Category: Lamar Dodd Award

Lamar Dodd Creative Research Award

Karen Norris, professor and Charles H. Wheatley Georgia Research Alliance Chair in Immunology & Translational Biomedical Research, is a global leader in the fields of immunology and infectious diseases as well as cardiopulmonary diseases associated with long-term HIV infection. She has expanded her research interests in a series of innovative, well-funded and transformative programs. Her major contributions include establishing the first non-human primate models of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), pulmonary arterial hypertension and Pneumocystis pneumonia. She assisted in the formation of the University of Georgia Center for Vaccines and Immunology and helped establish and directed the Non-human Primate Research Core. Her laboratory has developed a broadly protective vaccine and immunotherapeutic agents to prevent and treat life-threatening fungal infections, including pulmonary aspergillosis and invasive candidiasis. She holds patents for related technologies and her work has led to the establishment of NXT Biologics, Inc, a company founded by Norris to advance life-saving vaccines and immunotherapies.

Lamar Dodd Creative Research Award

Natarajan Kannan, professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the Institute of Bioinformatics, leads an internationally recognized program at the interface of bioinformatics and biochemistry. Developing and applying sophisticated statistical and computational tools, he maps the complex relationships connecting sequence, structure, function and regulation in large families of protein kinases. These enzymes turn signals on and off in cells, a critical part of cell communication. Kinases are involved in many diseases and in related drug development studies as anti-cancer and infectious disease targets. He has also developed powerful informatics tools and deep learning models for the classification and evolutionary analysis of glycosyltransferases, a large family of enzymes. He is leveraging new information from these proteins from different cell, tissue, disease types and organisms to develop predictions about how they propagate signals in diseases. And he continues to train the next generation of scientists to apply new computational tools for biological discovery.

Lamar Dodd Creative Research Award

James C. Beasley, Terrell Professor of Forestry and Natural Resources in the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory and Terrell Professor in the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources, has developed an acclaimed research program in wildlife ecology and conservation. His innovative and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of radioactive contamination in the environment and its effects as an ecological stressor have challenged fundamental assumptions about the status and health of wildlife in radiologically contaminated landscapes, leading to the discovery of abundant and diverse wildlife communities. Since 2014, he has served as the International Atomic Energy Agency’s wildlife adviser to the Fukushima Prefecture government in Japan in response to the 2011 tsunami and nuclear accident. He is recognized as one of the world’s experts on invasive wild pigs, building one of the most important academic research programs studying invasive wild pigs in the US. And he is engaged in high-impact carnivore conservation research projects to reduce human-wildlife conflicts globally.

Lamar Dodd Creative Research Award

Y. George Zheng, professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Sciences, is an international expert in epigenetics and chemical biology. Epigenetic processes are inheritable changes in gene expression that are not involved in a DNA sequence. These processes play important roles in transforming normal cells into malignant tumor cells. Zheng’s laboratory seeks to understand how abnormalities in chromatin modifications can profoundly affect gene expression in diseases, particularly cancers. His cutting-edge research program has uncovered several previously unprecedented epigenetic biomarkers and mechanisms that significantly impacted the landscape of epigenetic research. His group has also developed a number of potent small molecule compounds with novel chemotype pharmacophores that interact or interfere with oncology-crucial epigenetic enzyme targets. The drug agents that his team has discovered or designed are undergoing a series of biochemical and preclinical tests and could eventually generate a new avenue for controlling cancer development, progression or metastasis.

Lamar Dodd Creative Research Award 2021

M. Stephen Trent, UGA Foundation Distinguished Professor of Infectious Diseases, is a driving force and an international leader in the area of bacterial cell surfaces and cell envelope biology. His work has affected the development of novel antibiotics and the generation of vaccines, providing a broader understanding of bacterial pathogenesis for the treatment of infectious diseases. He exploits a wide range of bacterial pathogen prototypes, representing different modes of infection, to highlight unique questions in cell envelope biology and bacterial surface remodeling. He has developed a series of complementary, innovative and well-funded projects that ask leading-edge questions in pathogen biology. The impressive breadth of microorganisms under investigation by his team is matched by successful integrations of multidisciplinary approaches ranging from animal models of infection to genomics, enzymology and structural biology. As a result, his work has offered detailed mechanistic investigations, as well as important broader insights that have afforded major advances.