Mark E. Peeples
Nationwide Children's Hospital/The Ohio State University
For distinguished, outstanding scientific research achievement, particularly with respiratory syncytial virus infections in children, and a record of teaching excellence and tireless work on behalf of Sigma Xi
Quote
"Being a member of Sigma Xi constantly reminds me of the breadth of scientific endeavors and their importance for improving life for all people and for the planet we inhabit, but also my obligation to communicate the excitement of science to those who aren’t lucky enough to be scientists themselves."
Biography
Mark E. Peeples, PhD, is a principal investigator in the Center for Vaccines and Immunity in the Abigail Wexner Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and professor in the Department of Pediatrics of The Ohio State University College of Medicine in Columbus, Ohio, where he has been for the past 16 years. Before that, he was a faculty member at Rush University in Chicago, Illinois.
He served as a Board member, treasurer, secretary and president of his Sigma Xi Chapter at both institutions, and as president of Sigma Xi in 2015–2016, as a member of the Sigma Xi executive, finance and nominations committees and as the head of the Members and Chapters Task Force for the past three years. He was elected a AAAS Fellow in 2016 and a STEM Exemplar of the Ohio Academy of Science in 2017.
His research on respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), the most frequent cause of hospitalization of children, mostly focuses on understanding the attachment and fusion glycoproteins of the virus. He has published over 100 research papers and his work has been funded nearly continuously for the past 35 years by NIH and pharma. He also holds five patents and has five more pending. Over the past five years he has been collaborating with five other investigators to use their new insights into the functions of RSV proteins and the clinical disease caused by RSV to develop a live attenuated vaccine that will protect young children from RSV disease.
Most recently he and his collaborators have turned their attention to another important RNA virus that infects the respiratory tract, SARS-CoV-2. They are using what they have learned from RSV to generate highly immunogenic vaccine candidates that will induce long term immunological memory.
He has trained 20 graduate students as virologists, epithelial cell biologists, and infectious disease physician/scientists and 22 PhD and MD postdoctoral fellows.