About our speakers
George Deepe received his medical degree from the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and performed an Internal Medicine residency at Southern Illinois University. Based on an encounter with a patient with histoplasmosis while a resident, he chose to do an infectious diseases fellowship at the University of Kentucky under the guidance of Ward Bullock, MD who was exploring immune responses to Histoplasma capsulatum in humans and mice. Subsequently, the lab moved to the University of Cincinnati where Dr. Deepe continued his investigations. He became a faculty member and has continued his career at Cincinnati which is a highly endemic area for this pathogen. He developed a mouse model of pulmonary histoplasmosis to study lung immunity to this pathogen. His work also incorporates studies of human cells to corroborate those found in mice. Specific areas of interest have been cytokine regulation of immunity, the role of transcription factors in macrophages and dendritic cells in regulating host defenses, the influence of T cell receptor subsets in protective immunity, and the contribution of zinc to host defenses exerted by macrophages. The goal of the research is to identify the mechanisms by which the immune system successfully constrains growth of this fungal pathogen. In that way, one can better understand why the immune system fails to control the infection.
Tamara L. Doering did her undergraduate, graduate, and medical training at Johns Hopkins University and the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where she earned a PhD elucidating GPI anchor biosynthesis in African trypanosomes with Paul Englund and Gerald Hart. She then studied intracellular transport in Saccharomyces cerevisiae as a postdoctoral fellow with Randy Schekman at the University of California, Berkeley, before turning to studies of Cryptococcus neoformans. After an introduction to this organism with Arturo Casadevall at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and two years on the faculty at Weill Cornell Medical College, she moved to Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, where she is now the Alumni Endowed Professor of Molecular Microbiology. Studies in her lab focus on the mechanisms of synthesis of cryptococcal glycans, particularly the capsule and cell wall, as well as on other aspects of cryptococcal biology including lipid modification and traffic, capsule regulation, the role of naturally occurring genome variants in pathogenesis, and fungal dissemination. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, and a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation. Among other honors, she has received Burroughs Wellcome Fund Awards in Biomedical Sciences and in Molecular Pathogenic Mycology and a Mentor Award from the Washington University Academic Women’s Network. Her lab’s research has been supported primarily by the National Institutes of Health, particularly the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and enabled by the terrific community of fungal researchers.
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