Jonathan Juliano, MD, MSPH, DTM&H, professor of medicine in infectious diseases and epidemiology was honored with the Bailey K. Ashford Medal at the annual meeting of the American Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH), held last month in New Orleans, Louisiana.
The prestigious Bailey K. Ashford Medal is awarded for distinguished work in tropical medicine, named in honor of Bailey K. Ashford who recognized the connection between hookworm infection and anemia at the age of 26. This is one of 6 honorary medals bestowed by ASTMH. Juliano was nominated for the award by Rhoel Dinglasan, PhD, MPH, a professor at the University of Florida; Thomas Wellems, MD, PhD, chief of malaria at the NIAID; and IDEEL colleagues Jessica Lin, MD, MSCR, and Jonathan Parr, MD, MPH.
Juliano is the associate director of the Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases and primarily studies malaria. He says there is growing concern about the effectiveness of antimalarial drugs in East Africa with emerging mutations that show resistance to first-line malaria treatment recommended by the World Health Organization.
“This is still a disease that kills hundreds of millions of people a year, and evolutionarily, it’s the most interesting pathogen in the world. How it co-evolves with the human host and co-evolves with the mosquito vector is remarkable. And it really poses tremendous challenges in terms of control.”
Juliano works in the Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Ecology Lab (IDEEL) that he co-founded. Officially formed in 2015, IDEEL is a virtual laboratory that is focused on improving the health of the world’s poorest populations by understanding the infectious diseases that impact them. The team leverages a broad range of methods and techniques, spanning from cellular biology, genomics, translational and spatial epidemiology and implementation sciences to understand infectious diseases. Currently, IDEEL conducts research in Tanzania/Zanzibar, Uganda, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Cameroon, Malawi, Zambia, Kenya, Ethiopia, Ghana, Gabon, Mali, Peru, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Colombia, China and Bangladesh.
Juliano received a Bachelor of Science with distinction from the University of Toronto, with a double major in Microbiology and History. In 2001, he received his medical degree from UNC School of Medicine, followed by a combined Internal Medicine and Pediatrics Residency at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, MN. In 2005, Juliano returned to Chapel Hill for his infectious disease fellowship, working with Steven Meshnick, MD, PhD, a mentor who inspired Juliano’s career in malaria research. Since joining the faculty at UNC, Juliano has been active in the education of medical students, graduate students, residents and fellows. He is a preceptor in UNC’s Curriculum in Genetics and Molecular Biology and Associate Chief for Research and professional Development for the Division of Infectious Diseases. He is a Fellow of the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) and ASTMH, and a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI).
About the Bailey K. Ashford Medal
Bailey K. Ashford was born on September 28, 1873 in Washington D.C., and was son of Dr. Francis Ashford, Dean of the Georgetown School of Medicine. He received his MD from Georgetown and entered the Army Medical Corps in 1897. After the Spanish American War, he was sent to Puerto Rico, in command of medical department troops. In 1899, at age 26, he recognized that hookworms caused the anemia prevalent among the rural populations and in 1904 he founded the Puerto Rico Anemia Commission to combat the disease. Except for assignments in Washington and France in WWI, he was destined to spend almost his professional career in Puerto Rico, where he died in 1934. He was instrumental in founding the School of Tropical Medicine in Puerto Rico which later transformed into the School of Medicine.
The Bailey K. Ashford Medal design was inspired by the ancient Egyptians who recognized several helminthic infections including the parasitic infection caused by the Ancylostoma hookworm. The motif places the sun at the top, bracketed by a pair of cobras as venomous snakes in tropical medicine, with sunbeams suggesting tropical latitudes. A baboon likely represents the use of primates and other experimental animals in medical research, while the sacred scarab at the bottom was a solar symbol representing immortality and resurrection. The dung beetle symbolizes the widespread problem of tropical hygiene, the fecal-borne or soil-transmitted diseases, of which hookworm disease is an example.