Journal of Infectious Disease and Pathology
Open Access

Biography

Erle S. Robertson, Ph.D., has over 30 years of experience in Molecular Biology and over 2 decades of experience specifically in the field of viral oncology with a focus on oncogenic viruses and gammaherpesviruses. He completed his post-doctoral training in Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at Harvard Medical School and an instructor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Division of Infectious Disease. He moved to the University of Michigan Medical School as an independent investigator in 1997. Dr. Robertson moved to Penn in 2002 and is the Director of the Tumor Virology Training Program at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and the Program Leader of the Tumor Virology program of the Abramson Comprehensive Cancer Center. He is also the director of the Cell Culture core of the UPenn GI Center for Molecular and Digestive Diseases. He has over 20 years of experience training undergraduate, graduate students and postdoctoral candidates in tissue culture and molecular biology techniques. He directs a lab with a focus on infectious agents and mechanisms of oncogenesis mediated by viral agents leading to development of cancer. He has broad expertise in viral oncology and investigates the role of tumor viruses and their regulation of tumor suppressors and metastatic suppressors by viral encoded antigens. He has developed reverse genetic strategies, and has been instrumental in developing strategies for identifying oncogenic viruses in a number of human cancers related to EBV and KSHV, and is currently investigating the mechanism of oncogenesis by these tumor viruses. Ongoing program efforts are based on development of a microbial signature patterns in major cancers with diagnostic potential. He is also working on developing preclinical datasets for therapeutic compounds with specificity for viral associated cancers with the potential for moving into a phase 1 trial. He has published seminal works in EBV and KSHV which demonstrates his experience of over 22 years of in the field of gammaherpesviruses. Most importantly, he has trained numerous post-doctoral fellows who have successfully moved to independent faculty positions throughout the world and is passionate about his contributions to the careers of junior investigators in the field of microbiology and cancer biology.

Research Interest

Reverse genetics, infection, inflammation and pro-metastatic activity of gamma herpes viruses.

Global Speakers in the subject

Global Experts in the subject