This profile is based on one written by Harold Amos, PhD, the program's original director, as part of his work for the program's 15th anniversary activities in 1998. The featured scholar was selected by the NPO as representative of the success of the program across different years, specialties, locations and with scholars of diverse backgrounds.

Stanford University School of Medicine (Stanford, Calif.)
$118,501; January 1986 to December 1987
ID# 010785

$120,000; January 1988 to March 1988
ID# 012936

$133,479; August 1990 to May 1992
ID# 017190

Fellowship Research Topic
Characterization of Enteropathogenic E. Coli Adhesion and Its Receptor on Epithelial Cells

Position as of February 2008

• Professor of Epidemiology & Infectious Diseases, School of Public Health, Division of Public Health Biology and Epidemiology, University of California, Berkeley
• Advisory Board, John E. Fogarty International Center for Advanced Study in the Health Sciences, Berkeley, Calif.

Profile
Lee W. Riley, MD, was born and raised in Yokohama and Tokyo, Japan, and moved with his family to Bangkok during his secondary school years. After high school in Bangkok, he attended Stanford University as an undergraduate, earning a BA in philosophy with distinction.

Medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, was followed by an internship and residency in internal medicine at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center. Next, Riley joined the Epidemic Intelligence Service of the Enteric Diseases Branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta. During his three years at the CDC, he had an opportunity to investigate the first outbreak of hemorrhagic colitis that led to the discovery of E. coli 0157:H7, now considered a major emerging pathogen in the United States. He spent the following three years as an infectious diseases fellow in medical microbiology at Stanford.

Riley began his MMFDP fellowship at Stanford in 1986. In 1988, Riley interrupted his MMFDP fellowship when the CDC asked him to participate in a project with the World Health Organization in India, where he served as Laboratory Project Manager with the India Biomedical Support Project. He returned to the United States in 1990 to join the faculty at Cornell University Medical College as assistant professor of medicine in the Division of International Medicine and Infectious Diseases. His MMFDP fellowship was reactivated, and he continued his laboratory research at Cornell. In 1994, he became a tenured associate professor of medicine, and in 1996, he left Cornell to become a professor of infectious diseases and epidemiology in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley.

At Berkeley, Riley teaches two courses he developed called Molecular Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases and Current Topics in Vaccinology. He spends at least one month each year on field projects in Brazil. He is on the advisory board of the John E. Fogarty International Program on Emerging Infectious Disease Research and Training at Berkeley, where he and his colleagues train investigators from Brazil as well as Central American countries in laboratory-based field epidemiology. In addition to his teaching and training programs, he directs a research laboratory dealing with bacterial pathogenesis studies and molecular epidemiology projects that are focused on tuberculosis, salmonellosis, leptospirosis, and urinary tract infections. These projects are supported by the National Institutes of Health and local funding agencies. Riley is a founding editor of the International Journal of Infectious Diseases and a section editor of Tubercle and Lung Disease.

In 1999, Riley was appointed to the National Advisory Committee of the MMFDP, one of four program alumni who serve in that capacity.