Peter Hotez

Peter J. Hotez is a scientist, pediatrician, and advocate in the fields of global health, vaccinology, and neglected tropical disease control. He serves as founding dean and chief of the Baylor College of Medicine National School of Tropical Medicine in the Department of pediatrics and holds the Texas Children's Hospital Endowed Chair in Tropical Pediatrics.
Hotez is President of the Sabin Vaccine Institute, headquartered in Washington, DC, and leads the Sabin Vaccine Institute and Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development. He is also University Professor at Baylor University and is the Fellow in Disease and Poverty at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University.

As President of the Sabin Vaccine Institute and Director of its product development partnership (PDP) Hotez leads an international team of scientists working to develop vaccines to combat hookworm infection, schistosomiasis, and other infectious and neglected diseases, including Chagas disease, leishmaniasis, and SARS.

Together with Philip K. Russell, Hotez founded the Human Hookworm Vaccine Initiative (HHVI) in 1999, the first initiative of the Sabin Vaccine Institute PDP. Hotez writes extensively about vaccine diplomacy, i.e., the opportunity of using vaccines as instruments of foreign policy and to promote global peace, especially among poor countries seeking nuclear weapons technology.

NTD policy and advocacy

Hotez is a global health advocate and policymaker in the area of neglected tropical diseases, with an emphasis on providing impoverished populations access to essential and existing medicines for neglected tropical diseases. His activities helped to promote the establishment of the Global Network for NTDs, which Hotez co-founded in 2006 Global Network for Neglected Tropical Diseases (“Global Network”). The Global Network, launched at the Clinton Global Initiative and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, highlights the health and educational effects of neglected tropical diseases and advocates for their control and elimination. As a result of these activities, and the effort of public-private partnerships and NGOs, today more than 250 million people are receiving essential medicines for neglected tropical diseases.

Hotez is the founding Editor-In-Chief of the Public Library of Science (PLoS) Neglected Tropical Diseases, an online open access medical journal focused exclusively on neglected tropical diseases.

His papers in PLOS NTDs on the Geopolitics of NTDs provide a new framework for incorporating NTDs into U.S. foreign policy and helped to launch the concept known as vaccine diplomacy. Hotez also studies NTDs among the poor living in the U.S. and other developed countries. His 2008 PLOS NTDs paper on “Neglected infections in the United States of America” highlighted the hidden burden of NTDs in the American South while his 2012 op-ed piece in the New York Times, "Tropical Diseases: The New Plague of Poverty", emphasized the especially high burden of NTDs among the poor in Texas. His work is leading to a new global health framework based on extreme poverty regardless of whether it occurs in low- and middle-income countries or industrialized nations. Many of these concepts are articulated in his book “Forgotten People, Forgotten Diseases” ASM Press.

In December 2014 Hotez was named U.S. Science Envoy by the White House and State Department. In this role he will focus on vaccine science diplomacy and joint vaccine development with countries in the Middle East and North Africa.

Hotez introduced the concept of Blue Marble Health to raise awareness of neglected tropical diseases and their disproportionate impact on the extreme poor living among the wealthiest G20 (Group of 20) countries, including 4–5 million people in the United States living on less than $2 a day. In subsequent policy papers, Hotez provided evidence that with some important exceptions most of the world's NTDs paradoxically affect populations living in G20 countries, especially in areas of concentrated poverty such as northern India, southern Mexico, western China, northeastern Brazil, and even the southern United States. This finding is in contrast to traditional global health views of developed vs. developing countries.

Hotez' work among people with NTDs in Texas helped lead to the establishment of the National School of Tropical Medicine (NSTM) at Baylor College of Medicine (BCM). It is the first school in the United States solely committed to addressing the world's most pressing tropical disease issues.

Hotez was born in Hartford, Connecticut. He received a BA in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry magna cum laude (Phi Beta Kappa) from Yale University in 1980, a PhD from Rockefeller University in 1986, and a Doctorate in Medicine from Weill Cornell Medical College in 1987. His doctoral dissertation and postdoctoral training were in the area of hookworm molecular pathogenesis and vaccine development.

