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Dr. De Groot earned degrees from Smith College (BA, 1978) and the Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago (MD, 1983). She was trained in internal medicine at Tufts New England Medical Center (1986), and then went on to complete additional training in immunoinformatics and vaccine research under Jay Berzofsky at the National Institutes of Health (1989). Following her fellowship at the NIH, she returned to Tufts NEMC for clinical training in infectious disease (1991). She became board certified in Internal Medicine in 1986 and in Infectious Disease in 1992. De Groot obtained her first (K08) NIH grant in 1990. In 1992, she joined the faculty of the Brown University Medical School, where she opened the TB/HIV Research Laboratory. De Groot licensed the EpiMatrix vaccine design technology from her laboratory at Brown and established EpiVax, a bioinformatics and vaccine design company in 1998. Dr. De Groot currently devotes 33% of her effort to Brown as Associate Professor of Community Health and Medicine and Director of the TB/HIV Research laboratory, and 67% of her effort to EpiVax, where she directs the company's business strategy, marketing and scientific efforts. She also teaches vaccinology to undergraduate students at Brown University and the University of Rhode Island, and also provides clinical care to patients at the Rhode Island TB clinic. She is founder and Co-Chief editor of Infectious Diseases in Corrections report (an on-line electronic journal, established 1998) and founder and Scientific Director of the GAIA Vaccine Foundation (501c3, 2002). De Groot has received uninterrupted federal funding for her research activities through multiple NIH (K08, R21, R01, SBIR) and foundation grants since 1989. She was the recipient of a National Foundation for Infectious Diseases-Eli Lilly Award, two Rhode Island Foundation awards and a Commercial Innovation Award (from the Rhode Island Center for Cellular Medicine). More recently, she was recognized as one of the "Best and the Brightest" in Science and Technology by Esquire Magazine (2003) for her work on the GAIA HIV vaccine. She has published more than 60 articles and chapters describing the development of epitope-driven vaccines and the application of immunoinformatics tools. In addition to her active research on vaccines for HIV, TB, Tularemia, Smallpox and EBV, she is a pioneer in the field of deimmunizing protein therapeutics. | 