Jarrod Fortwendel
Associate Professor, Department of Clinical Pharmacy and Translational Science
Q: When did you join the faculty here at UTHSC and what drew you here?
A: I joined the faculty in July of 2016 and after five years at the University of South Alabama. I moved here specifically because of the concentration of people that work with fungal pathogens, both fungal pathogenesis and our drug response. I could see it would be a good synergistic relationship.
Q: How did you get into your current research?
A: I actually did my PhD working with the organism that we still work with. In fact, Our RO1 was really a project I started as a graduate student and continued to develop it as a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University.
Q: Why is this research important?
A: We work with an organism that is a major threat to the industrialized world. The countries where we see a lot of aggressive immune therapies and immune suppression to deal with things like cancer or organ transfer, the organism we study is a real threat to that patient population. We are in contact with it all the time and people who are healthy can fight it off but that growing population of immune-suppressed patients are vulnerable.
Q: What do you like to do with your free time? Do you have any hobbies?
A: I like to play guitar; that is my biggest free time hobby. My wife and I also like to try and experience things locally, we love to try new restaurants. I really enjoy the restaurant Acre and I like Andrew Michael’s kitchen but the one I was most pleasantly surprised about lately was Café 1912.
Q: If you could have dinner with anyone, alive or dead, who would it be?
A: I would love to have dinner with my younger sister who passed away a few years ago. During most of the last part of her life I lived really far away and she was excited about the possibility that one day I would move closer to home. I am originally from southern Indiana and being here in Memphis is closer than I have been in a long time. She loved this town and I think she would have freaked out to find out I moved here.
Q: What is the most interesting place you have been?
A: Lisbon Portugal, we were there recently for a conference and I didn’t know what to expect. We took a few days as personal time and it was just the most fantastic place. The people who we met were super excited to show off the area and their culture. I would go back there in a heartbeat.
