Donations and endowments enable the LaMontagne Center to mature as a research center and sustain its operations. Distribution of these funds allows the LaMontagne Center to act upon new opportunities such as offering competitive fellowships to recruit talented postdoctoral fellows doing cutting-edge research, providing seed grants for LaMontagne Center investigators to initiate new research projects and maintaining state-of-the-art core research facilities.
By supporting the LaMontagne Center for Infectious Disease, you can impact the future of disease research. Your donation will play a role in the development of new treatments, infectious disease prevention and future infection predictions. The research that your donation supports at the LaMontagne Center will revolutionize health practices for many deadly diseases.
Infectious diseases represent a leading cause of mortality worldwide. Understanding the biological principles that underlie the mechanisms by which infectious agents adapt to and undermine the defense mechanisms of, a host organism is critical for the development of therapeutic agents to fight disease. An understanding of the evolution of both the pathogens and the host immune response to pathogens is also necessary because an infectious agent, its host, and the drugs and vaccines used for treatment, make up a dynamic, interacting complex that is continually co-evolving. The University of Texas at Austin has strength in several areas of biology, chemistry, pharmaceutics and engineering that make it uniquely poised for national prominence in infectious disease research.
The Richard J. Meyer Endowed Lectureship
The Richard J. Meyer Endowed Lectureship will allow LCID faculty, students and postdoctoral fellows to learn cutting-edge information that will inspire their research. Richard J. Meyer was a member of the Department of Microbiology and the merged Molecular Genetics and Microbiology Department and the Molecular Biosciences Department. This endowment was established in Richard’s memory to recognize his contributions to science and his training of Microbiology graduate students.