He obtained pediatric residency training at the Massachusetts General Hospital, and postdoctoral training in clinical pediatric infectious diseases and molecular parasitology at Yale University School of Medicine. Prior to becoming founding Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine, Dr. Hotez was Professor and Chair of the Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Tropical Medicine at George Washington University previously and prior to that associate professor at Yale University School of Medicine.

Hotez has been awarded:

• 2011 - The Abraham Horwitz Award from the Pan American Health and Education Foundation and Pan American Health Organization for excellence in leadership in Inter-American public health guidelines
• 2006 - The Leverhulme Medal from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine.
• 2003 - The Bailey K. Ashford Medal from the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene for distinguished work in tropical medicine.
• 1999 - The Ward Medal from the American Society of Parasitologists for outstanding contributions to the field of parasitology.

In 2008, he was elected to membership in the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies. He is an ambassador of the Paul G. Rogers Society for Global Health Research, a Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics (FAAP), a member of the World Health Organization Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee for WHO TDR (Special Programme on Tropical Diseases Research), and in 2011, Hotez was appointed as a member of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Council of Councils. He is a member of the inaugural class of Fellows of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

Hotez is the author of more than 330 scientific and technical papers on NTDs. In addition he is the author of Forgotten People, Forgotten Diseases: The Neglected Tropical Diseases and Their Impact on Global Health and Development, co-author of Parasitic Diseases, 5th Edition, a co-editor of Krugman's Infectious Diseases of Children, 11th Edition, and co-editor of Manson's Tropical Diseases, 23rd Edition and Feigin and Cherry's Textbook of Pediatric Infectious Diseases, 7th Edition. In addition, Hotez writes frequently for lay audiences, including papers in Scientific American and op-ed pieces in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Huffington Post. He has been interviewed on numerous national TV and news programs, such as CNN, NPR, Charlie Rose and PRI. He has also consulted for popular television shows that highlight tropical diseases, including House and Private Practice. He has also been interviewed for an article in Science & Diplomacy.

Selected scientific publications:

