Craig Roy, PhD, Waldemar Von Zedtwitz Professor of Microbial Pathogenesis and professor of immunobiology, has been appointed the new director of the Combined Program in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences (BBS), effective September 1, 2019, for a five-year term.
Roy brings to this position deep experience as a long-time leader in the Microbiology track of the BBS as the director of admissions and director of graduate studies, and as a member of the executive committees for both the Immunobiology and the Microbial Pathogenesis training grants. He is credited with having a collaborative and consensus-building leadership style that suits him well to take the BBS into its next phase of development and growth.
Roy came to Yale in 1998 and was a founding member of the Department of Microbial Pathogenesis, of which he now serves as vice chair. Roy earned his B.S. from Michigan State University in 1985 and his Ph.D. in Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford University in 1991 in the laboratory of Dr. Stanley Falkow. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Ralph Isberg in the Department of Molecular Microbiology at Tufts University School of Medicine in 1996, he was appointed as assistant professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology at Stony Brook University.
Research in the Roy laboratory focuses on the host-pathogen interface. Using multi-disciplinary approaches his laboratory targets the molecular and cellular events that enable microbial pathogens to evade host defense mechanisms. In particular, Roy studies how bacteria that replicate inside mammalian cells create specialized vacuoles that support pathogen replication. They have used Legionella pneumophila and Coxiella burnetii as model pathogens to study this process. The goals of this research are to determine the mechanism by which these bacterial effector proteins regulate phagosome maturation, modulate host immunity, and subvert eukaryotic cell functions.