George Chaconas

Biography

George Chaconas was educated at the City University of New York and the University of Calgary (Ph.D. Nucleic Acid Biochemistry). After postdoctoral training at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory he was appointed as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Western Ontario in 1981. He remained at the University of Western Ontario until 2002 at which time he was appointed as Professor and Alberta Heritage Scientist in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the Department of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases at the University of Calgary. From 2003-2017 he held the Canada Research Chair in the Molecular Biology of Lyme Borreliosis.

Dr. Chaconas’ research is focused on studies of the bacterium that causes Lyme disease, the most common tick-transmitted disease in the northern hemisphere. Studies are directed to two main areas: 1) the mechanism by which Lyme disease spirochetes escape from the host vasculature to invade surrounding tissue and 2) the mechanism by which DNA rearrangements promote antigenic variation of a major surface protein used to avoid the host immune system. Dr. Chaconas has been the recipient of the Roche Diagnostics Award for Biomolecular and Cellular Research (Canadian Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology), the Murray Award for Career Achievement (Canadian Society of Microbiologists) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship to Assist Research and Artistic Creation