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2010 ASM International Affairs Fellowship and Professorship Recipients

ASM International Education Committee (IEC) is pleased to announce the winners of Round One of the 2010 ASM International Fellowships and Professorships. These programs strive to put the IEC's Strategic Plan into action by providing high-quality education and training programs to microbiologists and institutions at all levels, fostering the professional development of international microbiologists, and promoting excellence in the microbiological sciences through scholarly exchange. To learn more about how to apply for these programs, please visit www.asm.org/international/grants.

ASM International Fellowships

The International Fellowship Program encourages research and training collaborations in microbiological sciences worldwide by enabling early-career scientists or students from developing countries to visit the host laboratories of experienced ASM members. The International Fellows for Round One, 2010 are listed below.

kachiuruRomano Kachiuru, a Research Fellow at the Institute for Biotechnology Research in the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, Nairobi, Kenya, was awarded an ASM International Fellowship for Africa to pursue the researchproject," Cloning and functional screening of the genome of isolate 327 from Lake Elmenteita for novel haloalkaliphilic enzymes," with host Jo Handelsman at Yale University in New Haven, Conn.

guptaSourav Sen Gupta, a Research Assistant in the Department of Microbiology at the National Institute of Cholera and Enteric Diseases, Kolkata, India, was awarded an ASM International Fellowship for Asia to pursue the research project, "A Search for Novel Bacterial Pathogens Causing Diarrhea," with Oscar Stine at University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, Md.

gomezAndres Gomez, an M.Sc. student and Research Associate in the Biosciences School at the National University of Colombia in Medellin, was awarded an ASM International Fellowship for Latin America and the Caribbean to work with Gerald Sims at University of Illinois, Urbana on the research project, "Analysis and characterization of microbial populations associated to the degradation of phenols at different depths in the soil of a former Landfill in Colombia-South America."

pontelLucas Pontel, a Ph.D. student at the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology of Rosario (IBR) in the Universidad Nacional de Rosario, Argentina, was awarded an ASM International Fellowship for Latin America and the Caribbean to pursue the research project, "Transition-metal ion response and virulence in Salmonella," with Michael Mc- Clelland at Vaccine Research Institute of San Diego, Calif.

ASM International Professorships The International Professorship Program provides microbiological expertise to faculty and students throughout the world. The program enables an ASM member who is scientifically recognized in his/her area to travel to an institution of higher learning in a developing country to teach an interactive short course on a topic in any of the microbiological disciplines. The International Professors for RoundOne of 2010 are listed below.
brunsMary Ann Bruns, Associate Professor in the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences at the Pennsylvania State University in University Park, was awarded an ASM International Professorship for Africa to teach a course on Soil and environmental microbiology with host Joshua Ogunwole at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, Nigeria.

ningShunbin Ning, Assistant Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was awarded an ASM International Professorship for Asia to teach a course entitled "IFN regulatory factors in innate immunity and oncogenesis" with host Hong-Bing Shu at the Wuhan University in Wuhan, China.

baronEllen Jo Baron, Associate Director of the Clinical Microbiology Laboratory and Professor in the Pathology Department at Stanford University Medical School in Palo Alto, Calif., was awarded an ASM-PAHO Infectious Diseases Epidemiology&Surveillance Professorship to teach a course entitled "Basic Benchtop Microbiology Workflow Workshop" with host Bergantino Ying at the University of Panama in Estafeta Universitaria, Panama.

leslieJohn Leslie, Department Head and Professor in the Department of Plant Pathology at Kansas State University in Manhattan, was awarded an ASM International Professorship for Latin America and the Caribbean to teach a course entitled "Fusarium lab workshop and scientific writing" at the Universidad Nacional de Rio Cuarto in Rio Cuarto, Argentina, with host Sofia Chulze.
Indo-U.S. Professorships in Microbiology The Indo-U.S. Professorship Program encourages scientific partnerships between the United States and India and is sponsored by the Indo-U.S. Science&Technology Forum.

