Welcome to the Center of Excellence in Inflammation, Infectious Disease & Immunity where innovative research is vital to medical breakthroughs!
At the COE in Inflammation, Infectious Disease and Immunity, human subjects research is our backbone. Together with other experienced members, CIIDI explores opportunities for collaborative advancements in human immunology & disease and apply those efforts towards improving the quality of patient care. From workbench to bedside, our researchers are among the best in their field.
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Video Transcript
[Speaker: Dr. Dave Williams]
Hi, my name is Dave Williams. I'm the Carol Hardy Long Professor of Surgery at Quillien College of Medicine. I'm also co-director of the Center of Excellence in Inflammation, Infectious Disease, and Immunity.
I wanted to introduce you to our center and the reason for its existence. Our center was created in 2014 as a Center of Excellence to focus on infectious disease immunity and inflammation.
Our center was created to serve as a catalyst for advancing research: basic research, applied research, translational and clinical research, in our areas of interest.
We currently have approximately 58 members across all of the colleges within ETSU. Most of our members focus on biomedical research, but we also have members in other areas of the university as well. To give you a little more insight into the center, I'd like to introduce my co-director Dr. Jon Moorman.
[Speaker: Dr. Jonathan Moorman]
Hi, I'm Jon Moorman. I'm a co-director for the Center of Excellence here, along with Dr. Williams and I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the translational approach that our center has.
Our center was created to maximize translational science by bringing together clinicians and researchers who might otherwise never be together. And to do this, we've established a series of clinical cores.
These cores are clinical sites where we're able to recruit patients so that they can get us biospecimens that we can use in our research. This type of research is much more, I would call it real, in that it actually involves patients and not just work in a laboratory or work with mice.
We have now recruited multiple clinical sites , including our HIV Centers of Excellence where we get many, many patient specimens, as well as focusing on areas that are very interesting to our particular center.
Our focus areas currently include HIV, but also Hepatitis B, Hepatitis C , Covid19, of course, over the last several years, and Sepsis. These are our areas of focus that we have a fair amount of funding in and that as we go forward we expect to excel in.
So, a major role for our center is to provide educational opportunities to undergraduate students, to graduate students, and to postdoctoral fellows. In order to do this, we have worked with the biomedical sciences program here to realign the areas of interest that they have in their program.
We have created a concentration that is completely aligned with our center and is focused on inflammation, infectious diseases, and immunity. By doing this, we're able to offer excellent training opportunities to all of these trainees in laboratories that are highly equipped, highly functional, and with principal investigators that really know how to do science, including translational science.
[Speaker: Dr. Dave Williams]
In addition to what Jon has told you about our center, I'd like to fill you in on a few other aspects of our center. One of the things that we're really excited about now is we've created a new drug discovery program, a drug discovery core, which is led by Dr. Zuchao Ma.
We're very interested in the development of vaccines and adjuvants for a variety of purposes. Obviously vaccines are in the public consciousness right now. It's a very important area, and we're going to advance that area in the next few years.
Another important aspect of the center was to create infrastructure to advance science and to allow the members of the center to be more competitive nationally. And to do that, we have purchased a variety of equipment, such as new flow cytometers, confocal microscopes, NMR instruments, and so on. All of which are essential for advancing our research.
We look forward to continuing this in the future. Thank you very much for your interest in the Center of Excellence and Inflammation, Infectious Disease, and Immunity.
[Music]
CIIDI celebrates a decade of excellence in basic, clinical, and translational research, as highlighted in the 2025 State of University Address (page 26): Download the Report