One Health Spring Seminar: Hajduk & Szempruch

Dr. Hajduk and Tony Szempruch presents, “Extracellular Vesicle-Mediated Cellular Communication: Its role in virulence propagation and pathology of African Trypanosomes” on March 18, 2015 at 1:00pm in the Coverdell Center, Room 175 (Reception to follow).

Dr. Hajduk received his B.S. from the University of Georgia and his Ph.D. from the University of Glasgow, UK. He was a NATO and EMBO visiting scholar at the University of Amsterdam and a Rockefeller Foundation postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University. He was on the faculty in the Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Genetics at

Trypanosomes

the University of Alabama at Birmingham from 1983-2002 and at the Marine Biological Laboratory as a Senior Scientist and founding Director of the Global Infectious Disease Program and Professor of Molecular Microbiology & Immunology at Brown University (2002-06). Appointed Professor and Head of the Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology at University of Georgia in 2006 he is a Fogarty International Scholar, a Burroughs Wellcome Scholar in Molecular Parasitology and a Fellow of the American Society for Microbiology.

 

Dr. Hajduk’s laboratory studies the molecular and biochemical basis of parasitic diseases. His lab is currently investigating several basic molecular pathways in African trypanosomes. These include RNA editing, mitochondrial biogenesis, developmental control of gene expression and mechanisms of cell communication. In addition, his lab is studying human innate immunity to trypanosomes and the mechanisms used by the parasites to infect humans

Tony Szempruch completed his undergraduate degree in microbiology at North Carolina State University. He joined the department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at UGA in 2010 to work with Dr. Stephen Hajduk on mitochondrial RNA editing and molecular mechanisms of protein diversity in Trypanosoma brucei. His research on these processes has resulted in the identification of a novel mechanism for cellular communication and host cell remodeling used by T. brucei.

Sponsored by: University of Georgia Biomedical and Health Sciences Institute

onehealth.uga.edu | Follow OneHealth on Twitter @OneHealth_UGA