College/Institute: College of Medicine and Emerging Pathogens Institute
Department: Division of Mycobacteriology and the Southeastern Tuberculosis Center
Research interests: variability of infectiousness and transmission of tuberculosis (TB)
Kevin Fennelly, MD, MPH is Director of the Nontuberculous Mycobacterial Disease Program and Associate Professor of Medicine in the new Division of Mycobacteriology and the Southeastern Tuberculosis Center in the Department of Medicine and is a faculty member of the Emerging Pathogens Institute at the University of Florida. He is also a Senior Associate in Environmental and Occupational Health at the VA National Center for Occupational Health and Infection Control (COHIC). He was recruited in January 2010 from the New Jersey Medical School-UMDNJ in Newark, where he served as the Interim Director of the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine and a Principal Investigator in the Center for Emerging and Re-Emerging Pathogens. After a combined pulmonary and occupational-environmental medicine fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco, he joined the faculty at the National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver and was then recruited to UMDNJ in 2001. He has clinical expertise in managing multidrug-resistant tuberculosis and nontuberculous mycobacterial infections, and he has served as a consultant on TB Infection Control and preventing TB transmission in South Africa, Botswana, Russia, and Mexico.
His major research interests are the variability of infectiousness and transmission of tuberculosis (TB). He has a patent pending on a diagnostic device to collect infectious aerosols from patients with respiratory infections, and he has recently developed an improved method of microscopy for the diagnosis of TB. Laboratory-based research in progress includes studying the airborne survival of pathogens using a newly developed model of airborne dessication stress, use of viability stains for microscopy of mycobacteria, and quantitative microscopy of elastin fibers in sputum as a marker of lung destruction. His clinical studies outside the laboratory have been conducted not only in the U.S. but in Kampala, Uganda; Vitoria, Brazil; and Brisbane, Australia.
Contact information:
PO Box 100009
Gainesville, Fla. 32610-0009
Phone: (352) 352-273-7682
Email: Kevin.Fennelly@medicine.ufl.edu