Alejandro Aballay, PhD

Dr. Alejandro Aballay is Professor, Department of Genetics, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Professor, Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, McGovern Medical School at UT Health Houston and Dean of the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. Before joining MD Anderson and the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, Dr. Aballay was Professor and Chair of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at OHSU. Prior to OHSU, Dr. Aballay was Professor in Molecular Genetics and Microbiology and Center Director at Duke University Medical Center. Dr. Aballay received his Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the Nacional de Cuyo University Medical School in Mendoza, Argentina, in 1998. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Washington University School of Medicine, in 1999, on intracellular trafficking. He completed a second postdoctoral fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Department of Genetics, Harvard Medical School, in 2002, on molecular pathogenesis. Dr. Aballay joined the Duke faculty in 2002 and launched a multidisciplinary research program studying neural circuits involved in the control of stress responses and innate immunity. His team also studies the effects of inflammation on the nervous system. Dr. Aballay has published in Science, Developmental Cell, PNAS. eLife, and Current Biology. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, AAAS and a member of multiple editorial boards, including Virulence, Journal of Pathogens, Frontiers in Microbial Immunology, and mBio. He has served on a number of grant review panels for the National Science Foundation and NIH. He has received a prestigious NIH MERIT Award from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences for his research project on the role of the nervous system in controlling immunity.