Campus News

Director of the Center for Vaccines and Immunology discusses commitment to COVID-19 fight

Ted Ross, Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar and director of UGA’s Center for Vaccines and Immunology. (Photo by Peter Frey/UGA)

Ted Ross, the director of the Center for Vaccine and Immunology, was recently quoted in a Georgia Trend article about high-level institutions’ role in COVID-19 research.

Ross said that Georgia is distinctively positioned for its role in COVID-19 research.

“We have some pretty high-level research institutions. We have been preparing for this type of high-level work through the actions of the (Georgia Research Alliance) in bringing investigators, scientists and medical doctors to this state. We have the right facilities, the right people, all connected to business and government leaders; and it just fell into place that we would get a lot of attention from NIH, from CDC,” he said.

He elaborated on educational institutions’ roles in fighting the coronavirus pandemic.

“There’s a lot of focus, a lot of higher-level educational institutions and medical institutions turning their attention to COVID because the problem was so acute and so immediate. I feel like for myself, personally, everything I prepared for was becoming valuable when COVID hit,” Ross said.

The article discusses Ross’ work studying protective immune responses to the coronavirus in order to find out how long immunity lasts in people infected with COVID-19.