chaudharyAnita Chaudhary, Senior Scientist in the Division of Environmental Sciences at the Indian Agriculture Research Institute in New Delhi, India, was awarded an Indo-U.S. Research Professorship to perform a research project entitled "Optimization of parameters for biofuel production process by photosynthetic bacteria in photobioreactors" with Bruce Rittmann at the Arizona State University in Tempe.

manoharB. Murali Manohar, Director of the Centre for Animal Health Studies at the Tamil Nadu Veterinary and Animal Sciences University in Chennai, India, was awarded an Indo-U.S. Research Professorship to visit Nammalwar Sriranganathan at the Virginia- Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine, Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., to perform a research project entitled "Testing of nanoplexes containing gentamycin to treat chronic/persistent brucellosis."

ASM-UNESCO Leadership Grant for International Educators

The ASM-UNESCO Leadership Grant for International Educators program, sponsored jointly by ASM and UNESCO and currently in its second year, enables a select group of educators from resource-limited countries to attend the ASM Conference for Undergraduate Educators (ASMCUE) and a pre-conference workshop; this year the events will be held in San Diego, CA on 20-23 May 2010. The purpose of the program is to provide leaders in education with the resources to build innovative teaching modules that engage students and lead to enduring understandings in microbiology. The participants will be paired with an appropriate U.S. counterpart with whom they will interact during a one-year Learning Residency. The deadline for the 2011 ASM-UNESCO Leadership Grant for International Educators will be 1 November 2010.

Scholarship Recipients

Africa

Jane-Francis Akoachere, University of Buea, SW Region, Buea, Cameroon

Ousman Diagne, Institut Sénégalais de Recherches Agricoles (ISRA), Dakar, Senegal

Uzoamaka Ogechi George-Okafor, Enugu State University of Science and Technology (ESUT), Enugu, Enugu State, Nigeria

Asia

Esperanza C. Cabrera, De La Salle University, Manila, Philippines

Debananda S. Ningthoujam, Manipur University, Canchipur, Imphal, Manipur, India

Latin America

Maria Julia Amoroso, Universidad Nacional de Tucumán, Tucumán, Argentina

Maria Tersita Bertolı´ Avella, Universidad Dr. José Matías Delgado (UJMD), La Libertad, El Salvador

Hygia Maria Nunes Guerreiro, Escola Bahiana de Medicina e Saúde Pública, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil

Honorable Mention Recipients

Gebre Kibru Tiga, Jimma University, Jimma, Ethiopia

Ciraj Ali Mohammed, Melaka Manipal Medical College, International Centre for Health Sciences, Manipal, Karnataka State, India

Marta Elena Farias, Universidad Nacional de Tucumán, Tucumán, Argentina

LabCap Visits Guyana

The International Laboratory Capacity Building (LabCap) Program housed within the ASM International Affairs department was invited to visit Guyana in an introductory mission in order to help define microbiology diagnostic priorities for the country. LabCap Senior Program Specialist Mah-Séré Keita Sow was joined by three LabCap consultants, Mary Gilchrist, Lourens Robberts, and Miguel Grimaldo, on a four-day mission to identify specific assistance needs for diagnosing tuberculosis (TB) and other HIV-related opportunistic infections (OIs), as well as to review plans to upgrade the biosafety level 2 (BSL2) TB laboratory at the newly established National Public Health Reference Laboratory (NPHRL).

LabCap was invited to develop a microbiology capacity-building program for Guyana by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Global AIDS Program (GAP). With TB as one of the primary causes of mortality among HIV-infected individuals, CDC-Guyana and the government of Guyana determined that strengthening their capacity to detect and diagnose TB cases, including multiple drug-resistant cases, was of utmost priority for Guyana. Given the recent establishment of the NPHRL as directed by Colin Roach, Guyana felt it an opportune time to work with LabCap in defining diagnostic strengthening needs for that facility, which serves as the country's primary referral and reference laboratory. As such, the NPHRL, The National TB Program, headed by Jeetendra Mohanlall, and CDC-Guyana, represented primarily by Gayathri Warnasuriya, Senior Laboratory Advisor, organized a full schedule for the LabCap team to include a meeting with the Minister of Health of Guyana, Leslie Ramsammy, visits to different clinics directly affiliated with the NPHRL, and a visit to a regional laboratory located in New Amsterdam, Guyana.

