J. Andrew Alspaugh, MD
Associate Professor
Department of Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases
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Biography:

Andy Alspaugh received his A.B. in Chemistry from the University of North Carolina in 1987. During this time, he worked in the laboratory of Patricia Pukkila where he was first exposed to the genetics and molecular biology of fungi with the model basidiomycete Coprinus cinereus. He attended Duke University School of Medicine and received his M.D. degree in 1991. During medical school, he spent one year in the laboratory of Don Granger, studying immune responses to the human fungal pathogen Cryptococcus neoformans. The Granger lab had previously demonstrated that murine macrophages use nitric oxide to inhibit the growth of C. neoformans. Dr. Alspaugh developed a cell-free model system using chemically-generated nitrogen oxides to mimic the fungicidal activity of macrophages and to further characterize the effect of nitric oxide on fungal cells.

From 1991-1995, Dr. Alspaugh trained in Internal Medicine at Vanderbilt University. He was the Chief Resident in Medicine at the Nashville VA Medical Center from 1994-1995. After this time, he returned to Duke University for his subspecialty training in Infectious Diseases. He joined the laboratory of Joseph Heitman in 1996 and began to study signaling pathways regulating pathogenesis in Cryptococcus neoformans.

Dr. Alspaugh joined the faculty of the Department of Medicine and Division of Infectious Diseases at Duke University Medical Center in 1998. He also has a secondary appointment in the Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, and he is a member of the University Program in Genetics. He received the Merck Young Investigator Award in Medical Mycology through the Infectious Diseases Society of America in 2000. He also received a Burroughs Wellcome Fund New Investigator Award in Molecular Pathogenic Mycology in 2001. His research is currently supported by funding from the NIAID to study the Ras and cAMP signaling pathways in microbial development and pathogenesis. The focus of Dr. Alspaugh's research is to further define the molecular mechanisms of microbial pathogenesis. He is especially interested in defining conserved signal transduction pathways that have been co-opted by microbial pathogens to enable their pathogenic potential. Dr. Alspaugh also serves as an editor for FEMS Yeast Research, as well as a member of the editorial boards for Eukaryotic Cell and PLoS One, a new open access journal from the Public Library of Science.