The First Big Award

The distance from the small mountain town of Lares, Puerto Rico, to the cosmopolitan West Coast city of Mayaguez is just 18 miles as the crow flies. But for Amariliz Rivera, that short journey— from hometown to university— proved transformative in all of the usual, and some unusual, ways.

The biology major, who thought she was headed to a career in medicine, was one of just five students hand-picked to participate in the first Minority Access to Research Careers program at the University of Puerto Rico in Mayaguez, which provided her with financial support for all four college years, a mentor to guide her progress, and experiences she had never even dreamed of. “I took extra classes, had hands-on training and research experiences, changed my major to microbiology,” she says, “and found out that I love working in a lab.”

It certainly isn’t everyone’s idea of a good time to perform manual DNA sequencing to study the telomeres of Drosophila (the common fruit fly), but for Rivera it was “a great time.” Her 10 weeks in the summer of 1992 spent working in the lab of Mary-Lou Pardue, PhD, an internationally recognized geneticist, cell-biologist, and then-chair of the department of microbiology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), cemented her career decision. “By the end of that summer, I knew for-sure that I wanted to do a PhD.”

And when she was ready to apply to doctoral programs, her stand-out talent, once again, did not go unnoticed. Rivera was singled out for a minority training program at UMDNJ (now Rutgers) Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences (GSBS) in Piscataway by Michael Liebowitz, MD, PhD, director of Graduate Academic Diversity, who was visiting the Mayaguez campus to recruit students underrepresented in the field of biomedical research. She came to New Jersey in the summer right after graduation from college, initially training in Liebowitz’s lab. “GSBS was a very good fit,” she says.

After rotating through three labs as part of her first year in graduate school, Rivera joined the research team of Yakov Ron, PhD, a professor of pharmacology, to study autoimmunity in a mouse model of multiple sclerosis. “Our work focused on gaining a better understanding of how the immune system attacks the body and coming up with potential therapeutic avenues — to modify the autoimmune process,” she explains.

For 10 years — from 1993 to 2003 — she persevered. “These were challenging times for technical reasons,” she says. “This work takes persistence, and you can’t quit when it doesn’t work out.”

Throughout, Rivera applied and won NIH fellowship and post-doctoral fellowship awards for qualified minorities. “I would not have made it without that financial support,” she says.

She had planned to return to Puerto Rico after earning her doctoral degree to become a professor at a small undergraduate college and do some research on the side. However, during graduate school she met her husband and also fell in love with New Jersey. “It feels like home to me,” she says. Her husband, Michael Correa, MD, a graduate of Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, is an internist with a solo practice in Morningside Heights, and they have two sons, Samuel and David, ages 10 and 7.

In 2003, Rivera moved on to the lab of Eric Pamer, PhD, chief of infectious diseases at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and her life as a professional researcher was off and running. She had discovered a driving interest in what has become the abiding theme of her work: achieving a better understanding of how the immune system recognizes and fights infection with the ultimate goal of assisting the body in that battle. Pamer’s lab was studying the response of CD8 (infection-fighting) cells to bacteria.

Rivera landed in the right place at the right time. Pamer wanted to launch a new project and proposed that Rivera head it up. She willingly accepted the challenge.

The focus of the new investigation would be Aspergillus—a fungus “whose spores are present in the air we breathe, but does not normally cause illness,” according to the official Aspergillus Website. “In those with a weakened immune system, damaged lungs or individuals with allergies, Aspergillus can cause disease…Commercially many plant diseases and food spoilage may be due to Aspergillus infection. Sources of high numbers of Aspergillus spores include air conditioning units, composting, damp or flood damaged housing, and hospital building projects,” it states.

Not only did Rivera accept the project, but she succeeded in effecting a major coup—she created a new mouse model with fungus-specific T cells. While this may sound ho-hum to the uninitiated, a new animal model to better study a specific disease is a major achievement in the science world, often moving research forward far more quickly.

“Fungal infections have not been studied nearly as much as viral and bacterial infections,” she explains. “They had not been considered that dangerous because they had not been thought to cause much disease. This was a neglected area of study.”

Rivera worked in the Sloan Kettering lab for seven years, and when she was ready to move on, she found her spot in the growing research program of NJMS Senior Associate Dean for Research William Gause, PhD, who recently launched the Rutgers Institute for Infectious and Inflammatory Diseases (i3D) at the school. “I brought my mice and I brought my program here, and he gave me everything else to take my research to the next level,” she says.

And clearly, the relationship is on a positive trajectory. In March, Rivera won her first big NIH research grant, a five-year $1.25 million RO1 award to study “how monocytes talk to neutrophils and how neutrophils talk back.”

Rivera explains that her current research grew out of her prior investigations of how monocytes and neutrophils (two types of immune cells) function. “Our findings have taken us to this next step — looking at how these two types of cells signal to each other,” she explains.

Rivera’s primary work continues to be aimed at a better understanding of how the body fights fungal infections at the molecular level; and her ultimate goal is to enhance the immune system’s fight by boosting the body’s own efforts. “These findings may also be applicable to other lung infections,” she states.

What does she see as she looks into her future? “I hope to make new mouse models,” she says. “Aspergillus is a type of mold and molds are very common in our environment. They are particularly abundant indoors.”

An impaired immune system can allow these infections to become very serious, she continues. “I want to know if our exposure to molds is generally harmless or whether it frequently contributes to disease processes. When there is flooding and there are many fungal spores in the air, is that exposure affecting people’s health?”

Rivera says that a molecular picture detailing how molds are recognized by their host, which cells react first and which cells react next— down to specific genes, is what is needed. “If we enhance expression of these genes, can we improve health?” she asks.

As Rivera and the three GSBS students in her lab tackle these big questions, she is preparing an NIH program project grant proposal (P01) with Gause and others in the infection and inflammation group. “We are basically looking at the same question — how the body gears up to respond to infection —but we are looking at it from different angles,” she explains.

She is working on a new mouse model to help answer these new questions. In the meantime, the mouse model she developed to study fungal infection continues to serve as a useful research tool, recently traveling abroad to a lab in Japan and also stateside to another in Wisconsin.

Rivera ponders whether houses flooded by Hurricane Sandy may be incubators for disease-causing organisms and what potentially could be done to prevent this from happening in the future. Hailing from an island that is no stranger to damaging storms, she hopes that her long years of research may soon yield answers that will impact the wellbeing of flood-ravaged communities from New Jersey to Puerto Rico and beyond.