Two Vanderbilt investigators recently received Joint Research Awards from the Infectious Diseases Society of America's Education and Research Foundation and the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases.
The awards support research by promising young investigators who may not otherwise find funding as federal and other institutional research support becomes more difficult to obtain.
Helen Talbot, M.D., M.P.H., assistant professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases, will be identifying immune correlates in older adults that will serve as endpoints to measure the effectiveness of novel influenza vaccines. Her study aims to define which cellular and humoral immune responses correlate with protection from influenza infection in adults 50 and older.
Mark Hicar, M.D., Ph.D., instructor in Pediatrics in the Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases, will investigate the functional aspects of the HIV antibodies he has identified, defining the biochemical and structural features of HIV envelope trimmer-specific antibodies and their relation to neutralization and binding of the envelope protein.