Animal Health Research Center, Center for Vaccines and Immunology, Department of Infectious Diseases
Director, GRA Eminent Scholar of Infectious Diseases, Professor
Expertise
Immunology | Infectious Diseases | Vaccinology | Virology
Biography
Ted M. Ross, Ph.D. is the Director of the Center for Vaccines and Immunology and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar and Professor of Infectious Diseases at the University of Georgia. Dr. Ross earned his undergraduate and graduate studies in Zoology and Microbiology at the University of Arkansas and he received a Doctorate in Microbiology and Immunology from Vanderbilt University in 1996. He was awarded the inaugural Sidney P. Colowick Award in Outstanding Graduate Research while at Vanderbilt. Dr. Ross performed post-doctoral fellowships at Duke University on HIV biology of viral entry and at Emory University on vaccine development for HIV and influenza viruses. He then started his own laboratory as Principal Investigator at East Carolina University and in 2003 moved the laboratory to the University of Pittsburgh in the Departments of Medicine-Infectious Diseases, Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, and as a founding member of the Center for Vaccine Research where he served the University for 10 years. In 2015, he joined the faculty at the University of Georgia. Dr. Ross explores new vaccine technologies intended to protect against all strains of influenza – an endeavor that could potentially eliminate the need for seasonal flu shots. Dr. Ross and his colleagues are applying similar strategies to fight other serious viruses such as, Dengue, Zika, Ebola, Chikungunya, and HIV Type-1 viruses.
Dr. Ross has published more than 130 papers and book chapters on infectious disease and vaccine development. He has been an invited speaker at more than 130 national and international conferences and participates in several vaccine working groups, including at the U.S. NIH, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization. He is an editorial 100 board member of Vaccine. He previously served as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Current HIV Research. In addition, he has been an ad-hoc reviewer on NIH study sections and a reviewer for 24 different journals.
Dr. Ross served as the Treasurer and Secretary of International Society for Vaccines from 2012-2017 and now is the current President-Elect (elected 2018) and has served as the Co-Chair of the 8th and 9th Vaccine and ISV Congress in Philadelphia (8th) and Seoul (9th). In addition, Dr. Ross will be the lead Chair of the 12th ISV Congress in 2018 to be held in Atlanta, USA.
Research Interests
- Development of Broadly Reactive Vaccines using computationally optimized broadly reactive antigen (COBRA) modeling. Influenza, HIV, Dengue.
- Modeling Immunity to Biodefense agents and influenza.
- Influenza VLP-based vaccines for seasonal and pandemic influenza.
- Pathogenicity/Genomic Modeling of influenza infection in adult and elderly ferrets, and humans.
- Evaluation of human clinical samples following influenza vaccination.
- Development of tetravalent Dengue VLP-based vaccines.
- Development of VLPs for RVFV and CCHFV.
- Multiclade Consensus Env VLP AIDS vaccine.
- Using Consensus Env Sequences to broaden immunity.
- Using C3d adjuvants in a DNA vaccine to enhance the immunogenicity to HIV/SIV, RVFV, Dengue, West Nile, Chikungunya virus envelopes.
- Development and testing pandemic H5N1, H1N1, H7N9 subtypes.
Selected Publications
PubMed