In July, Dr. John Clemens, Director-General of the IVI, was named one of twenty-three foremost experts on global health in the United States who will advocate for the need for greater US investment in global health research, as part of Research!America’s Paul G. Rogers Society for Global Health Research.

Dr. Clemens became a Global Health Research Ambassador, joining a group of leaders in a variety of global health areas, including vaccines, HIV/AIDS research, tuberculosis, nutrition and environmental hazards. The new Ambassadors joined last year’s appointees to make up the first 50 Ambassadors in the Rogers Society.

The Rogers Society, named for the Honorable Paul G. Rogers, former Florida Congressman and renowned champion of research to improve health, aims to increase the awareness of, and to make the case for greater US investment in, research to fight diseases that disproportionately affect the world’s poorest nations.

Selected by an Advisory Council that includes three Nobel Laureates, members of this prestigious group represent a spectrum of US scientist-advocates. Ambassadors will work to build a national discussion about global health research and will stress the importance of effective collaboration among industry, academia, patient advocacy groups, the non-profit research sector and the US government.

The Paul G. Rogers Society was established in 2006 by Research!America, with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Research!America is the largest not-for-profit public education and advocacy alliance working to make research to improve health a higher national priority in the US. Founded in 1989, it is supported by more than 500 member organizations, which represent more than 125 million Americans. Learn more at: http://www.researchamerica.org/media/index.html

DG to chair US cholera & other bacterial enteric infections panel

Also in July, Dr. Clemens was named the Chair of the United States Panel on Cholera and Other Bacterial Enteric Infections by Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) of the US National Institutes of Health. The panel is the oldest of the US-Japan Cooperative Medical Sciences Program (USJCMSP).

The USJCMSP was established in 1965 by President Lyndon Johnson to foster collaborative research between US and Japanese scientists in order to solve Asia’s major health problems, especially among populations in developing countries. The US panel is hosted by the US NIAID.

As chairman, Dr. Clemens will lead a panel of distinguished US scientists and will act as a catalyst in stimulating collaborative research on cholera and other bacterial infections between US and Japanese investigators. In this capacity, he will attend and present research data at conferences of the Joint Committee of the USJCMSP, which aims to improve diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of the diseases being studied by the panels.

The USJCMSP consists of a board on immunology, and panels on cholera and other bacterial enteric infections, AIDS, acute respiratory infections, the environment, hepatitis, leprosy/tuberculosis, nutrition and metabolism, parasitic diseases, and selected viral diseases.