Boston University National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories tour
- Time:
- Monday, October 12th, 2:00 pm to 4:30 pm
- Location:
- Board bus at Kresge Lobby at 2:00 pm for the 15-minute ride to BU's medical campus.
Located on BU’s Medical Campus, Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL) contains Biosafety Level 3 and 4 labs that are among the most advanced in the world. NEIDL’s BSL-3 lab has been active since 2014, and the BSL-4 lab is expected to open — and begin research on Ebola and Marburg viruses — by the fall of 2015.
Participants will meet NEIDL director Ronald Corley and staff researchers and take limited tours of the facility. For safety and security reasons, the public is not allowed inside BSL-3 and BSL-4 labs, but participants will be able to view researchers at work through windows and chat with them via the NEIDL’s voice communications system — or, more informally, in a separate meeting room.
Researchers available on site may include:
- Elke Muhlberger, one of the world’s leading Ebola and Marburg virus researchers
- Paul Duprex, an expert on measles and mumps, as well as zoonosis (diseases that jump from animals to humans)
- John Connor, who applies cutting edge optics to virus detection
- Nahid Bhadelia, a physician and epidemiologist at Boston Medical Center who is the NEIDL’s director of infection control, and made three trips to West Africa during the Ebola outbreak
- Gustavo Mostoslavsky, from BU’s Center for Regenerative Medicine, who studies what happens when dangerous zoonotic viruses jump from bats to humans.
NEIDL is a secure facility. For clearance purposes, all meeting participants who register for this tour will be contacted by ScienceWriters2015 organizers and asked to supply a full name and date of birth. Non-U.S. citizens will be required to supply passport and visa numbers. Phones and cameras are not allowed inside the facility.
A Boston University bus will depart from Kresge promptly at 2:00 pm for the 15-minute ride to BU's medical campus. Refreshments will be provided on site.
