Beth Kirkpatrick, MD; Donna Rizzo and Kimberly Vannest named University Scholars for 2021 – 2022 academic year. The University of Vermont Graduate College is pleased to announce the 2021-2022 University Scholars. The University Scholars program recognizes distinguished UVM faculty members for sustained excellence in research, scholarship and creative arts. Basic and Applied Sciences Professor and Chair, Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics Dr. Kirkpatrick is Professor and Chair in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at the University of Vermont (UVM) Larner College of Medicine. She holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases and is an attending physician at the UVM Medical Center. She received her M.D. at Albany Medical College and performed an Internal Medicine residency and chief residency at the University of Rochester. She completed subspecialty and research training in Infectious Diseases at Johns Hopkins and received additional training in clinical tropical medicine in Lima, Peru. She is currently a fellow of the American College of Physicians, The American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, and the Infectious Diseases Society of America. Dr. Kirkpatrick began her career with research interests in enteric infections, mucosal immunology, and vaccines. In 2001, she began the UVM Vaccine Testing Center, which is now a multi-disciplinary team researching candidate vaccines and vaccine immunology. With the goal of understanding and preventing infectious diseases around the globe (especially in low-income countries), this committed and growing team of investigators performs both investigator-initiated and industry-supported phase I-III human vaccine clinical trials and controlled human infection models. In the laboratory, the VTC interrogates human immunology to understand vaccine responsiveness, correlates of protection, and vaccine failure. Currently the team focuses on flaviviruses (e.g. Dengue, Zika) and enteric infections (e.g. rotavirus, campylobacter, polio), and now, SARS-CoV2. Dr. Kirkpatrick is also the Principal Investigator of one of the National Institutes of Health-funded Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) grants at UVM; the Translational Global Infectious Diseases Research (TGIR) Center, which is focused on the development of the next generation of faculty investigators from both the biomedical and quantitative/modeling fields.