Wieland Meyer

Biography

Prof. Wieland Meyeris the Head of the Molecular Mycology Research Laboratory at the Center for Infectious Diseases and Microbiology and Professor for Molecular Medical Mycology, Sydney Medical School – Westmead Hospital, Marie Bashir Institute for Infectious Diseases and Biosecurity, The University of Sydney, Westmead Millennium Institute, Sydney, Australia. He is also Guest Professor at Fondação Oswaldo Cruz (FIOCRUZ) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He did his PhD in 1992 with Prof. Thomas Börner at the Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany, by establishing DNA and PCR fingerprinting for fungal strain typing. He than wend on in 1992 to do his postdoc with Prof. Thomas Mitchell at Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC, USA, to work on the phylogeny of human pathogenic yeasts (Candida spp.) and the epidemiology of cryptococcosis, before he took up a position at the University of Sydney to establish the Molecular Mycology Research Laboratory at Westmead Hospital in 1995. His research focuses on the evolution, phylogeny, speciation, population genetics, genomics, molecular epidemiology and typing, of human pathogenic fungi (especially of the genera Candida, Cryptococcus, Scedosporium and Pneumocystis), the development of fast, simple and reliable molecular identification techniques for human/animal fungal pathogens, and the understanding of fungal pathogenesis on a molecular level. He is leading an international research team, which investigates the global epidemiology of the Cryptococcus neoformans/C. gattii species complex, for which he established a Multilocus sequencing typing (MLST) scheme accessible via mlst.mycologylab.org and also undertook the first global whole genome population analysis in collaboration with TGen, Phoenix, USA. He is leading an international consortium of microbiology reference laboratories to establish a quality controlled ITS database (its.mycologylab.org) and identify new alternative genetic loci for fungal DNA barcoding. His research is funded by research grants from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NH&MRC) Australia, the National Institute if Health (NIH) USA and Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES), Brazil. He is the curator of the Westmead Hospital Medical Mycology Culture Collection, housing over 10000 strains. He has published more than 150 peer reviewed research papers. He was the Vice-President and is currently General Secretary of the International Society of Human and Animal Mycology (ISHAM)and was the chair of the organizing committee of the 19th ISHAM congress 4-8.5.2015 in Melbourne, Australia.Hewas the Vice-President of International Mycological Association (IMA) from 2006-2010 and chaired the organizing committee of the International Mycological Congress (IMC8) in Cairns, Australia in 2006. He is currently a member of the executive committee of the IMA. He was also the Vice-President (1998-2002) and the President (2002-2005) of the Australasian Mycological Society. He was associate editor of the journal: Medical Mycology, and is the associated editor of Personia-Molecular Phylogeny and Evolution of Fungi, Australasian Mycologist, Microbiology Australia, IMA Fungus, Japanese Medical Mycology Journal (MMJ) and DNA Barcoding.

Research Interest

Molecular Medical Mycology Fungal Population Genetics Fungal Phylogeny and Taxonomy Fungal Virulence Molecular Epidemiology of human pathogenic fungi Fungal Disease Outbreak Investigation Fungal Strain Typing Early Fungal Disease Diagnostic