Contact: Sasha Steinberg

STARKVILLE, Miss.—Nearly 60 senior research scientists, postdoctoral fellows and undergraduate and graduate students from Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee institutions of higher learning are gathering Thursday-Friday [May 19-20] at Mississippi State for the 2016 Southeastern Pneumococcal Symposium.

Bringing together nearly one quarter of all of the major pneumococcal research laboratories in the U.S., this year’s two-day scientific conference is designed to facilitate discussion and foster new collaborations between labs in an effort to increase funding opportunities for the institutions involved.

Topics of discussion will include host-pathogen interactions, epidemiology, antimicrobial therapies, bacterial physiology, vaccine research and polymicrobial infections.

Occurring in the respiratory tract, pneumococcus is a spherical bacterium that is the most common cause of bacterial pneumonia and also is associated with pericarditis, meningitis and other infectious diseases.

Serving as keynote speaker for this year’s symposium is David Briles. A world-renowned Streptococcus pneumoniae biology and pathogenesis researcher, he also is the symposium’s founder.

In addition to the American Society for Microbiology, support for this year’s event is provided by the university’s Institute for Genomics, Biotechnology and Biocomputing, College of Arts and Sciences and its Department of Biological Sciences, and the College of Veterinary Medicine and its Center of Biomedical Research Excellence.

For more information on the MSU-hosted 2016 Southeastern Pneumococcal Symposium, contact biological sciences assistant professor Justin Thornton at 662-325-8020 or thornton@biology.msstate.edu.

MSU is Mississippi’s leading university, available online at www.msstate.edu.