Yuri Persidsky, M.D., Ph.D., has been named chair of pathology and laboratory medicine at the Temple University School of Medicine and Temple University Hospital.

He joins Temple from the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) where he was professor and attending pathologist in the Department of Pathology and Microbiology and the Department of Pharmacology and Experimental Neuroscience.

After receiving his medical degree from the Kiev State Medical Institute and his Ph.D. in pathology at the Kiev Research Institute of Urology and Nephrology, both in Ukraine, Persidsky was appointed assistant professor of pathology at the Research Institutes of the Ukrainian Ministry of Health in Kiev.

Later, Persidsky joined the Research Institutes of Epidemiology and Infectious Diseases of the Ukrainian Ministry of Health, becoming an associate professor and head of the pathology laboratory. He then moved to Strasbourg, France, to complete a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale.

At UNMC, Persidsky was program chief and then deputy director of the Center for Neurovirology and Neurodegenerative Disorders as well as professor of pathology and microbiology and professor of pharmacology and experimental neuroscience.

Persidsky’s research interests include neuroinflammation, the blood-brain barrier and HIV-1 brain infection, also known as NeuroAIDS. He is especially recognized for his development and use of a “humanized” rodent model of NeuroAIDS in which he studies the pathogenesis of neuroinflammatory responses to HIV in the brain, the mechanisms of blood-brain barrier impairment and the role of co-morbidity factors (like alcohol and drug abuse) in HIV-associated neurodegeneration.

He is currently an investigator for several National Institutes of Health grants that support these research interests. He is also a regular member of the Study Section “NeuroAIDS and End Organ Diseases” and numerous special emphasis panels at the NIH.

Currently president-elect of the Society for NeuroImmune Pharmacology, Persidsky is also a member of numerous professional and scientific societies including the College of American Pathologists, the American Society of Clinical Pathologists, the American Society of Virology, the American Society for Investigative Pathology, the American Society of Neuroscience, the International Society of Neuroimmunology, the International Society of Neurovirology, the Society for NeuroImmune Pharmacology and the American Society of Neurochemistry.

He is the author of more than 120 scholarly peer-reviewed publications and also serves as an ad-hoc reviewer for many journals. A member of several editorial boards including the Journal of Neuroimmune Pharmacology, the Journal of NeuroVirology and the Journal of Cytochemistry and Histochemistry, Persidsky also served as a co-editor of a special issue of Neurotoxity Research.

As a regularly invited speaker and organizer of scientific meetings and conferences worldwide, Persidsky presented and chaired sessions at the International Conference on Opportunistic Pathogens in AIDS in New Delhi and the 14th Society on NeuroImmune Pharmacology in Charleston, S.C., earlier this year. In 2007, he spoke at the Neuroscience Colloquium in Berlin and on “Signal transduction in the Blood-Brain Barriers” in Potsdam, Germany.

—Written by Nan Myers for Temple University’s Health Sciences Center.