Dr. Guerrant is the Thomas H. Hunter Professor Emeritus of International Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases and International Medicine at University of Virginia and was Founder and former Director of the Center for Global Health Equity at UVa, one of the first Trans-University Centers for Global Health. He was elected to the IOM/National Academy of Medicine and formerly chaired its Board on Global Health. Having lived and worked in Congo, Bangladesh and Brazil and trained at Davidson College, UVa, Harvard-BCH and Hopkins, his research is focused on the long-term impact of diarrhea and repeated enteric infections in developing areas. With longstanding NIH support and colleagues in Fortaleza Brazil and South Africa, he with others has described the vicious cycle of diarrhea or enteric infections and malnutrition with long-term consequences for stunted growth, cognitive development, and metabolic syndrome. He further discovered that the cognitive deficit most affected was Alzheimer-like semantic fluency impairment, and he then found that the Alzheimer risk gene, ApoE4 actually protected favela children against diarrhea and cognitive impairment, perhaps helping explain the evolution of this troubling allele.
Dr Guerrant is senior editor of "Tropical Infectious Diseases," "At the Edge of Development: Health Crises in a Transitional Society," and over 725 scientific articles (18 with UVa's 3 Nobel Laureates, Gilman, Murad and Marshall) and has recently published "Evolution of Evolution: The Survival Value of Caring," and "Why Care? ...and How?" He is past president of the ASTMH and recipient of its highest honor, the Walter Reed Medal; the IDSA Mentor Award; Va Outstanding Scientist; UVa's Thomas Jefferson Award, and the NFID Maxwell Finland Award.
