Department of Microbiology

History Alive

Microbiology has a long and distinguished history at The University of Chicago. The Department of Microbiology evolved from the Departments of Pathology and Pathology & Bacteriology and included world renown scientists such as Howard Taylor Ricketts, William H. Taliaferro, Lowell T. Coggeshall, William Burrows and James Moulder. Howard Taylor Ricketts identified rickettsiae as the causative agents of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever and Typhus. William Taliaferro and Lowell Coggeshall, both members of the National Academy of Sciences, served as Chairmen of the Department and later Deans of the Division of Biological Sciences. Successive editions of Burrows' textbook in Medical Microbiology served the needs of medical schools for decades. Jim Moulder served as chairman of the Department of Microbiology and as a leader in chlamydial research. By 1984, the Department of Microbiology was dissolved as part of a re-structuring of the Biological Sciences Division at the University of Chicago. At this time, the Department of Microbiology could boast international leadership and world class faculty.

The Committee on Virology, chaired for almost four decades by Bernard Roizman, has trained graduate students in Virology since 1965 and awarded Ph.D. degrees in this discipline, a role that is currently continued by the Committee on Microbiology. Together, the two Committees served an important function in Microbiology graduate education at a time when the University of Chicago did not sustain a Department of Microbiology. After its resurrection by our current Dean Dr. James L. Madara on July 1, 2004, the new Department of Microbiology is gradually assuming all responsibility for education, research, faculty development and community activities in the fields of Microbiology at the University of Chicago.

More than 200 graduate students received a Ph.D. in Microbiology and/or Virology at the University of Chicago. We are very proud of our graduates, many of whom have achieved national recognition or even world fame. Our Department of Microbiology is reaching out to its graduates by publishing a quarterly newsletter, UofC MicroNews, which we send out by mail and publish on this website. We hope UofC MicroNews and this website will continue to fuel your interest in the well being of our Department and its graduates. To begin in developing our web based tool, we will now begin to list classes of graduate students who received their Ph.D. or M.D./Ph.D. degrees from our program together with their current affiliation (the address list will be used to send information by mail). We very much appreciate your efforts in working with our Administrative Office to establish this website and in keeping it up to date.