Pacific Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases Research
John A. Burns School of Medicine, University of Hawai'i at Manoa
Director: Dr. Richard Yanagihara

INVESTIGATORS

Individuals selected as COBRE Investigators represent junior faculty at UHM with the most promise to succeed as career researchers in infectious diseases. They are all highly motivated, extremely hard-working women, who are passionate about research. As COBRE-supported research faculty, they will be expected to obtain extramural funding (investigator-initiated R-series awards), as well as add to the much-needed critical mass of researchers in infectious diseases, and become part of the new generation of biomedical researchers for the State of Hawai‘i. To ensure success, COBRE Mentors and Collaborators, as well as COBRE External Advisors, take proactive roles in assisting the COBRE Investigators in responding to appropriate requests for applications from NIH and other extramural granting agencies.

Guliz Erdem, M.D.
Associate Professor, Department of Pediatrics, John A. Burns School of Medicine

Dr. Erdem received her M.D. in 1990 from Hacettepe University Faculty of Medicine in Ankara, Turkey. After completing a residency in pediatrics at Hacettepe University Children’s Hospital, she did fellowship training in pediatric infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital Medical Center at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine in 1996-1999 and further clinical training in pediatrics at JABSOM in 1999-2001. In preliminary studies, conducted during her residency training, Dr. Erdem demonstrated that the genotypes of group A streptococci (GAS) in Hawai‘i were unlike those found on the continental United States. This observation and the unusually high incidence of acute rheumatic fever (ARF) among Polynesian children in Hawai‘i provide a unique setting in which to further investigate the molecular epidemiology and adhesion properties of these unusual GAS genotypes.

Brenda Y. Hernandez, Ph.D., M.P.H.
Assistant Researcher, Cancer Etiology Program, Cancer Research Center of Hawai‘i

Dr. Hernandez received a B.A. (1987) and M.P.H. (1990) from Harvard University and Yale University School of Medicine, respectively, and a Ph.D. in epidemiology (1999) from UHM, has worked as an HIV testing counselor and health care planner for the City of New Haven, a cancer education coordinator for the NCI’s Cancer Information Service, and as Director of the Hawai‘i Tumor Registry. For her dissertation research, Dr. Hernandez gained immense proficiency and expertise in molecular methods, including gene amplification, nucleic acid hybridization and sequence analysis. Currently, as a co-investigator in an NCI-funded, five-year longitudinal study of HPV persistence in the uterine cervix among a multi-ethnic cohort of 1,150 women in Hawai‘i, she is performing the necessary molecular assays, as well as analyzing the epidemiological data.

 

Allison Imrie, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of Public Health Sciences and Epidemiology, John A. Burns School of Medicine

Dr. Imrie is a Tongan woman who received a Ph.D. in virology in 1997 from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Dr. Imrie started her scientific career as a laboratory technician, initially with no real thought of becoming a research scientist herself. Formerly, as a member of an elite team of virologists and clinicians, headed by Dr. David Cooper, investigating the natural history of primary HIV infection among young homosexual men in Sydney, she almost single-handedly established one of the first HIV diagnostic (and research) laboratories in Australia. The immediacy of the times, marked by horrifyingly large numbers of AIDS cases and deaths, propelled her to pursue her doctoral studies. She first joined the Retrovirology Research Laboratory in 1996, while still finishing her dissertation. The recent outbreak of dengue fever in the Hawaiian Islands, after an absence of nearly six decades, provides her with an unparalleled opportunity to apply her newfound expertise in cellular and molecular immunology to address pressing issues surrounding the immunopathogenesis of dengue fever and dengue hemorrhagic fever.