Announcing the Dr. Will Hueston Speaker Series

CAHFS is proud to announce the launch of the Dr. Will Hueston Speaker Series, featuring key speakers in the areas of animal health and food safety. The Speaker Series was named to honor the legacy of Dr. Hueston, University of Minnesota Professor Emeritus, and an advocate and champion of inter-disciplinary collaboration in the areas of public health, epidemiology, capacity building, and policy. The first seminar event will take place this Friday, December 8; details listed below.

Dr. Elizabeth Rieder, PhD
USDA - Agriculture Research Service, Plum Island

"Development of Novel Foot-and-Mouth Disease Virus Marker Vaccines"

Friday, December 8th, 12:00 - 1:00pm
280 VDL (seminar room)

Elizabeth Rieder received her M. Sc. Degree in Biochemistry (1986) and a Ph.D. in Virology and Genetic (1991) from the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina. Her doctoral studies involved the molecular mechanism of Foot-and-Mouth Disease Virus (FMDV)-escape mutant generation, isolated under selective immune pressure. Following receipt of her Ph.D., Dr. Rieder was a Research Scientist (1991-1997) at PIADC, USDA, ARS and studied FMDV pathogenesis and developed experimental FMDV vaccines through the generation of an infectious cDNA clone for this virus.
 
From 1997 through 2002, Dr. Rieder was a Senior Scientist/Instructor for the Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, NY. Her research work at Stony Brook focused on the analysis of replication signals in the genome of plus strand RNA viruses including poliovirus and rhinovirus. She also assembled and characterized infectious cDNA clones of important human pathogens of the enteroviruses including those that causes upper respiratory disease in humans or have been implicated in the induction of type I diabetes, and characterized their biological, antigenic and genetic properties. Since 2003, Dr. Rieder is leading a Molecular Biology Laboratory within the Foreign Animal Research Unit, Plum Island Animal Diseases Center as a Senior Scientist.
 
Dr. Rieder has a long-standing and active research interest in the processes that lead to replication of RNA viruses. She has conducted research on foot-and-mouth disease virus for more than 20 years, and made important contributions to vaccine developments and to the understanding of the mechanism contributing to virus replication and virus-host cell interaction at molecular levels.
 
The primary interest in her laboratory concerns the role of both viral factors (proteins and genetic elements), and host factors, that might influence how the virus causes disease. Recently, her laboratory has developed a safer marker vaccine for FMDV that undergoing early development with an industrial partner. In a second area, her group utilizes reverse genetic combined with biochemical approaches to examine the role of non-structural proteins in FMDV proliferation. This involves using full length FMDV cDNA of outbreak strains and non-replicating viral genomes, called replicons. Her ultimate goal is to develop strategies to interfere with virus-specific processes and to genetically engineer safe and efficacious FMDV vaccine candidates.