Thomas A. Russo is the Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases in the Department of Medicine at Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University at Buffalo. He is an expert on all aspects of infectious disease, including epidemiology, clinical disease, treatment and prevention. He conducts research on gram-negative bacterial infections, including new, hypervirulent variants of bacteria that are becoming resistant to antibiotics. He also works on vaccines and drug development targeted against these infections. Russo was lead author on a paper that reported on his team’s discovery of biomarkers that can help distinguish the flesh-eating, lethal pathogen of Klebsiella pneumoniae from the more common, less virulent strain. The discovery makes possible a diagnostic test for this hypervirulent strain.