Arturo Casadevall

Arturo Casadevall is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Molecular Microbiology & Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and the Alfred and Jill Sommer Professor and Chair of the W. Harry Feinstone Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

He is an internationally recognized expert in infectious disease research, with a focus on fungal and bacterial pathogenesis and basic immunology of antibody structure-function.

He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.

Arturo Casadevall was born in Sancti Spíritus, Cuba in 1957.

He moved to Elmhurst, Queens, New York City in 1968 and became a U.S. citizen in 1976.

Prior to his career in medicine, Casadevall worked at McDonald's for 4 years and later as a bank teller.

Casadevall received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Chemistry from Queens College, City University of New York in 1979, and his M.S. and Ph.D in Biochemistry from New York University in 1983 and 1984.

He then received his M.D. from New York University in 1985.

Casadevall completed his internship and residency in internal medicine at the Bellevue Hospital Center, and a fellowship in infectious diseases at the Montefiore Medical Center of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

Under the guidance of Matthew D. Scharff, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship in cell biology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine from 1989 to 1991.

In 1992, he accepted an assistant professorship in medicine and microbiology & immunology at Albert Einstein.

In 2000, he became the director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Montefiore Medical Center and rose to the rank of full professor by 2001.

In 2001, Casadevall received the Samuel M. Rosen outstanding teacher award and in 2008 he was recognized the American Society for Microbiology with the William Hinton Award for “outstanding contributions toward fostering the research training of underrepresented minorities in microbiology.” ASM also notes that Casadevall was the first Hispanic Department Chair at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and has “provided exemplary training and mentoring to a significant number of minority scientists, and himself served as a role model of success.”

He has served as President of the Medical Mycology Society of America, Chair of American Society for Microbiology Division F, Chair of the American Society for Microbiology Career Development Committee, and Co-Chair of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Board of Scientific Counselors, and currently serves on the Scientific Council of the Pasteur Institute.

He is a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation, American College of Physicians and the Association of American Physicians, and was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Microbiology.

In 2002, he was named the Selma and Jacques Mitrani Professor in Biomedical Research.

He served as a member of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity from 2005 to 2014.

In 2006, he became the Chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology and was named the Leo and Julia Forchheimer Professor of Microbiology Immunology.

He is board-certified by the American Board of Internal Medicine in the subspecialty of infectious diseases until 2023.

Casadevall’s groundbreaking work in the field of infectious diseases has been recognized by many, including the National Institutes of Health, which presented him with a Merit Award in 2007.

He received several distinguished awards, including the Alumni Achievement Award in Basic Science from New York University, the Rhoda Benham Award of the Medical Mycological Society of the Americas, the Kass Lecture from the Infectious Diseases Society of America, and the ASM Founders Distinguished Service Award from the American Society for Microbiology.

Until July 2009, Dr. Casadevall served as an editor of the ASM journal Infection and Immunity and continues to serve on the editorial boards of the Journal of Infectious Diseases and the Journal of Experimental Medicine.

He is also the founding Editor in Chief of mBio, the first open access general journal of the American Society for Microbiology.

The Bloomberg Distinguished Professorship program was established in 2013 by a gift from Michael Bloomberg.

Casadevall holds appointments in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology and the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine’s Department of Infectious Diseases.

In 2014, he became an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and in 2017, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 2022, he was elected to National Academy of Sciences.

Bridging the fields of microbiology and immunology, Casadevall's research is focused on fungal and bacterial pathogenesis and basic immunology of antibody structure-function.

He has defined much of what is known about fungal pathogenesis and how fungi such as Cryptococcus neoformans evade the host immune response.

Fungal infections are particularly dangerous in immunocompromised individuals such as cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy, making this work highly significant.

With his collaborator Dr. Ekaterina (Kate) Dadachova, he pioneered the use of radioimmunotherapeutic strategies for the control of systemic fungal and other infections.

During the course of his studies, he noted that certain fungi were radioresistant and worked to develop novel therapeutic strategies for a variety of human diseases including melanoma and infectious diseases, such as tuberculosis.

He holds several active patents on these approaches.

Casadevall has a long record of outstanding scholarly and leadership contributions.

Casadevall was also a commissioner for the National Forensic Commission of the United States Department of Justice from 2015 to 2017.

In March 2015, Casadevall was named a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University for his accomplishments as an interdisciplinary researcher and excellence in teaching.

He also serves as the Alfred and Jill Sommer Professor and Chair of the W. Harry Feinstone Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at the Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2015.

Casadevall is passionate about improving the doctoral curriculum, stating that he wants to “develop a program of putting the 'Ph' [philosophy] back into 'PhD’ [...] Hopkins reformed medical education 100 years ago, and now we can experiment with creating better ways of training scientists.”

Casadevall is profiled in the last chapter of Range by David Epstein, a book arguing against specialization.

Epstein posits that Casadevall's early life experiences, including working odd jobs unrelated to medicine, contributed to his later success.