• Hotez PJ, Brooker S, Bethony JM, Bottazzi ME, Loukas A, Xiao S. Hookworm infection. NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE, 2004; 351: 799-807.
• Hotez PJ, Molyneux DH, Fenwick A, Kumaresan J, Sachs SE, Sachs JD, Savioli L. Control of neglected tropical diseases. NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE, 2007; 357: 1018-27.
• Hotez PJ. Neglected infections of poverty in the United States of America. PLOS NEGLECTED TROPICAL DISEASES, 2008; 2: e256.
• Hotez PJ, Fenwick A, Savioli L, Molyneux DH. Rescuing the “bottom billion” through neglected tropical disease control. THE LANCET, 2009; 373: 1570-4.
• Hotez PJ. A plan to defeat neglected tropical diseases. SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, 2010; 302: 90-6.
• Hotez PJ. America's most distressed areas and their neglected infections: the United States Gulf Coast and the District of Columbia. PLOS NEGLECTED TROPICAL DISEASES, 2011; 5: e843.
• Hotez PJ, Neeraj M, Rubinstein J, Sachs DJ. Integrating neglected tropical diseases into HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria control. NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE, 2011; 364: 2086-9.
• Pearson MS, Pickering DA, Tribolet L, McSorley HJ, Bethony JM, Dougall AM, Hotez PJ, Loukas A. Enhanced protective efficacy of chimeric forms of the schistosomiasis vaccine antigen Sm-TSP-2. PLOS NEGLECTED TROPICAL DISEASES, 2012; 6: 1564.
• Hotez PJ, Bottazzi ME, Dumonteil E, Kamhawi E, Valenzuela J, Ortega J, Ponce de Leon Rosales S, Betancourt Cravioto M, Tapia-Conyer R. Texas and Mexico: Sharing a Legacy of Poverty and Neglected Tropical Diseases. PLOS NEGLECTED TROPICAL DISEASES, 2012; 6: e1497.
• Hotez PJ, Dumonteil E, Woc-Colburn L, Serpa-Alvarez JA, Bezek S, Edwards MS, Hallmark CJ, Musselwhite LW, Flink BJ, Bottazzi ME. Chagas disease: the new HIV/AIDS of the Americas. PLOS NEGLECTED TROPICAL DISEASES, 2012; 6: e1498.
• Hotez PJ. American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene Presidential Address. The four horsemen of the apocalypse: tropical medicine in the fight against plague, death, famine, and war. AMERICAN JOURNAL OF TROPICAL MEDICINE AND HYGIENE, 2012; 87: 3-10.
• Goud GN, Deumic V, Gupta R, Brelsford J, Zhan B, Gillespie P, Rezende W, Plieskatt JI, Hotez PJ, Bottazzi ME. Expression, purification, and molecular analysis of the Necator americanus glutathione S-transferase (Na-GST-1): a production process developed for a lead candidate recombinant hookworm vaccine antigen. PROTEIN EXPRESSION AND PURIFICATION, 2012; 83: 145-51.
• Barry MA, Bezek S, Serpa-Alvarez J, Hotez PJ, Woc-Colburn L. Neglected infections of poverty in Texas and the United States: management and treatment options. CLINICAL PHARMACOLOGY AND THERAPEUTICS, 2012; 92: 170-81.
• Dumonteil E, Bottazzi ME, Zhan B, Heffernan MJ, Jones K, Valenzuela J, Kamhawi S, Ortega J, Ponce de Leon Rosales S, Lee BY, Bacon KM, Fleischer B, Slingsby BT, Betancourt Cravioto M, Tapia-Conyer R, Hotez PJ. Accelerating the development of a therapeutic vaccine for human Chagas disease: Rationale and prospects. EXPERT REVIEW OF VACCINES, 2012; 11: 1043-55.
• Andrus J, Bottazzi ME, Chow J, Goraleski KA, Fisher-Hoch S, Lambuth JK, Lee BY, Margolis H, McCormick J, Melby P, Murray KO, Rico-Hesse R, Valenzuela JG, Hotez PJ. Ears of the armadillo: global health research and neglected diseases in Texas. PLOS NEGLECTED TROPICAL DISEASES 2013; 7: e2021.
• Cheng BW, Curti E, Rezende WC, Kwityn C, Zhan B, Gillespie P; Plieskatt J, Joshi SB, Volkin DB, Hotez PJ, Middaugh CR, Bottazzi ME. Biophysical and formulation studies of the Schistosoma mansoni TSP-2 extracellular domain recombinant protein, a lead vaccine candidate antigen for intestinal schistosomiasis. HUMAN VACCINES AND IMMUNOTHERAPEUTICS 2013; 9: 2351-60.
• Barry MA, Weatherhead JE, Hotez PJ, Woc-Colburn L. Childhood Parasitic Infections Endemic to the United States. PEDIATRIC CLINICS OF NORTH AMERICA 2013; 60: 471-85.
• Hotez PJ, Dumonteil E, Betancourt Cravioto M, Bottazzi ME, Tapia Conyer R, Meymandi S, Karunakara U, Ribeiro I, Cohen RM, Pecoul B. An unfolding tragedy of Chagas disease in North America. PLOS NEGLECTED TROPICAL DISEASES 7:e2300.
• Hotez PJ. NTDs V.2.0: “Blue Marble Health”—Neglected Tropical Disease Control and Elimination in a Shifting Health Policy Landscape. PLOS NEGLECTED TROPICAL DISEASES 7: e2570.
• Curti E, Seid CA, Hudspeth E, Center L, Rezende W, Pollet J, Kwityn C, Hammond M, Matsunami RK, Engler DA, Hotez PJ, Bottazzi M. Optimization and revision of the production process of the Necator americanus glutathione S-transferase 1 (Na-GST-1), the lead hookworm vaccine recombinant protein candidate. HUMAN VACCINE AND IMMUNOTHERAPEUTICS 2014; 10: 1914-25.
• Hotez PJ. Neglected parasitic infections and poverty in the United States. PLOS NEGLECTED TROPICAL DISEASES 2014; 8: e3012.
• Garcia MN, Murray KO, Hotez PJ, Rossmann SN, Gorchakov R, Ontiveros A, Woc-Colburn L, Bottazzi ME, Rhodes CE, Ballantyne CM, Aguilar D. Development of Chagas cardiac manifestations among Texas blood donors. AMERICAN JOURNAL OF CARDIOLOGY 2015; 115: 113-117.
• Hotez PJ, Bottazzi ME, Klei T, Abraham D. The onchocerciasis vaccine for Africa (TOVA) project. PLOS NEGLECTED TROPICAL DISEASES 9: 0003422.

