SAFE AND EFFECTIVE VACCINE AGAINST HUMAN METAPNEUMOVIRUS (HMPV)

Dr. Alexis Kargelis

Doctor of Microbiology and Immunology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, USA. He then completed two postdoctoral degrees, one at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and another at The Rockefeller University, New York-USA. He is currently a Full Professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology at the Faculty of Biological Sciences and in the Department of Endocrinology at the Faculty of Medicine of the Catholic University of Chile.

He is also scientific adviser to the Senate and representative of the International Center for Molecular Genetics and Biotechnology in Chile. Dr. Kalergis will bring his expertise in transferring basic research to applications for the benefit of human health. He is a well-known researcher, won the award for the best doctoral thesis at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, has trained hundreds of pre-and post-graduate students, many of whom currently hold academic positions in Chile and abroad.

Dr. Kalergis has delivered a hundred international conferences and published more than 160 articles in high impact journals such as Nature Immunology, PNAS and the Lancet. He has dozens of patent applications and has been awarded and funded by prestigious institutions in the USA, such as the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation, the Irvington Foundation and the Irene Diamond Foundation. He also received the award for the most outstanding young researcher in 2004 awarded by the Society of Biology and BiosChile IGSA. He has won national research funds such as Fondef, Fondecyt and the Millennium Scientific Initiative, as well as international ones such as the International Foundation of Science and the European Community. He currently serves as a board member of the Technological Consortium in Applied Molecular Clinical Biomedicine and as a director of the Millennium Institute in Immunology and Immunotherapy. Recently Dr. Kalergis was invited to join the Presidential Commission "Science for Development", which advises the President of the Republic on Science and Technology and on the design of the Ministry of Science and Technology.