Bard Citizen Science Lecture on Tuesday, April 10, Focuses on Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Efforts to Reduce Enteric and Diarrheal Diseases

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.— On Tuesday, April 10, the Bard College Citizen Science Lecture Series will present the lecture “Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Investments in Reducing Enteric and Diarrheal Diseases Burden.” While diarrhea-related deaths have decreased globally, diarrheal diseases remain the second-leading cause of childhood deaths. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s investments are aimed toward saving and improving millions of lives thorough the development and delivery of low-cost interventions that prevent and treat diarrheal and enteric diseases. The presentation, by Gates Foundation Program Officer Niranjan Bose, will provide an overview of the team’s strategy as well as a summary of the vaccine-related investments in this field. The lecture is free and open to the public and takes place at 7 p.m. in the Multipurpose Room of the Bertelsmann Campus Center.

Niranjan Bose is a program officer in the Enterics and Diarrheal Diseases Team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and is responsible for a portfolio of grants, which include clinical development of enteric vaccines and the overall program management component for the team. Previously, he was with SDG Life Sciences, a unit of IMS Health, where he was a senior consultant and assisted clients in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries with strategy development, company valuations, preclinical research validation, revenue forecasting, and competitive assessments. His doctoral thesis was on cholera pathogenesis, with a focus on developing the assembly mechanism for an attachment factor, which is currently being targeted as a vaccine target. Niranjan’s research experience spans various aspects of preclinical research and target identification in the pharmaceutical industry and enzymatic applications in the biotechnology industry. He has worked in academic and industrial research labs in India, the United States, and Singapore in the areas of formulation development, assay development, vaccine target biogenesis, and rational drug design. Niranjan holds a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Dartmouth College and an M.S. in biological sciences and B.S. in pharmaceutical sciences from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India. He also received the Business Bridge Diploma from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.

For more information on this lecture of Citizen Science, please visit citizenscience.bard.edu.

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(4/2/12)

This event was last updated on 04-03-2012

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