Image: The University of Georgia and the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) in partnership with the Georgia Department of Public Health, have received a five-year, $17 million cooperative agreement from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to establish a Pathogen Genomics Center of Excellence. Department of Plant Biology Senior Research Scientist and Director of the Georgia Genomics and Bioinformatics Core Lab, Dr. Magdy Alabady is a part of the team establishing the center. The center is intended to strengthen public health response to infectious disease threats and support public health workforce development. UGA will be leading the effort to translate new discoveries into usable data and interventions. GTRI will be leading the operations and implementation arm of the Georgia-based center. Collectively, this work will be focused on transitioning innovations out of academia and into use at public health departments across the United States. This work will build on the innovative tools generated from UGA’s interdisciplinary infectious disease research centers, including the Center for Vaccines and Immunology, Center for Influenza Disease Emergence Research, and the Center for Ecology of Infectious Diseases. By facilitating ongoing collaborations, the network will help ensure that academic researchers, public health agencies and others involved in a pandemic response will have systems in place to share crucial information and apply consistent data-gathering techniques. Sampling and sequencing innovations developed at the center will be shared with other centers and public health agencies nationwide. Team members include Tonia Parrott at the Georgia Department of Public Health and Amy Winter, Erin Lipp, Travis Glenn, Magdy Alabady, Liang Liu, Pej Rohani, Susan Sanchez, Mandev Gill and John Drake from UGA. They will be joined by Rebecca Hutchins and True Merrill at GTRI. The network across Georgia also includes researchers from Emory University, Georgia State University and Augusta University Medical College of Georgia. This article is an excerpt of an article originally published by UGA Today and written by Lauren Baggett. It can be found here
