On June 13, Columbia Summer in China will invites Professor Walter Ian Lipkin to share his virus hunting story at Columbia Global Centers | Beijing.
At the 2015 National Science and Technology Awards Conference in Beijing, Professor Ian Lipkin, director of the Mailman School’s Center for Infection and Immunity, received China’s top science honor for foreign scientists, the International Science and Technology Cooperation Award, at a ceremony in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, presided by President Xi Jinping. The award recognizes Professor Lipkin's outstanding scientific and technological contributions and promotion of scientific advancement in the country.
At the height of the SARS outbreak in 2003, Professor Lipkin was invited to assess the state of the epidemic, identify gaps in research, and develop a strategy for containing the virus and reducing morbidity and mortality. Once the outbreak was contained, Professor Lipkin helped develop the institutional infrastructure needed to ensure that China would have the resources required to detect and more rapidly respond to emerging infectious threats, in part through building the Institut Pasteur in Shanghai, new national Centers for Disease Control in Beijing, and the Guangzhou Institute of Biomedicine and Health.
On May 9, 2013, Professor Lipkin went to Beijing to sign a Joint Laboratory for Pathogeny Discovery with the National Institute for Viral Disease Control and Prevention (NIVDC) within the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Xiaoping Dong serves as the Chinese director of the laboratory, and Zhaojun Duan serves as the executive director. The Joint Laboratory aims to promote and enhance the ability to respond to new and outbreaking infectious diseases in China, and to expand the multifaceted cooperation into the fields of virus discovery, disease diagnosis and vaccine development. Today, Professor Lipkin continues to consult with the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Chinese Academy of Science, and the Ministry of Health to better respond to infectious diseases.
Speaker
W. Ian Lipkin, MD, is internationally recognized as an authority on the use of molecular methods for pathogen discovery. Dr. Lipkin has over 30 years of experience in diagnostics, microbial discovery and outbreak response, has mentored and trained more than 30 students and post-doctoral fellows and leads a team of over 65 investigators, post-doctoral fellows and research and support staff in New York City and another 150 across the world. In the 1980s, Dr. Lipkin identified AIDS-associated immunological abnormalities and inflammatory neuropathy, which he showed could be treated with plasmapheresis, and demonstrated that early life exposure to viral infections affects neurotransmitter function. He was the first to use purely molecular methods to identify an infectious agent, developed MassTag PCR and GreeneChip technology and pioneered the use of high throughput sequencing in pathogen discovery. He and his team implicated the West Nile virus as the cause of the encephalitis epidemic in New York in 1999 and have discovered or characterized more than 500 infectious agents including the Borna disease virus, West Nile virus, LuJo virus and human rhinovirus C. Dr. Lipkin assisted the WHO and the Peoples Republic of China during the 2003 SARS outbreak and currently advises the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in addressing the challenge of MERS. He also directs large programs focused on autism and chronic fatigue syndrome wherein gene-environment interactions such as infection and intoxication are postulated to cause disease.
Special Notice
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The event will be conducted in English.
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Due to limited seats, registration will be verified through the QR code of confirmation. Please present the QR code at the entrance.
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