Members

China Scherz is a medical anthropologist who has been conducting ethnographic research in Uganda since 2007. She is especially interested in the impact of infectious diseases on children’s well-being and how infectious diseases outcomes are impacted by risky behaviors. Her first book Having People, Having Heart: Charity, Sustainable Development, and Problems of Dependence in Central Uganda (University of Chicago Press, 2014) focused on the tensions between different approaches to caring for orphaned children, many of whom were orphaned by their parents’ deaths from HIV/AIDS. She is currently leading a collaborative ethnographic study of alcohol use and recovery in Uganda. While high levels of alcohol consumption have been of increasing interest to medical researchers seeking to better understand diseases including HIV, tuberculosis, cancer, and other diseases in Uganda and in sub-Saharan Africa, this study will provide the first extended analysis of contemporary modes of conceptualizing and addressing problem-drinking in an African context. In addition to her academic work, she also served as a project manager for an anti-retroviral adherence and directly observed therapy program for the Boston based PACT project of Partners In Health from 2002-2004.

Rathina Kumar Shanmuga Kani is a Research Associate in the Department of Biology in the College of Arts and Sciences. His research interest includes point-of-care diagnostics development, antimicrobial resistance, characterization of novel resistance genes, and molecular epidemiology. He has substantial experience in the development and evaluation of PCR- and isothermal amplification-based molecular diagnostics for antimicrobial-resistant infections at the point-of-care. He has developed PCR-dipstick detection tests for several antimicrobial-resistant pathogens including colistin- and carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, and vancomycin-resistant Enterococci. GeneFields CPE, one of the molecular diagnostics that he has developed for the rapid detection of carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae is commercially available as a diagnostic kit in Japan. Currently, he is involved in the development of point-of-care diagnostic kits for viral infections but not limited to COVID-19. On the other hand, he studies the impact of bile acids on persister cells for recurrent C. difficile infection.

Lois Shepherd is the Peter A. Wallenborn, Jr. and Dolly F. Wallenborn Professor of Biomedical Ethics at the University of Virginia, where she directs the programs in law and medicine at the Center for Biomedical Ethics and Humanities. She is also a Professor of Public Health Sciences and Professor of Law at the University of Virginia. She is the co-author of a leading casebook, Bioethics and the Law (3rd ed. Wolters Kluwer), as well as the author of If That Ever Happens to Me: Making Life and Death Decisions After Terri Schiavo (2009) and numerous law review and medical journal articles on law and medicine, including reproductive medicine, disability, end-of-life decision-making, and research ethics.

Jim Smith is the Henry L. Kinnier Professor of Environmental Engineering in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Dr. Smith’s research focuses on developing appropriate technologies to improve water quality for the global poor. Globally, over 3 billion people do not receive water at the level of service we experience here the USA. As a result, over 2 million children die annually from ingestion of waterborne pathogens and the associated gastrointestinal infections, dehydration, and malnutrition. Countless more children suffer from growth stunting and cognitive impairment. In the absence of centralized water treatment and distribution systems, the World Health Organization has suggested that the best opportunity is to develop technologies that treat water right before consumption (e.g. at the household or point-of-use level). However, this is a difficult design problem as the inventions must be technologically effective, socially acceptable, extremely inexpensive, and simple to use. However, success in developing these appropriate technologies will result in countless lives saved by reducing infections by waterborne pathogens throughout the developing world.

Nathan Swami is an Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Dr. Swami’s work on microfluidic diagnostic and co-culture systems for the control of infections is well matched to the proposed Institute of Global Infectious Disease. Current microbiological analysis approaches to detect infectious pathogens and identify therapies are focused on time-consuming and costly methods based on animal models or adhesion assays that reduce the number of experimental permutations that can be studied. His research group is focused on label-free microfluidic approaches for highly parallelized microbial manipulation, electroporation and analysis of microbes, with single-cell sensitivity. Specifically, Dr. Swami’s group utilizes the characteristic intracellular electrophysiology arising from the phenotypic differences between cells to identify subpopulations using single-cell impedance cytometry for enabling spatially localized microfluidic enrichment and biomarker analysis.