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Charles A. Scanga, Ph.D.
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Research Assistant Professor
9014 BST3
3051 Fifth Avenue
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213
Phone: (412) 624-4480
Fax: (412) 624-4440
E-mail: scangaca@pitt.edu
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Biography
Dr. Charles Scanga is a Pittsburgh native who grew up on a farm in Tarentum. He got his B.S. in Biology from Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, PA in 1987 and then earned a Masters Degree in Clinical Immunology at Hahnemann University in Philadelphia. He spent the next 5 years working on a collaborative project between the National Zoo (Washington DC) and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (Bethesda, MD) in which he helped identify the etiologic agent of a newly emerging arenaviral disease that was killing captive marmosets and tamarins around the world. In 1995, he decided to pursue a Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh and joined Dr. JoAnne Flynn’s laboratory as part of the Microbiology and Molecular Virology program in the Department of Molecular Genetics and Biochemistry. He studied the immunology of latent tuberculosis and received his Ph.D. in 2000. Dr. Scanga did a post-doctoral fellowship at the National Institutes of Health in Alan Sher’s lab, studying the role of Toll-like receptors in T. gondii as well as M. tuberculosis infections and used an HIV transgenic mouse line to investigate how M. tuberculosis co-infection drives HIV gene expression. In 2006, Dr. Scanga joined the Aeras Global TB Vaccine Foundation (Rockville, MD), where he was a senior scientist responsible for planning and managing preclinical studies of vaccine candidates in non-human primates as well as other animal models. In November 2009, he joined the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Vaccine Research as a Research Assistant Professor and serves as the project director for a large grant awarded to Dr. Flynn by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This project involves several research groups across the world and uses imaging techniques such as CT/PET to follow in vivo the response of TB to antibiotic regimens in non-human primates with the ultimate goal to help design more effective chemotherapeutic regimens. Dr Scanga has over 30 publications, serves on the Editorial Board of Infection and Immunity, and is a reviewer for several other journals. He is married to Carol and has three children (Emily, Alex, and Patrick) as well as one black lab (Kia’Ora).
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