Schiffer appointed new director of NIH-funded AIDS research center
Celia A. Schiffer, PhD, professor of biochemistry & molecular pharmacology, has been appointed director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded Center for AIDS Research (CFAR) at UMass Medical School, one of 20 CFARs in the United States that form an important network of core facilities providing expertise, resources and services not supported through traditional funding mechanisms. Dr. Schiffer replaces Mario Stevenson, PhD, who has taken a position at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine as chief of infectious diseases.
Schiffer will lead CFAR with the newly appointed co-directors, Paul R. Clapham, PhD, associate professor of molecular medicine and molecular genetics & microbiology, and Katherine Ruiz De Luzuriaga, MD, professor of pediatrics and medicine and a CFAR core director, and the other CFAR core directors, Ellen Kittler, PhD, research assistant professor of molecular medicine, Maria L. Zapp, PhD, assistant professor of molecular medicine and molecular genetics & microbiology and Mohan Somasundaran, PhD, research associate professor of pediatrics.
“Dr. Schiffer’s enthusiasm for this new role will not be a surprise to her colleagues; her research into the molecular basis of drug resistance has introduced a new paradigm for drug design, one where preventing drug resistance—one of the great practical problems of contemporary therapeutics—is considered as part of a drug design strategy, rather than a consequence,” said Terence R. Flotte, MD, the Celia and Isaac Haidak Professor in Medicine, executive deputy chancellor, provost and dean of the School of Medicine. “Her NIH program project, ‘Targeting Ensembles of Drug Resistant HIV Proteases,’ puts her at the forefront of exciting new advances in treatment for viral disease.”
The CFAR program, co-funded by seven institutes at the NIH, provides administrative and shared research support to synergistically enhance and coordinate high quality AIDS research projects. The CFAR program emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration, especially between basic and clinical investigators; translational research, in which findings from the laboratory are brought to the clinic and vice versa; an inclusion of minorities; and prevention and behavioral change research. By supporting a multi-disciplinary environment that promotes basic, clinical, epidemiologic, behavioral and translational research in the prevention, detection and treatment of HIV infection and AIDS, CFARs are instrumental in stimulating scientific collaboration in interdisciplinary and translational research; promoting development of sustainable multidisciplinary HIV/AIDS research programs at CFAR institutions; supporting innovative NIH HIV/AIDS research initiatives; and facilitating technology transfer and development through scientific interactions between CFARs and industry.
Schiffer is a graduate of the University of Chicago, where she earned a degree in physics, and the University of California at San Francisco, where she completed her PhD in biophysics. She joined the faculty at UMMS in 1998, after postdoctoral work at ETH Zurich and Genentech in San Francisco, and was promoted to the rank of professor in 2007. In 2005, and again this year, she was honored by her colleagues with awards for achievement in science and as an outstanding mentor to women faculty. In both instances, nominators remarked on her passion and commitment both to science and her profession. “I am certain her energy, skill, demonstrated leadership and knowledge—as well as her strong record of achievement in grant awards will be important to the development of a highly competitive CFAR renewal submission,” said Dr. Flotte.
The CFAR renewal process will also present Schiffer with an opportunity to broaden the CFAR scope for UMMS, incorporating contemporary work associated with tuberculosis, hepatitis C and drug resistance, and vaccine development generally into the existing HIV research community at UMMS. “Dr. Schiffer’s vision for a broadened CFAR fits well strategically with our UMass Center for Clinical and Translational Science and our goal of expanding our clinical and translational research into novel and groundbreaking therapies,” said Flotte. Her vision also includes plans for an institute devoted specifically to the study of drug resistance.
