Dr. Connie Gebhart was honored during the last American Association of Veterinary Laboratory Diagnosticians (AAVLD) meeting as the recipient of the BioMIC Excellence in Diagnostic Veterinary Microbiology Award.
Supported by Biomic Inc, this prestigious AAVLD award recognizes distinguished scientist (s) for research accomplishments in the field that result in new scientific findings that have application for the betterment of veterinary medicine.
Dr. Connie Gebhart is full professor at the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Minnesota, USA. After obtaining both MS and PhD degrees in Veterinary Medicine from that college, she supervised multiple microbiology laboratories and projects until joining the faculty at the College of Veterinary Medicine in 2003. She currently holds a joint appointment with the Department of Veterinary and Biomedical Sciences and the Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory as Faculty Advisor for Microbiology.
Dr. Gebhart has published over 100 peer reviewed manuscripts in internationally recognized journals and has co-authored seven chapters in books such as “Diseases of Swine”, “Bergey’s Manual of Systematic Bacteriology” and “Pathogenesis of Bacterial Infections in Animals”. She has been invited to speak at numerous national and international veterinary conferences such as the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine, the American Association of Swine Veterinarians and the International Pig Veterinary Society, as well as for various universities and industries throughout the world.
As faculty, Dr. Gebhart is engaged in service, teaching and research concerning bacterial diseases, with special emphases on diagnosis and epidemiology of enteric diseases. Her research has focused on the obligately intracellular bacterium Lawsonia intracellularis and the novel porcine pathogen Brachyspira hampsonii. In particular, her laboratory was instrumental in identifying these new pathogenic species and continues to be active in studying all facets of these exceptional bacteria. Current research seeks to understand how L. intracellularis causes proliferation of enterocytes, by exploring processes such as interference with apoptosis, mechanism(s) of intracellular survival, alteration of normal cellular differentiation, and effect(s) on the enterocytes’ normal cell cycles.