Prof. George Chaconas University of Calgary, Canada

George Chaconas obtained his Ph.D. in the Division of Medical Biochemistry at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada and did postdoctoral work Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. He subsequently took a faculty position in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Western Ontario. His laboratory focused on the molecular mechanism of DNA transposition or “how jumping genes jump”. In 1999-2000, with the help of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Dr. Chaconas’ research interests took a turn through a sabbatical at the NIH Rocky Mountain Labs in Montana where he began working on the Lyme disease pathogen Borrelia burgdorferi. In 2002 he took a position in the Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology and the Department of Microbiology, Immunology & Infectious Diseases at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada where he is currently Professor in the Snyder Institute for Chronic Diseases. He held the Canada Research Chair in the Molecular Biology of Lyme Borreliosis from 2003-2017. Work in his laboratory is focused on Borrelia burgdorferi, the spirochete causing Lyme disease. His research includes studies on a variety of processes in this organism including, telomere resolution, antigenic variation, genome dynamics, regulation of global gene expression, intravital microscopy to study B. burgdorferi dissemination in a living host and metabolomics approaches for Lyme disease diagnosis.