Dr. Jean–Luc Benoit is the Director of the Infectious Diseases Fellowship Program Director. He has spent much effort on establishing a new single-site fellowship program at UCH. He is also the Director of the Travel Clinic. In addition, he has been continuing his studies of patient attitudes and adherence to antiretroviral therapy. This work, supported by his Falk Foundation Award, has been presented at the International Q Methodology Meeting in London and the Annual Meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America in San Diego this year. He also continues to be an outstanding educator, and the most active teacher in the section.

Dr. Kathleen Mullane has clinical trials experience in antibiotic therapy for C. difficile diarrhea, pneumonia, intra-abdominal and pelvic infections and skin and soft tissue infections; antiviral therapy for HIV and CMV; and antifungal therapy for yeasts, moulds, and opportunistic fungal infections. She is published in all of these areas. She is currently charged with managing the clinical trials for the Infectious Diseases Section. Her clinical practice centers on treating infections in immunocompromised hosts including those with HIV and in those undergoing transplantation procedures.

Dr. Elaine Petrof has received a career development award to study the molecular basis of the effects of probiotic formulations in inflammatory bowel disease. This work will be conducted under the mentorship of Dr. Eugene Chang in the section of Gastroenterology. Probiotics are ingestible microorganisms having health benefit beyond their intrinsic nutritive value. Probiotics have been used to treat a variety of gastrointestinal ailments including inflammatory bowel disease, rotavirus and antibiotic-associated diarrhea, to name a few. They appear to have protective, trophic and anti-inflammatory effects on bowel mucosa. However, the exact mechanisms by which probiotics act to protect against mucosal injury have yet to be fully elucidated. Efforts are currently underway to more fully characterize the microbial-epithelial cell interactions involved and to isolate the probiotic bioactive factor(s) responsible for these effects.

Dr. Kenneth Pursell has clinical trials expertise in the area of infections in transplant recipients. Along with Dr. David Pitrak, he published “Impaired Phagocyte Respiratory Burst Responses to Opportunistic Fungal Pathogens in Transplant Recipients” in Transplant Infectious Diseases in January, 2003. Dr. Pursell will also be a co-investigator, along with Dr. Michelle Josephson from the section of Nephrology, on an NIH- sponsored multi-center study of solid organ transplantation in HIV patients, with Dr. Robert Harland from Surgery serving a PI. He is also collaborating with the University of Pittsburgh on studies of cryptococcal infections in transplant recipients and combination antifungal therapy for invasive aspergillosis in the transplant population. He also continues to collaborated on a multi-center study of the utility of direct sequence amplification for detection of resistance mutations in drug-resistant CMV infection in the transplant population.

Dr. Renslow Sherer is an internationally know expert in HIV- infection. He is setting up educational programs and helping with development of the HIV care program. His other efforts will be directed toward international programs for HIV care as part of PROJECT HOPE. He is also fostering clinical research efforts to study HIV internationally.

Dr. Stephen Weber is the Hospital Epidemiologist. He has expanded the activities of the Infection Control Program and established a Molecular Epidemiology Laboratory as part of the program. His efforts have helped support the hospital’s position as a Leadership Hospital for Bioterrorism Preparedness in the city. Stephen is the recipient of the Departmental Clinical Research Award. He is studying the epidemiology of colonization and infectious with a vancomycin- resistant enterococci (VRE) in a bone marrow transplant unit. This year he authored a timely article in JAMA on the inability of syndromic surveillance at a single institution to detect last year’s West Nile Virus outbreak. His study of fluoroquinolone use as a risk factor for infectious with methicillin-resistant Staph.aureus, but not methicillin-sensitive Staph. aureus, was published in Emerging Infectious Diseases in November 2003. Stephen is very interested in studying the methods of epidemiolgoic investigation as well.

Dr. Matthew Wynia’s research interests are wide-ranging and include physician responses to utilization review, differences in the codes of ethics of medical professional associations and healthcare organizations, professionalism, and performance measures for health care ethics. He is the Director for the Institute for Ethics at the AMA. His work has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and other leading medical journals.