Consultants Gilchrist and Robberts had the opportunity to make presentations outlining several diagnostic options for TB and other OIs. Attendees of these presentations included the NPHRL laboratory staff and affiliated hospital center clinicians, who then discussed optimal diagnostic approaches for Guyana with Gilchrist and Robberts. In conjunction with these presentations and meetings, Consultant Grimaldo met with Guyanese engineers and contractors responsible for erecting the NPHRL.

Grimaldo visited the facility with the contractors and later provided specific recommendations on how best to move forward with plans for upgrading the space designated for the BSL2 TB laboratory. The LabCap team left Georgetown with a better understanding of the way forward on how LabCap can assist Guyana in realizing its objectives. The follow-up visit is expected for spring 2010.

Development of this publication was supported by Cooperative Agreement Number U2GPS001947-01 from the Department of Health and Human Services/Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), National Center for HIV, STD, and TB Prevention (NCHSTP), Global AIDS Program (GAP). Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of CDC.

ASM Participation in the 40th Union World Conference on Lung Health

In December 2009, International Laboratory Capacity Building Program (LabCap) Senior Program Specialist Juliano Timm traveled to Cancun, Mexico, to represent ASM at the 40th Union World Conference on Lung Health of the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease (IUATLD). In line with the theme of this year's conference, "Poverty and Lung Health," several plenary sessions and special lectures discussed not only how poverty and inequality in the health sector hinder tuberculosis (TB) control efforts, but also examples of initiatives being pioneered in several developing countries to increase access to TB care services. More broadly, the conference provided an opportunity to review progress in the areas of TB, HIV/AIDS, childhood pneumonia, asthma, and tobacco control in the context of the Millennium Development Goals.

Scientific sessions, symposia, and posters, on the other hand, tended to focus on technical and practical issues pertaining to TB, TB-HIV, or tobacco control. For example, there were updates on clinical and programmatic management of multidrug resistant (MDR)- and extreme drug resistant (XDR)-TB; as well as on clinical trials of candidate TB vaccines, anti-TB drugs, and regime therapies. There were also presentations on childhood TB diagnostic and case management, TB and migration, TB and tobacco use in prisons, airborne infection control, and laboratory systems. Moreover, the TB Control Assistance Program (TB CAP), a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)-funded initiative, released a set of new tools and guidelines for strengthening TB control and care including The Laboratory Toolbox, Human Resources for Health, etc. These resources can be downloaded from http://www.tbcta.org/. Several of these presentations were in Spanish or had simultaneous English/Spanish/English translation available.

Of particular interest to ASM LabCap were the presentations on the development and introduction, in resource-limited settings, of new diagnostic tools for TB. In the "Scientific Forum on Recent Advances in TB Diagnostics," sponsored by the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND), a partner of ASM LabCap, participants discussed new TB tests under development and the programmatic implementation of existing technologies- for example, how to assess their impact on patients and measure their costs. In addition, the New Diagnostics Working Group of the Stop TB Partnership, during its annual meeting, released "Pathways to Better Diagnostics for TB," a document that provides guidance to TB diagnostic research, development, and implementation-" from the discovery of new techniques and tools through to their delivery in previously neglected markets." This blueprint also "seeks to inform and advance independent evaluation and assessment of new tools' likely impacts based on scientifically sound methodology" (http://www.stoptb.org/wg/new_diagnostics/ ).

Development of this publication was supported by Cooperative Agreement Number U2GPS001947-01 from the Department of Health and Human Services/Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention (NCHSTP), Global AIDS Program (GAP). Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of CDC.