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Dr. Joseph Vinetz is a professor of medicine and tropical disease specialist at UC San Diego School of Medicine. Dr. Vinetz graduated from Yale University and received his medical degree from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) in 1991. He completed a residency in internal medicine and a fellowship in infectious diseases at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, during which time he was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Physician Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Institutes of Health. Prior to joining the University of California San Diego faculty in 2003, he was an infectious diseases specialist and researcher at the University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston and of the World Health Organization’s Collaborating Center for Tropical Diseases at Galveston. His research focuses on tropical infectious diseases. His laboratory takes a comprehensive approach from laboratory bench to bedside, encompassing mechanistic molecular biology, biochemistry, immunology and cell biology approaches to the translational research of malaria, leptospirosis and brucellosis.
A key component of Dr. Vinetz’ research program is field work in Peru, both in the capital city of Lima and the Amazon city of Iquitos, where he maintains state-of-the-art laboratories. He maintains close ties to his Peruvian collaborators through formal appointments at the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia (considered by many to be among the leading medical universities in Latin America) and the non-governmental organization AB PRISMA in Lima. Dr. Vinetz is deeply committed to building research capacity building in Peru. With his Peruvian partners, he has research access to the whole of Peru from the coast to the Andes to the jungle. He actively collaborates with the Peruvian Ministry of Health, National Institute of Health and the Interior Ministry (INRENA). Collaboration with INRENA focuses on analysis of zoonotic diseases of wild animals of the Peruvian Amazon. These relationships allow for export of samples to the U.S. for analysis for which joint credit and ownership is shared among U.S. and Peruvian investigators.
Dr. Vinetz is program director of a training program, “Endemic Infectious Diseases of the Peruvian Amazon,” supported by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, in partnership with the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, Lima, Peru. His research has been supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the World Health Organization, and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.