Deborah Dean, MD, MPH, Executive Director of CGHI, is a Senior Scientist at Children's Hospital Oakland Research Insitute (CHORI) and a faculty member at University of California San Francisco/Berkeley who has been leading the field of Chlamydia trachomatis research both nationally and internationally for decades. Currently serving as a member of the Global Alliance to Eliminate Blinding Trachoma at the World Health Organization (WHO) and prior research coordinator for the WHO and International Trachoma Initiative for the prevention of blinding trachoma in Vietnam, Dr. Dean has been receiving National Institute of Health (NIH) awards to study C. trachomatis in a variety of different geographical regions since 1990, in addition to WHO research funding. Dr. Dean currently has 8 different active grants, including an NIH/Fogarty International Center award and a Thrasher Foundation award.
Dr. Dean's research has involved international research and outreach in a variety of different countries. In Vietnam, Dr. Dean has ongoing research collaborations with the Vietnamese National Institutes of Ophthalmology, the Vietnamese National Institute of Nutrition in Hanoi, and the Ho Chi Minh City Lung Hospital and District Medical Center and Ho Chi Minh City Dermatovenereal Disease Hospital. Dr. Dean also has ongoing collaborations with the Universidad Central del Ecuador, Pontificia Universidad Catolica Del Ecuador in Quito, Ecuador, and the Seva Foundation in Nepal, as well as with other international organizations in India, England, France and the Netherlands.
Dr. Dean's contributions to Chlamydia translational research include the discovery that the organism undergoes recombination with other chlamydial strains and species, a groundbreaking finding that has implications for our knowledge of how Chlamydia cause disease, pioneering genetic typing of C. trachomatis, identification of multiple species of Chlamydia that are implicated in blinding trachoma, and the creation of the Chlamydia Sequence Database, an interactive, user-friendly relational database for chlamydial genes and genomes.
Dr. Dean received her undergraduate degree from the University of California at Berkeley as well as an MPH in Public Health (Epidemiology) from UCB. She completed her MD at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, an Internal Medicine internship and residency at the University of California at San Francisco, a clinical fellowship in Infectious Diseases and a postdoctoral fellowship in Microbial Pathogenesis at Stanford University.
