Join us to celebrate the research of MD-PhD students, and CTSI trainees, scholars and pilot awardees representing multiple departments and colleges across the University of Florida.

KEYNOTE SPEAKER

Eric Nelson, MD, PhD, FAAP

Dr. Nelson is a physician-scientist in the Department of Pediatrics at the UF College of Medicine. He holds an appointment in the Department of Environmental and Global Health at the UF College of Public Health and Health Professions. Dr. Nelson is the PI of a large NIH-funded laboratory at the UF Emerging Pathogens Institute and maintains field laboratories in Haiti and Bangladesh.

Agenda

11:00 a.m.

12:30 p.m.

2:00 p.m.

2:30 p.m.

3:30 p.m.

Pediatric health equity is at the heart of Dr. Nelson’s research. He is trained clinically in pediatrics and scientifically in molecular microbial pathogenesis. His team’s strategy has been to use cholera as a model system to discover opportunities to improve clinical and scientific response to large-scale infectious disease outbreaks. The premise is that outbreaks prey most on marginalized populations, and improving outbreak response for these populations conveys equity. 

Cholera has devastating impacts on poor and vulnerable populations worldwide and shares commonalities with other diarrheal diseases that collectively represent the second leading cause of death for children between the ages of 1 month and 5 years of age. Clinically, Dr. Nelson’s team asks how might emerging technology be leveraged to improve access to high-quality care, including increased antibiotic stewardship. 

To do this they build clinical decision-support technologies to identify, map and better manage diarrheal disease outbreaks. As they evaluate these tools in clinical trials, the trials inform an ambitious basic science agenda to define how the selective pressures of antibiotics and lytic bacteriophage impact diarrheal disease severity, disrupt the commensal intestinal microflora, select for antibiotic and bacteriophage resistance, influence transmission and diagnostic performance. The integration of clinical trials and basic science has made for impactful translational research that benefits patients and improves a fundamental understanding of pathogenesis, disease transmission, antimicrobial resistance and diagnostic design requirements. 

These clinical and scientific research lines have exposed a bias towards research at centralized clinics and hospitals. This negates the identification and study of health events in households that do not require seeking care. Therefore, Dr. Nelson has expanded the scope of his research to identify methods to improve access to care at the level of households by combining telemedicine and medication delivery, as well as investigating infection and transmission of infectious agents within household unit clusters. 

Using these diverse skill sets, they joined in the fight against Covid-19 and launched parallel studies on COVID-19 infection and transmission among children and their household contacts inside and outside the USA. Now in the COVID-19 era, Dr. Nelson’s goal is to continue striving for healthcare equity for children globally while adapting to the new and different pressures imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Contact Us

For questions about the symposium, please contact Susan Gardner or Mary Gipson