Selected op-eds:

• Hotez PJ. In India’s forgotten diseases, an opportunity. THE HINDU, March 8, 2011.
• Hotez PJ. School takes on ancient scourges. HOUSTON CHRONICLE, August 21, 2011.
• Hotez P. A new tropical medicine clinic for ‘third world America’. HUFFINGTON POST, October 27, 2011.
• Hotez P. Engaging Iran through vaccine diplomacy. MILLER-McCUNE, November 30, 2011.
• Hotez P, Kazura J. A military cutback we can’t afford: fighting tropical diseases. THE ATLANTIC, January 19, 2012.
• Hotez P. The London Declaration: a tipping point for the world’s poor. HUFFINGTON POST, January 30, 2012.
• Hotez P. Saving 7 million pregnancies in Africa. HUFFINGTON POST, March 19, 2012.
• Hotez PJ. Tropical diseases: the new plague of poverty. THE NEW YORK TIMES, August 19, 2012.
• Hotez PJ. Campaign spending: what else can $2 billion buy? HUFFINGTON POST, November 13, 2102.
• Hotez PJ. Combating diseases of poverty requires joint US-Middle East effort. GLOBALPOST, November 19, 2012.
• Hotez PJ. A reunification Rx for Korea. LOS ANGELES TIMES, January 24, 2013.
• Hotez PJ. The disease next door. FOREIGN POLICY, March 25, 2013.
• Hotez PJ. Arab revolutions: Ignoring a potential catastrophe. ALJAZEERA AMERICA, August 16, 2013.
• Hotez PJ. Next Steps in US-Iran Diplomacy: Vaccines. PACIFIC STANDARD, November 6, 2013.
• Hotez PJ. Ebola doesn’t threaten America – other tropical diseases do. VICE October 2, 2014.
• Hotez PJ. Justice for all should embrace black America’s neglected health disparities. HUFFINGTON POST December 23, 2014.
• Hotez PJ and Herricks JR. One million deaths by parasites. PLOS SPEAKING OF MEDICINE January 16, 2015.
• Hotez PJ. Will California measles outbreak be wake-up call? HOUSTON CHRONICLE (PROGNOSIS) January 28, 2015.
• Hotez PJ. A new wave of diseases threatens Southern Europe and the Middle East The Washington Post October 23, 2015.

• "Forgotten People, Forgotten Diseases: The Neglected Tropical Diseases and Their Impact on Global Health and Development: 9781555814403: Medicine & Health Science Books @". Amazon.com. Retrieved 2015-05-02. 
• "Parasitic Diseases, Fifth Edition: 9780970002778: Medicine & Health Science Books @". Amazon.com. Retrieved 2015-05-02. 
• "JAMA Network | JAMA | Home". Jama.ama-assn.org. Retrieved 2015-05-02. 
• Jiménez, Marguerite (2014-06-09). "Epidemics and Opportunities for U.S.-Cuba Collaboration". Science & Diplomacy. 3 (2).