Keynote: Vincent Racaniello

The ASPIRE Program is excited to welcome Dr. Vincent Racaniello, PhD, to be our Keynote Speaker for the 2021 Annual Career Symposium.

Join us for the Keynote Talk on Thursday, May 6, at 7:00pm CST.

Register to attend the event through this Eventbrite link. We will email you the day of the event with the link to watch!

Vincent Racaniello, PhD (@profvrr) is Higgins Professor of Microbiology & Immunology at Columbia University Medical Center. He has been studying viruses for over 40 years, starting in 1975, when he entered the Ph.D. program in Biomedical Sciences at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine of the City University of New York. His thesis research, in the laboratory of Dr. Peter Palese, was focussed on influenza viruses. In 1979 he joined the laboratory of Dr. David Baltimore at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for postdoctoral work on poliovirus. In 1982 Vincent joined the faculty  in the Department of Microbiology at Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons in New York City. There he established a laboratory to study viruses, and to train other scientists to become virologists. Over the years his laboratory has studied a variety of viruses including poliovirus, echovirus, enteroviruses 70 and D68, rhinovirus, Zika virus and hepatitis C virus. As principal investigator of his laboratory, he oversees the research  that is carried out by Ph.D. students and postdoctoral fellows. He also teaches virology to undergraduate and graduate students, as well as medical, dental, and nursing students. His virology lectures are available online at iTunes University, YouTube, and Coursera.

Vincent entered the world of social media in 2004 with virology blog, followed by This Week in Virology. Videocasts of lectures from his undergraduate virology course are on iTunes University and virology blog. You can find him on Wikipedia, Twitter, GFacebook, and Instagram. His goal is to be Earth’s virology professor. In recognition of his contribution to microbiology education, he was awarded the Peter Wildy Prize for Microbiology Education by the Society for General Microbiology, and the American Society for Microbiology Award for Education. His Wildy Lecture provides an overview of how he uses social media for science communication.