Dr. Alok Das Mohapatra is an immunologist, with more than 20 years of research experience in the broad field of immunology at premier academic research institutions in the USA and India. While in India, he has close to 7 years of teaching experience in the field of microbiology and immunology, at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. After completing his Master’s degree in “Microbiology” and PhD in the field of “Cellular Immunology” from India, Dr. Das Mohapatra came to USA as a postdoctoral scientist and worked in the Center for Immunotherapy of Cancer and Infectious Diseases, Department of Immunology at UConn Health Center, Farmington, CT, USA. After working there for close to 6 years, he moved to the Center for International Health Research, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA, as a research scientist and then joined the division of Infectious Diseases and Immunology at Umass Medical School, Worcester, MA, USA. He has many research publications to his credit, published in top-tier international journals. After working in academia for more than a decade, Dr. Das Mohapatra moved into industry. Currently, he is working as a principal scientist on cutting-edge research in the field of cell therapy in cancer. Overall, he has gathered knowledge and expertise in diverse areas of immunology, including innate and adaptive immunity, basic and translational immunology, clinical immunology, and experimental immunology, in the context of both cancer and infectious diseases – caused by unicellular as well as multicellular parasites. As evidence of his expertise in the field, he has reviewed close to 100 research articles for publication in more than 12 different peer-reviewed international journals. He was elected as a full member of Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Honor Society. He has also received a Travel Award from the American Association of Immunology. Dr. Das Mohapatra realized that there is a pressing need for a comprehensive book on immunology in the market that will disseminate the complex concepts of immunology in ways that are easy to understand by general readers and, at the same time, inspire the intellectual curiosity of researchers in the field.Dr. Priyadarshi S. Sahu is a medical microbiologist and immunologist with several years of experience in academics, research, laboratory services, and consultancy. This Indian-born professor had a strong motivation toward science from his early education; understanding body’s defense mechanisms to infections has always fascinated him. He completed his masters in Microbiology followed by PhD under Faculty of Medicine at a nationally reputed postgraduate medical education center in India. Then he relocated to USA and started working as a postdoctoral fellow in a neuroimmunology laboratory at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Subsequently, he accepted a career to teach and has taken various academic positions so far having worked in different countries in Asia and the Americas. He has been teaching microbiology, immunology, parasitology, and infectious disease epidemiology to students at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels under medicine as well as other health science course programs, viz., dentistry, nursing, biomedical sciences, and medical laboratory technology). Currently, he is working as a full-time professor in microbiology and immunology teaching pre-clinical medicine at Medical University of the Americas, Nevis. He recommends the need to think carefully about the most appropriate teaching/learning methods and innovative ways to use them; the trick lies in how to use these methods to maximize the benefit for effective learning. He advocates the benefits of self-guided learning methods as well as appropriate learning materials for students in professional and higher education courses. An effective source of information is needed to empower to understand the concepts and to excel. He is keen to develop effective learning materials and also to explore newer methods of teaching in both small and large groups in medicine in order to integrate the knowledge of basic sciences into clinical applications and contribute to the learning process of the student through his expertise and experiences. He has guided multiple PhD as well as postgraduate research projects and has been actively involved in collaborative research in the fields of infectious diseases, immunology, and tropical medicine.
