THE JOHN R. LAMONTAGNE LECTURE SERIES

2023 LaMontagne Lecture - March 21, 2023, 3:00 p.m.

Peter J. Hotez, MD, PhD will be the speaker for the 2023 LaMontagne Symposium to be held March 21, 2023, 3:00 p.m. at the Etter-Harbin Alumni Center on the UT Campus. Dr. Hotez is Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine, Professor of Pediatrics and Molecular Virology & Microbiology, and University Professor at Baylor College of Medicine. He is Co-director of the Texas Children’s Center for Vaccine Development (CVD) and holds the Texas Children’s Hospital Endowed Chair of Tropical Pediatrics. He is a Fellow in Disease and Poverty at the James A Baker III Institute for Public Policy, Senior Fellow at the Scowcroft Institute of International Affairs at Texas A&M University, Faculty Fellow with the Hagler Institute for Advanced Studies at Texas A&M University, and Health Policy Scholar in the Baylor Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy.

Dr. Hotez is an internationally-recognized physician-scientist in neglected tropical diseases and vaccine development, championing access to vaccines globally and in the United States. As co-director of the Texas Children’s CVD, he leads a team and product development partnership for developing new vaccines for hookworm infection, schistosomiasis, leishmaniasis, Chagas disease, and SARS/MERS/SARS-2 coronaviruses, diseases affecting hundreds of millions of children and adults worldwide.

In December 2021, Dr. Hotez led efforts at the Texas Children’s Center for Vaccine Development to develop a low-cost recombinant protein COVID vaccine for global health, resulting in emergency use authorization in India. In 2022, Hotez and his colleague Dr. Maria Elena Bottazzi were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for “their work to develop and distribute a low-cost COVID-19 vaccine to people of the world without patent limitation.”

Dr. Hotez has authored more than 600 original papers and is the author of five single-author books, including Forgotten People, Forgotten Diseases (ASM Press); Blue Marble Health: An Innovative Plan to Fight Diseases of the Poor amid Wealth (Johns Hopkins University Press); Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism (Johns Hopkins University Press); and Preventing the Next Pandemic: Vaccine Diplomacy in a Time of Anti-science (Johns Hopkins University Press). Dr. Hotez appears frequently on television (including BBC, CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC), radio, and in newspaper interviews (including the New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal).

For more information on Dr. Hotez and his work, please go to peterhotez.org.

2022 LaMontagne Lecture - March 22, 2022, 3:00 p.m.

Link to Taped Lecture: https://video.ibm.com/recorded/131521908

The 2022 keynote speaker was Jason McLellan, PhD, Welch Chair in Chemistry and Professor of Molecular Biosciences, The University of Texas at Austin. The title of his lecture was Coronavirus Vaccines: How We Got Here and Where We Are Going. The event was held at the Etter-Harbin Alumni Center. The recording of the lecture can be found at the link above.

Dr. McLellan has worked to understand how viral protein structures operate. Viral protein structure and function are important for the development of vaccines and potential treatments for deadly viruses that have impacted the lives of billions of people. Dr. McLellan and his collaborators have engineered a key protein of coronaviruses for use in vaccines. His team has developed technology found in many leading vaccines against COVID-19 (Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson and Johnson, and Novavax). This discovery led to his selection as Texas Inventor of the Year by the State Bar of Texas’s Intellectual Property Section, which annually recognizes individuals and their inventions that have “significantly impacted the Texas economy.” McLellan and his colleagues also designed key proteins that form the basis of several vaccines.  These vaccines are directed against coronaviruses as well as respiratory syncytial virus, a virus especially dangerous for young children and seniors. He is the winner of multiple scientific awards, and his research and expertise have been featured in multiple media outlets.

2021 LaMontagne Lecture - March 23, 2021

Our 2021 keynote speaker was Dr. Mary Estes, Distinguished Professor of Virology and Microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. Her research group studies viruses that infect distinct types of cells (enterocytes, crypt cells, M cells) in the GI tract as probes to learn about the biology, host response and gene expression of these cells, using multidisciplinary approaches to probe the structure and molecular biology of GI viruses to understand the basic mechanisms that control virus replication, morphogenesis, virus-host interactions, and pathogenesis.