Maria J. C. Gomes-Solecki was born in Madeira, Portugal in 1967. Her area of research is infectious diseases, particularly immunopathogenesis of microbial antigens, development of vaccines and immunodiagnostics. Currently, she holds a position at New York Medical College as a Research Assistant Professor of Microbiology and Immunology. In addition, she holds a position in the private sector as Director of Research of Biopeptides, Corp., a biotech company in which she is a partner.

She graduated in 1992 with a Degree in Veterinary Medicine from the Faculdade de Medicina Veterinária of Universidade Técnica de Lisboa, Portugal; between 1992 and 1995 she held a fellowship in Clinical and Laboratory Immunology, working in INETI, Portugal. In the fall of 1995, she went to the USA and took a Post-Doc position at Stony Brook University, New York.

While doing a short-term fellowship at the University of Nice in France, she met Dr. Kenneth Marcu, an american professor who challenged her to join his lab in the United States, to try to do some “hard core science”. She went as a Research Scholar and her work was entirely supported by Prof. Marcu research funding. She decided to take this challenge because she wanted to advance her scientific career and possibly start a biotech company in research and development of biomolecules for design of vaccines and immunodiagnostics and because she has a fervent belief that one needs to take chances to advance and succeed in life.

She says that “with a lot of self-taught study and working at least 12h/day”, she has written six papers as first author and one as last author, for a total of seven papers. In addition, she has two more papers submitted as first author. She has been granted two patents (US and International) and has three additional patent applications submitted.

She has changed research institutions three times, first from INETI in Portugal to Stony Brook University in New York, and after that to the medical school at New York Medical College were she currently teaches and does her research. She is an independent researcher and has one project funded as Principal Investigator from NIH-NIAID (National Institute of Health, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases), which was funded for about one million dollars for three years (2004-2007).

Her team is composed of five members, two with a Licenciatura in Biotechnology (Vera Neves and Abbner Garcia), one with a Masters Degree in Microbiology (Miguel Aroso) and one veterinarian Post-Doc (Luciana Richer, DVM). In this coming fall, she will hire a PhD as a Post-Doc (Larissa Ivanova, PhD) and she will welcome to her lab another PhD Post-Doc that will bring her own fellowship from Spain (Beatriz del Rio Lagar, PhD). Besides that, she works in stringent collaboration with Dr. Dustin Brisson an Assistant Professor at University of Pennsyvania and a colleague, partner and friend, Dr. Raymond Dattwyler who is a medical doctor and Professor at New York Medical College.

Her laboratory at the New York Medical College is specialized in research and development of new technologies to design vaccines and immunodiagnostic systems against several microbial diseases. In the near future, she intends to write and compete for additional research funding through NIH (National Institute of Health, USA) and CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, USA) to make sure she can keep her lab running and growing.

Because she is also a partner at Biopeptides, Corp she says “we intend to develop our projects transferred from our laboratory at the university (NYMC), up to the point that they can be sold to large companies that would be interested in production and marketing”.

The main reason why Maria Gomes-Solecki is known amongst the scientific community is the development of an oral vaccine against Borrelia burgdorferi to be administered to wildlife, with the ultimate goal of drastically reducing the incidence of human Lyme disease.

She has never been invited to return to Portugal.

AWARDS

NIH-NIAID grant (US funding agency).

maria_gomes-solecki at nymc.edu