben Fuller (UVA), and Matthew Willis (VCU).
We welcome hearing from residents and students interested in learning more about ID or being connected to research projects in the Division. Please contact Patrick Jackson (pej9j@uvahealth.org) if you would like to hear more about ID training opportunities.
ADDITIONAL NEWS
In no particular order…
• Samantha Alleman-Moreau and Brett Moreau had a baby, Alexandra, in December!
• Dr. Neena Thomas-Gosain, U Colorado, is joining the ID faculty in September 2025 (spouse of Surgery recruit).
• The fellowship program under the leadership of Patrick Jackson successfully filled our fellowship class in the Match! Only 50.8% of programs were filled this year.
• Patrick Jackson received an R56, “HIV Rev-Rev Response Element Activity Variation in Transmission and Latency.” Direct costs $305,251.
• Tania Thomas and Tuyetanh Eichholz – Patient Experience Awards – A provider who achieved ≥ the 90th percentile on Overall Provider level section results.
• Carol Gilchrist, received a new R21 AI185530 “Developing vaccines against the intracellular and extracellular life stages of the Cryptosporidium parasite.”
• Mami Taniuchi: received a new grant titled “Machine Learning for Blue Line Tracing and Wastewater Surveillance” from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, totaling $1.77 million.
• James Platts-Mills received a new grant from the Gates Foundation, “GPDS analysis 3.0,” which extends support to the Global Pediatric Diarrhea Surveillance Network, now funded until 2027 and has been funded since 2016.
• Scott Heysell received an NIH K24 grant, “Global Infectious Diseases Framework to grow interdisciplinary research.”
• Cirle Warren (UVA/prime university) received The Virginia Catalyst Grant ($800,000) awarded to her and Drs. Joel Linden (Adovate/industry partner) and Liwu Li (Virginia Tech/partner university) for “A2B receptor blockade for the treatment of Clostridioides difficile infection.”
• James Platts-Mills took over the Gastrointestinal Infections sessions at the George Washington ID Board Review, joining Taison Bell on the ID Board Review faculty.
• Chris Moore, Tania Thomas, Stellah Mpagama (Tanzania), Conrad Muzoora (Uganda), and Scott Heysell– this month completed accrual (N=436) in phase 3 RCT to improve sepsis mortality.
• Scott Heysell was selected as Senior Fellow in UVA’s Society of Fellows, Idu Meadows as Junior Fellow.
• Amy Mathers and colleagues hosted the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, Centers for Disease Control, and American Society for Microbiology to UVA on Wednesday, Dec 11, on the topic “Virginia’s Pathogen Genomics Center of Excellence (PGCoE): Infectious Disease Monitoring as a Health System Quality Initiative.”
• James Platts-Mills and Eric Houpt are collaborators on a new R01 with Elizabeth McQuade (Emory, PI), “Targeted antibiotic therapy for Shigella among children in low-resource settings,” which continues our work on diarrheal disease in Haydom, Tanzania with a focus on identification and treatment of Shigella.
• Jie Sun and colleagues, Science paper on Organelle control of tissue repair and fibrosis after viral infection including COVID.
• Claire Fleming, a Petri group grad student, will receive this year’s prestigious PhRMA Foundation Predoctoral Fellowships
• FY25 Promotions – Amy Mathers (Professor), Kate McManus (Associate Professor), and James Platts-Mills (Associate Professor without term).
• Great recent grant scores:
– Jen Hendrick K23 on passive and active immunity to Adenovirus 40/41 infection.
– Scott Heysell, Chris Moore, and others U01 on a clinical trial for TB sepsis.
– Margaret Kosek and others U01 Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases (CREID) “Western Amazonian Center for Viral Emerging Infectious Diseases.”
• FY25 Department of Medicine Excellence Awards
– Excellence in Clinical Care – Tarina Parpia
– Excellence in Mentorship – Mami Taniuchi
– Excellence in Teaching – Patrick Jackson
– Outstanding Staff Contributor – LaMoria Alexander
– Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Award – Greg Townsend
– Diane Snustad Award – Tania Thomas
– Outstanding Team Contribution – Complicated C. Diff Clinic (ID Group – Cirle Warren, Jae Shin, Shannon Ferguson)
• Welcome to New Postdoctoral fellows (and Mentors) Maria Luana Morais (Cirle Warren) and Nasif Hossain (Josh Colston)
• Josh Colston received an $8000 Analytics Resource Award from UVA’s Data Analytics Center to support his ongoing research.
• Two post-docs in Bill Petri’s lab received awards at this year’s DOM Carey, Marshall, and Thorner Research & Scholar’s Week:
– Oral Presentation, 1st Place – Farha Naz, “Development of a Next-Generation Vaccine Against Clostridioides Difficile Infection”
– Oustanding Publication – Jashim Uddin, “Investigating the impact of antibiotic-induced dysbiosis on protection from Clostridium difficile colitis by mouse colonic innate lymphoid cells,” mBio.
• Jie Sun was selected for the 2024 Class of the School of Medicine’s Pinn Scholars. This prestigious award provides $120,000 for each recipient’s research program at the beginning of the three-year term.
• Great recent grant scores:
– Jen Hendrick K23 on passive and active immunity to Adenovirus 40/41 infection.
– Scott Heysell, Chris Moore, and others U01 on a clinical trial for TB sepsis.
– Margaret Kosek and others U01 Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases (CREID) “Western Amazonian Center for Viral Emerging Infectious Diseases.”
EVENTS
Administrative Staff Retreat
To connect with others on the team on matters outside of work and boost overall, we held our second annual Infectious Diseases Administrative Staff Retreat this past September, with team members opting into the activities that fit within their schedule. We began with lunch at Farm Bell Kitchen – always a delicious option.
We decided to vote on this year’s afternoon activity, and the winner was completing an escape room at Charlottesville’s Unlocked History. Our team worked together and “escaped” the Monticello-themed room “The British are Coming.” We then ended the day cooking our dinner at Seoul Korean BBQ and Hotpot.
We thank the Division for the opportunity to connect with our team members again and look forward to the next one.
Read full edition of January 2025 Medicine Matters
Filed Under: Basic Research, Clinical Research, DOM in the News, Education, In the Know, News and Notes, Notable Achievements, Publications, Research, Top News
Tags: Awards, DOM, Education, faculty, fellows, ID, Infectious Diseases & International Health, January 2025, January 2025 Medicine Matters, January Medicine Matters, medicine matters, profile, profiles, Publications, Research, Residents, staff