Meet the Directors

Steffanie Strathdee, PhD

Co-Director of the Center for Innovative Phage Applications and Therapeutics
Associate Dean of Global Health Sciences
Harold Simon Distinguished Professor
Department of Medicine

Steffanie A. Strathdee is Associate Dean of Global Health Sciences and Harold Simon Distinguished Professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine. She co-directs UCSD's center for Innovative Phage Applications and Therapeutics (IPATH), and the International Core of UCSD's Center for AIDS Research. An infectious disease epidemiologist, she has spent the last two decades focusing on prevention of infectious diseases in marginalized populations in developing countries and has published over 700 peer-reviewed publications. In 2019, she co-authored a memoir, The Perfect Predator: A Scientist's Race to Save Her Husband from a Deadly Superbug, that relays IPATH's first experience with phage therapy. In 2018, TIME magazine named her as one of 50 most influential people in health care.

Robert Schooley, MD

Co-Director of the Center for Innovative Phage Applications & Therapeutics
Distinguished Professor of Medicine
Department of Medicine

Dr. Schooley is a Distinguished Professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health at the University of California San Diego. He completed medical school and an internal medicine residency at Johns Hopkins and infectious disease fellowships at the NIH and Massachusetts General Hospital. He joined the faculty of Harvard Medical School in 1981. His research efforts are directed at the pathogenesis and therapy of RNA virus infections. He has been heavily involved in the development of antiviral chemotherapy directed at HIV, HCV and the herpesgroup viruses as well as in research, teaching and infrastructure building efforts in sub-Saharan Africa. Over the past several years, he has become interested in the use of viruses as therapeutic agents - namely the use of bacteriophages to treat multidrug resistant bacterial infections.

He became Head of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of Colorado in 1990. He led the NIH's AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG) from 1995 until 2002 during which time the ACTG performed many of the seminal studies that defined modern antiretroviral chemotherapy. He then led the ACTG in its expansion from a domestic US research operation into one with a global reach. He was recruited to the University of California San Diego and served as Head of UCSD's Infectious Diseases Division until 2017. His laboratory is engaged in the discovery of orally bioavailable anti-coronavirus compounds. He is deeply engaged in the University of California's response to the SARS CoV-2 outbreak.