Alejandro Aballay, Ph.D.

  • Professor of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology, School of Medicine
  • Chair, Molecular Microbiology and Immunology, School of Medicine
  • Program in Molecular and Cellular Biosciences, School of Medicine
  • Neuroscience Graduate Program, School of Medicine

Biography

Dr. Alejandro Aballay is Professor and Chair of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology. Before joining OHSU, Dr. Aballay was Professor in Molecular Genetics and Microbiology and Center Director at Duke University Medical Center. Dr. Aballay received his Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the Nacional de Cuyo University Medical School in Mendoza, Argentina, in 1998. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Washington University School of Medicine, in 1999, on intracellular trafficking. He completed a second postdoctoral fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Department of Genetics, Harvard Medical School, in 2002, on molecular pathogenesis. Dr. Aballay joined the Duke faculty in 2002 and launched a multidisciplinary research program studying neural circuits involved in the control of stress responses and innate immunity. His team also studies the effects of inflammation on the nervous system. Dr. Aballay has published in Science, Developmental Cell, PNAS. eLife, and Current Biology. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, AAAS and a member of multiple editorial boards, including Virulence, Journal of Pathogens, Frontiers in Microbial Immunology, and mBio. He has served on a number of grant review panels for the National Science Foundation and NIH. He has received a prestigious NIH MERIT Award from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences for his research project on the role of the nervous system in controlling immunity.

Areas of interest

  • host-pathogen interactions, neural-immune communications, neuroinflammation, infections, bacterial pathogenesis, organismal response to infections

Honors and awards

  • Dr. Aballay is a recipient of a number of awards, including: 2017 NIH MERIT Award, 2017 American Society for Microbiology fellowship, 2013 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) fellowship, 2009, Neuroimmunology of Brain Infections and Cancers Award, 2009 Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Early Career Scientist Competition-Semifinalist, 2005 ICAAC Young Investigator Award, 2003 Whitehead Scholar in Biomedical Sciences, 1998 Pew Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Publications

Publications