Scientific Advisory Board & Bios

Dr. Jack M. Gwaltney, Jr.
Dr. Gwaltney is Chief of the Division of Epidemiology and Virology at the University of Virginia, Director of the Center for Prevention Disease and Injury, and Professor Emeritus. Dr. Gwaltney's clinical interest include infectious diseases, clinical virology and acute respiratory disease. Over the past three decades, his research interests have been in the common cold, upper respiratory infections and influenza. Dr. Gwaltney in internationally recognized for more than 30 years of research on rhinoviruses and is author of more than 300 published articles, book chapters and books. He is the recipient of a Research Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health and is co-editor of the textbook "Infectious Disease and Antimicrobial Therapy of the Ears, Nose,and Throat."

Dr. Luc Montagnier
Dr. Montagnier has been an active researcher in oncology and virology for almost four decades. Throughout the 1970's and 1980's he focused on RNA tumor viruses and did extensive work on interferon in both animal and human systems. In 1983, as head of the Viral Oncology Unit at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, he and his colleagues discovered the human retrovirus, which later became known as HIV-1, the etiologic agent of AIDS. In 1985, his team isolated the second human AIDS virus, HIV-2. Since then, he has coordinated the work of a distinguished group of collaborators on the mechanisms of AIDS pathogenesis. Today Dr. Montagnier heads the "Aids and Retrovirus" department at the Pasteur Institute, is Chairman of the World Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention, which he co-founded in 1993, and holds the position of Distinguished Professor at Queens College in New York.

Dr. James J. Rahal
Dr. Rahal is Director of the Infectious Disease Section of the New York Hospital Queens, Professor of Medicine at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University, President of New York Society of Infectious Diseases and internationally renowned expert in the field of infection control. Dr. Rahal was one of the first physicians to study West Nile virus (WNV) commencing in 1999, when the illness, which is carried by mosquitoes, was first detected in the United States. Dr. Rahal has conducted a nationwide clinical trail for therapy of WNV with interferon alpha-2b, using Shering Plough's product, Intron A, in an effort to treat hospitalized patients.