Dr. Filemon Bucardo is currently a senior researcher at UNC-CH and was a former Professor at the Faculty of Medical Sciences of the National Autonomous University of León, Nicaragua (UNAN-León) where he taught Microbiology and Immunology. He has spent the past two decades researching viral infectious disease of public importance in Latin America. Leading studies contributed to the establishment of a Rotavirus gastroenteritis baseline of knowledge before vaccine development and implementation; Rotavirus is a major cause of mortality in children. In the last fifteen years he has been contributing to understand molecular and immunological aspects of Norovirus and Sapovirus gastroenteritis aiming to contribute with the development of a pediatric Norovirus and Sapovirus vaccines. Given the emergency and re-emergency of Chikungunya, Zika, SARS-CoV and Dengue in Latin America new capacities were developed by Dr. Bucardo group and several molecular and immunological studies were performed. Now at UNC-CH, Dr. Bucardo is studying gastrovirus and arboviruses mucosal and humoral and immunity studies.
Dr. Bucardo, research group in Nicaragua was working at 3 different levels: field epidemiology, laboratory research and community extension. His site serves for Field Epidemiology and Microbiology/Immunology training, students came from UNC-CH, DUKE, Linkoping/Sweden and Liege/Belgium.
Most of the research funding has been obtained from CDC, NIH and the Swedish Research Council through strong collaboration with Professors from UNC-CH (Profs. Aravinda de Silva, Elizabeth Stringer, Sylvia Becker-Dreps and Natalie Bowman) and Karolinska Institutet/Linkoping Universitet (Lennart Svensson).
Dr. Bucardo obtained his PhD on Infection Biology (Molecular Virology) from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden (2008), then received a scholarship from the Inter-American Academy of Science to performed Postdoctoral training on viral like particles production at Ohio State University (2012). He also performs Postdoctoral training on Good Clinical Practices at Linkoping University in Sweden (2014) and received fellowship from Fogarty International to perform Zika studies in Nicaragua (2016). He got a master’s degree on Clinical Biochemistry (2003) and bachelor’s in chemistry (1997) from UNAN-Leon.
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