Diane E. Griffin

Diane Edmund Griffin (born May 5, 1940 in Iowa City ) is an American microbiologist, immunologist and virologist.

Griffin grew up in Oklahoma City and Rock Island in Illinois and studied from 1958 at Augustana College and then at Stanford University , where she did her doctorate in microbiology and studied medicine at the same time (MD 1968, Ph.D. in microbiology 1970). She then went to the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine with her husband, where she began research in virology and immunology under Richard T. Johnson , first on Sindbis virus, an alphavirus that causes meningitis in mice, then on damage to the nervous system Measles virus. In 1973 she became Assistant Professor, 1979 Associate Professor and 1986 Professor in the Department of Neurology. From 1994 she headed the Microbiology and Immunology Department at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. From 1975 to 1982 she also conducted research at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute . In 2001, when an anonymous donor from Johns Hopkins University donated $ 100 million to a malaria institute, she became a founding director. In 2007 she handed over the management to Peter Agre .

She is particularly concerned with alphaviruses , measles, acute meningitis and malaria. She found that measles viruses weaken the acquired immune system (in particular, the cell-mediated immune response is destroyed via T lymphocytes, so that only the defense via antibodies remains), one reason why it is particularly severe in developing countries due to secondary infections and small children under 6 months cannot be vaccinated. She undertook field studies (with Johnson) in Peru and later in Zambia, where, to her surprise, she found that measles infections suppressed the spread of HIV in children.

The Malaria Institute, which she heads, researched, for example, improved diagnostic methods, vaccines, treatment based on artemisinin and transgenic mosquitoes that do not transmit malaria.

In 2016 she received the Maxwell Finland Award . In 2004 she became a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, and in 2018 of the American Philosophical Society . She is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Microbiology . She was president of the American Society for Virology from 1999 to 2000 .

In 1965 she married the neurologist John Griffin.

Fonts

• David M. Knipe, Peter M. Howley, Diane E. Griffin, (Eds.): Fields Virology. 5th edition, Lippincott Williams & Wilkins Verlag, 2007.
• Editor with Charles H. Calisher: Emergence and control of zoonotic viral encephalitides, Springer 2004

Web links

• Archives of Maryland