DEVELOPMENT, SECURITY, AND COOPERATION

Central Europe and Eurasia Individual Grants Programs

EXCHANGE PROGRAM WITH RUSSIAN INSTITUTES IN THE BIOMEDICAL SCIENCES

Current Grantees

State Research Center for Applied Microbiology (Obolensk)

Rebecca Morton, is an associate professor in the Department of Parasitology, Microbiology and Public Health at Oklahoma State University. She is currently working with a team of scientists to develop rapid and sensitive methods for detection of biological weapons. Her special interest is in tularemia, and she has isolated both subspecies tularensis and holarctica.

Konstantin Severinov, is assistant professor at the Waksman Institute for Microbiology at Rutgers University. His long-term research interest is to understand bacterial transcription mechanism and regulation in molecular detail. His laboratory is established in the field of bacterial transcription and has contributed to the understanding of E. coli and Thermus aquaticus RNA polymerases through structure-functional analyses of these enzymes.

Charles Stoltenow is assistant professor in the Department of Animal and Range Sciences at North Dakota State University. He received his DVM at Iowa State University in 1985. His area of interest as an applied epidemiologist is the interface between animal health and public health, specifically dealing with anthrax.

State Research Center for Virology and Applied Biotechnology (Vector)

Gregory Ebel is a research Scientist at the Arbovirus Research Laboratory at the New York State Department of Health. His present activities include phenotypic analyses of Powassan virus strains and determinations of the molecular determinants of virus-vector associations. His research goal is to expand his research on tick-borne encephalitis to include strains from Siberia, Asia, and central Europe.

Sergey Morzunov is Assistant Professor, Department of Microbiology, University of Nevada at Reno. He has been engaged in studies of the genetic diversity and molecular epidemiology of New World hantaviruses. In the last four years his research was focused on the investigation of co-evolution and co-specialization of different hantaviruses with their specific rodent hosts, but he is currently extending his project by studying evolutionary relationships of the Old World puumala hantavirus and Clethrionomys glareolus.

Bruce Scharf, DVM, is a Clinical Veterinarian and Assistant Professor at the Health Science Center, SUNY at Brooklyn. At Brooklyn he is responsible for all aspects of animal colony health, clinical care, and preventative and diagnostic medicine programs. He specializes in the standards which scientific institutions must address before they can perform scientifically valid reproducible animal experimentation, i.e., standard micro- and macroenvironmental issues for conducting animal research.