Students & Faculty please join us for the

Mechanisms of Disease

2023-2024 SEMINAR SERIES

Presented by

Rick L. Tarleton, PhD

Regents’ Professor,
UGA Athletic Association Distinguished Professor in Biological Sciences,
UGA Department of Cellular Biology,
UGA Center for Tropical & Emerging Global Diseases

Location: HSC Russell Hall, Room 228

Personal Statement:

Professor Rick Tarleton is a Regents’ Professor and UGA-Athletic Association Distinguished Research Chair in Biological Sciences at the University of Georgia, Athens, GA USA.  He was the Founding Director of the Center for Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases at UGA, currently home to >25 labs working in the area of tropical parasitic diseases.  Prior to coming to UGA in 1984, Rick spent one year at the University of Rochester as a post-doctoral fellow.  Both his B.A. and Ph.D. degrees are from Wake Forest University, where he fell in love with Trypanosoma cruzi under the mentorship of Ray Kuhn. Since his undergraduate time, he has worked nearly exclusively in the area of Chagas disease, including studies of the mechanisms of immunity and disease in T. cruzi infection, and the development of diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines for T. cruzi. Among other highlights, his lab provided some of the seminal findings documenting parasite persistence (rather than autoimmunity) in the etiology of Chagas disease, insights into the function of CD8+ T cells in immune control of T. cruzi and multiple tools for the study of T. cruzi, including genomic, transcriptomic and proteomic datasets and most recently adaptation of the CRISPR/Cas9 system for genome editing.  Among current projects in his lab are attempts at a better general understanding of the host:parasite interface in T. cruzi infection, with a focus on how parasite biology impacts host responses, discovery of biomarkers of cure in human, non-human primate, canine and murine T. cruzi infection, and the development of improved regimens and discovery of new drugs for treating the infection.  Rick is the Founder and President of the Chagas Disease Foundation, former chair of the U.S. NIH Immunity and Host Defense Study Section, and founder and convener of the Chagas Drug Discovery Consortium.  Previous awards include the Burroughs Welcome Fund Scholar Award (1995) and the Lamar Dodd Outstanding Researcher Award, University of Georgia, 2012.

This seminar is sponsored by the
AU/UGA Medical Partnership
Office of Basic Sciences