Dear colleagues,
I’m pleased to announce the appointment of Derek B. Sant’Angelo, Ph.D., as the next chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology.
Dr. Sant’Angelo comes to the VCU School of Medicine from the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School (RWJMS) at Rutgers University, where he is currently a professor in the departments of Pediatrics and Pharmacology of Immunology, the Harold L. Paz, M.D. Endowed Professor of Developmental Biology, associate director of Basic Science for the Child Health Institute of New Jersey, and chief of the Division of Immunobiology.
For more than 25 years, Dr. Sant’Angelo has been a leader in the field of T cell immunology, in which he has elucidated fundamental mechanisms of T cell development, discovered new T cell subsets and functions, and elucidated the role of these cells in health and disease. He is Director of the Genome Editing Shared Resource at Rutgers and serves on the advisory committees for the Immune Monitoring and Flow Cytometry Shared Resources, in addition to serving as chair for both the Biomedical Research Advisory Committee and the RWJMS Research Committee.
Dr. Sant’Angelo received his B.S. from the University of Michigan and his Ph.D. from Rutgers University. He was an HHMI Postdoctoral Fellow in the Section of Immunobiology at the Yale School of Medicine under the mentorship of Dr. Charles Janeway, Jr. Prior to moving to the Child Health Institute of New Jersey, he served on the faculty of the department of Immunology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, with appointments at the Cornell-Weill Graduate School of Medical Sciences and the Gerstner Sloan-Kettering Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences.
Dr. Sant’Angelo has been continuously funded by the NIH and other funding organizations for more than 20 years to study the development of the immune system and genes that control T cell responses to infections, cancer and other diseases. In his lab, Dr. Sant’Angelo is committed to training fellows, post-docs, graduate students and medical students to become the next generation of impactful scientists. He mentors faculty and is a formal mentor to junior faculty in the RWJMS departments of Pediatrics, Medicine and Pharmacology. His time at Yale, Sloan-Kettering and Rutgers allowed him to develop a comprehensive vision of graduate and medical student education, biomedical research and leadership that will serve the department of Microbiology and Immunology well.
This was an extensive and highly competitive search, and I am indebted to the search committee for its diligence and commitment, in particular to our co-chairs, Dr. Pamela Knapp and Dr. Mary Daly. I am also grateful to Dr. Huiping Zhou for her service as interim chair of the department, and to Dr. Robert Winn of the Massey Comprehensive Cancer Center, for his engagement and sponsorship of this recruitment effort. Please join me in congratulating Dr. Sant’Angelo and in welcoming him to our School of Medicine community later this summer.
Sincerely,
Arturo P. Saavedra, M.D., Ph.D.
Dean, VCU School of Medicine
Executive Vice President for Medical Affairs, VCU Health System
