It is a pleasure to introduce Dr. Howard E. Gendelman as this year’s recipient of the ISNV 2013 Bill Narayan Lectureship. “Howie”, as he is affectionately known, is the Margaret R. Larson Professor of Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases, Chairman of the Department of Pharmacology and Experimental Neuroscience, and Director of the Center for Neurodegenerative Disorders at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. Born and raised in Philadelphia, Howie went both to undergraduate (Muhlenberg College) and medical school (Penn State University College of Medicine) in Pennsylvania. He completed a residency in internal medicine at Montefiore Hospital, Albert Einstein College of Medicine and was a Clinical and Research Fellow in Neurology and Infectious Diseases at the Johns Hopkins University Medical Center. How appropriate that Howie is the recipient of the ISNV 2013 Bill Narayan Lectureship as he was a postdoctoral fellow in Bill Narayan’s laboratory while at Johns Hopkins. Howie occupied senior faculty and research positions at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences Center, the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, and the Henry Jackson Foundation for the Advancement in Military Medicine before joining the University of Nebraska Medical Center faculty in March of 1993. He retired from the US Army with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. Howie has a long and prestigious career in the field of Neurovirology. Among his many accomplishments, Howie has shown how functional alterations in brain immunity induce metabolic changes and ultimately lead to neural cell damage for a broad range of infectious, metabolic, and neurodegenerative disorders. Importantly, he has translated these observations into the development of therapeutic strategies aimed at preventing, slowing or reversing diseases of the CNS. He has shown that AIDS dementia is a reversible metabolic encephalopathy and has developed novel immunotherapy and nanomedicine strategies for Parkinson’s and viral diseases currently being tested in early clinical trials. Under his leadership, Howie is credited with the growth of the Department of Pharmacology and Experimental Neuroscience at the University of Nebraska Medical Center to be amongst the top-like ranked and federally funded departments (top ten) nationwide.
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