Faculty | Petri Receives State Award for Teaching and Research

Petri Receives State Council of Higher Education’s 2014 Outstanding Faculty Award

Division of Infectious Diseases and International Health Chief William A. Petri received the state’s highest honor for professors, the Outstanding Faculty Award, in February 2014. The award, given by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia and sponsored by the Dominion Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Dominion Virginia Power, recognizes superior accomplishments in teaching, research and public service.

“I am thrilled to receive this award, as I feel I am a product of UVA, having grown up professionally here over the last 30 years surrounded by great professors from whom I have learned, and upon whom I have modeled my career.”

Dr. Petri is among 12 faculty members selected from a pool of 115 applications in 2014 from institutions statewide. Petri and fellow awardees were honored at a ceremony in Richmond earlier this year. UVA Executive Vice President and Provost John D. Simon commented that Petri and fellow UVA awardee Linda Columbus demonstrate the “seamless integration of the University’s teaching, research, service and patient care missions.”

Petri is an internationally recognized leader in the field of global health, bridging the gap between laboratory science and patient care. An inventor and entrepreneur as well as practicing physician and teacher, he oversees the research program of the Division of Infectious Diseases’s — one of the largest at UVA. In his research, teaching and clinical service, Petri is recognized for his one-on-one mentorship with undergraduate, graduate and medical students, interns and fellows.

In 2008, the journal Nature named Petri as one of the top 20 NIH-funded scientists in the U.S. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, Petri is a pioneer and leader in the study of enteric infections and their consequences on the health of children. He leads the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s PROVIDE study in Bangladesh and India, exploring new solutions for the problem of oral poliovirus and rotavirus vaccine failures in the developing world. He and his collaborators have found that the underperformance of vaccines in the developing world is associated with malnutrition, diarrhea and shortened duration of exclusive breastfeeding.

Petri also is the most highly cited investigator in the world on amebiasis, one of the top 10 causes of diarrhea in children in the developing world. He has defined its ability to kill cells at the molecular level, developed the first FDA-cleared test for its diagnosis, and was the first person to discover that children were immune to reinfection, and that that immunity was associated with a particular antibody response. He discovered that the obesity hormone leptin plays a critical role in defense of the gut from ameba, with mutations in the receptor determining susceptibility to infection.

(Excerpted from University Communications news release by Fariss Samarrai, January 24, 2014.)