W. Ian Lipkin, MD, Named to Board of Editors of American Society for Microbiology Journal

W. Ian Lipkin, MD, the John Snow Professor of Epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, professor of neurology and pathology at Columbia University Medical Center, and director of the Mailman School’s Center for Infection and Immunity (CII), has been named to the board of Editors of the American Society for Microbiology’s (ASM) journal, mBio. 

An expert in diagnostics, pathogen surveillance and discovery, Dr. Lipkin has been at the forefront of infectious disease research for more than two decades and will serve as the journal’s editor for research related to pathogen discovery.

Launched in Fall 2009, mBio is ASM’s first broad-scope, online-only, open access journal. Edited by scientists involved in active research, the journal offers rapid review and publication of research in microbiology and allied fields. Arturo Casadevall, MD, Leo and Julia Forchheimer professor and chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, serves as the publication’s editor-in-chief.

Dr. Lipkin’s contributions in the field of microbial pathogenesis and discovery include the first use of purely molecular methods to identify an infectious agent; implication of West Nile virus as the cause of the encephalitis in North America in 1999; invention of MassTag PCR and the first panmicrobial microarray; first use of deep sequencing in pathogen discovery; and discovery of more than 200 viruses including Borna disease virus, rhinovirus C, Dandenong virus, and LuJo virus. Dr. Lipkin also was responsible for establishing the largest prospective birth cohort devoted to investigating gene-environment-timing interactions and biomarker discovery in development and disease.

Over the course of his career, Dr. Lipkin has assisted the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology, U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. Department of Defense, and the World Health Organization (WHO) in outbreaks of respiratory disease, hemorrhagic fever, meningoencephalitis, and vaccine safety investigations. He served as an intermediary between the WHO and the Chinese government during the SARS outbreak of 2003, and co-directed SARS research efforts in China with now Minister of Health Chen Zhu. Dr. Lipkin is director of the Northeast Biodefense Center, a consortium of academic and governmental biomedical research institutions in the tri-state area engaged in biodefense research and the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre on Diagnostics, Surveillance and Immunotherapeutics for Emerging Infectious and Zoonotic Diseases.