Greg Downey, MD
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Dr. Downey received his MD from the University of Manitoba, and completed training in General Internal Medicine at Harvard University at the Beth Israel and Brigham and Women's Hospital. He then undertook subspecialty training in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the University of Colorado-affiliated hospitals, followed by research training in pulmonary immunology at National Jewish Research and Medical Center in Denver. Dr. Downey is currently Director, Division of Respirology, and Professor and Vice Chair, Department of Medicine, University of Toronto and a Staff Physician in the Division of Respirology at the University Health Network and Mount Sinai Hospitals and a member of the Multi-Organ Transplant Unit at the Toronto General Hospital.
Dr. Downey is the recipient of a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Respiration from the CIHR. His lab’s research focus is on the intracellular signaling events regulating leukocyte activation, of which relevance is to diseases characterized by inflammatory injury, including acute lung injury (ARDS), sepsis, ischemia reperfusion, cystic fibrosis, and asthma. His laboratory uses state of the art techniques in cell and molecular biology including single cell microfluoresence imaging, microinjection, cloning and sequencing of genomic DNA, PCR, site-directed mutagenesis, fusion protein expression and mammalian cell transfection with dominant negative proteins, and knockout mice.
Scott Gray-Owen, PhD
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Dr. Scott Gray-Owen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Medical Genetics & Microbiology and the Graduate Department of Molecular & Medical Genetics at the University of Toronto. Dr. Gray-Owen is a New Investigator of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and was a recipient of the Ontario Premier’s Research Excellence Award (2003). Dr. Gray-Owen’s research aims to understand molecular and immunological aspects of interactions between the pathogenic Neisseria and humans, their only natural host. Neisseria gonorrhoeae and Neisseria meningitidis cause the sexually transmitted disease gonorrhea and the often fatal meningococcal meningitis and meningococcemia, respectively. These closely-related pathogens engage in an intimate association with human cells, and cross-talk between the bacteria and host governs the clinical outcome of these important infections. Insights gained from these studies have revealed a new paradigm of host-pathogen interaction by these highly evolved pathogens, and provide new insight into host cellular processes that contribute to cancer and autoimmune/inflammatory disease.
Sergio Grinstein, PhD
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Dr. Grinstein is a senior scientist, holds the Pitblado Chair in Cell Biology at the Hospital for Sick Children Research Institute (Sick Kids), and is a Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Toronto. Dr. Grinstein completed his PhD in 1976 at the Centro de Investigacion y Estudios Avanzados in Mexico City, went on to a two-year postdoctoral fellow in Cell Biology at Sick Kids, then spent a year in the Department of Biochemistry at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. He has been an International Scholar of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a recipient of the CIHR Distinguished Scientist and Michael Smith Awards, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Dr. Grinstein's research interests include signal transduction, leukocyte biology, phagocytosis, pH regulation, and ion transport. Specifically, he is internationally recognized for his research in two areas: the control of intracellular pH and the elucidation of mechanisms underlying the microbicidal response of macrophages and neutrophils. Dr. Grinstein's laboratory is studying the processes whereby macrophages and neutrophils migrate to sites of infection, ingest microbes and destroy them, as well as the strategies used by certain microorganisms to outsmart the immune system and avoid destruction. Dr. Grinstein's laboratory has devised a means of measuring the pH and ionic composition of individual organelles within intact live cells. Studies are conducted to investigate the identity and properties of the molecules responsible for transport of ions and for intracellular acid/base regulation.
Tim Hughes, PhD
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Dr. Hughes is an Assistant Professor in the Banting and Best Department of Medical Research at the University of Toronto. He received his PhD from Baylor College of Medicine and did postdoctoral work at Rosetta Inpharmatics. The Hughes laboratory is focused on developing and using systematic approaches to determine the functions of uncharacterized genes and the targets of uncharacterized drugs on a large scale. Major components of this work include highly-parallel experimental data acquisition, data analysis, including predictive algorithms, and downstream-directed experimentation.
Prabhat Jha, MD, DPhil
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Dr. Jha is Canada Research Chair of Health and Development at the University of Toronto, and Founding Director of the Centre for Global Health Research (CGHR), St. Michael’s Hospital and the University of Toronto. He holds a MD from the University of Manitoba, and a D. Phil in Epidemiology from Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. The chief research focus of CGHR is the epidemiology and prevention of premature mortality in developing countries, more specifically the measurement of the epidemiological correlates (such as smoking, alcohol, blood pressure, blood lipids, diabetes, obesity, HIV-1 related risk behaviours) and, eventually, genetic correlates of premature adult mortality. This involves mega-scale population-based studies that use “large, simple” prospective and retrospective study designs and methods to reliably document outcomes and exposure.
Rupert Kaul, MD, PhD
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Dr. Kaul is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Medicine Division of Infectious Diseases, University of Toronto. Dr. Kaul obtained his MD (1990) followed by residencies in Internal Medicine (1990-1993) and Infectious Diseases (1994-1995), all at the University of Toronto. In 2002, he completed his PhD at the Open University, Institute of Molecular Medicine, Oxford, and in the same year was granted a Canada Research Chair in HIV.
Dr. Kaul’s research focuses on the role of mucosal innate and cellular immunity in HIV transmission and susceptibility, and the effect on these immune parameters of co-infections (gonorrhea, Herpes simplex, CMV and other STDs). The work is based in cohorts from Toronto and Kenya. The lab aims to define mucosal immune correlates of HIV protection for vaccine and microbicide development and testing, and also of differential HIV genital shedding (and hence transmission) in infected individuals.
Jun Liu, PhD
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Dr. Liu is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Medical Genetics and Microbiology and the Graduate Department of Molecular and Medical Genetics at the University of Toronto. Dr. Liu received his B.Sc. in 1989 at Peking University, China, and Ph.D. in 1994 at the Medical College of Wisconsin, USA. He then did a postdoctoral training at the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California at Berkeley, before joining the Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, in 1998. Dr. Liu’s research focuses on the major global health threat of tuberculosis with the following goals: 1) to understand the molecular mechanisms of antibiotic resistance and to discover novel targets for development of new drugs, 2) to understand the attenuation mechanisms of Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine and improve BCG’s efficacy, and 3) to characterize host-pathogen interactions.
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