University of Pittsburgh Medical School faculty member and researcher Elodie Ghedin has been named a 2011 MacArthur Fellow.
Winners of the prestigious award, commonly known as a "genius grant," receive a $500,000 unrestricted award disbursed over the next five years. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which underwrites the award, annually selects a wide variety of fellows ranging from musicians to scientists based on their "creativity, originality and potential to make important contributions in the future"
The foundation selected 22 fellows on Tuesday, including Ghedin and Pitt alumnus Kevin Guskiewicz, a sports medicine researcher at the University of North Carolina.
Ghedin studies the genomes of human pathogens that trigger rare lethal diseases in the developing world. She is an assistant professor in the Pitt School of Medicine's Department of Computational and Systems Biology. She also is a member of the university's Center for Vaccine Research.
"I'm stunned and excited. With this award, I will expand on my parasitology work, specifically the organism that causes elephantiasis. I also hope to explore new avenues in the evolution of RNA viruses other than influenza," Ghedin said in a statement that Pitt officials released
She was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (1998-2000) and led the Viral Genomics group at the Institute for Genomic Research (2000-06) prior to her appointment to the faculty at Pitt.
