Dr. Cabello, professor of microbiology and immunology, is a Guggenheim Fellow 2004 for the "Public Health Implications of Antibiotic Use in Aquaculture." He will explore the emergence of bacterial antibiotic resistance that occurs between aquatic and terrestrial environments in the salmon aquaculture industry in Chile. The first faculty member to win a Guggenheim fellowship, which is given "on the basis of distinguished past achievement and exceptional promise for future accomplishment," Dr. Cabello joined the College in 1978. He was born in Santiago, Chile, and graduated from the University of Chile School of Medicine. Dr. Cabello did postdoctoral fellowships at Stanford University and the University of Chicago.
Ira S. Schwartz, Ph.D., professor and chairman of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, is the principal investigator of the CDC award to New York Medical College, one of ten institutions sharing more than $3.5 million for new research on Lyme disease. The studies are designed to improve understanding of the disease and to examine new methods for testing, prevention and control. His award is for "Lyme Disease Diagnosis with Host Gene Expression Arrays."
Dr. Schwartz will examine how cells from mice and humans respond to infection by Lyme bacteria--using a technique called microarray analysis to monitor how gene expression changes with infection--and possibly to develop new diagnostic tests for active infection based on these changes. He joined the College in 1980, spending 22 years in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology before being named chairman of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology in 2002. Dr. Schwartz received his doctorate degree from the City University of New York and did his postdoctoral fellowships at Roche Institute of Molecular Biology in Nutley, N.J.