November 16, 2019 — The UVA Medical Alumni Association recognized William A. Petri, Jr., PhD ‘80, MD ‘82, Fel ‘88, as recipient of its 2019 Walter Reed Distinguished Achievement Award during a presentation on November 16 in Charlottesville.

Petri is a professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases and International Health and vice chair for the Department of Medicine at the University of Virginia.

Petri practices internal medicine and the subspecialty of infectious diseases at the University of Virginia. He received MD and PhD (Microbiology) degrees from UVA, did medicine residency at Case Western and returned to UVA for infectious diseases fellowship.

Petri leads the PROVIDE study of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that is exploring in Bangladesh and India the pathogenesis of enteric environmental dysfunction and its association with oral poliovirus and rotavirus vaccine failures, malnutrition and neurocognitive developmental delay.

A recipient of both the Commonwealth of Virginia’s Outstanding Faculty Award (2014) and the Outstanding Scientist Award (2017), Petri has been recognized at UVA with the Kadner Award for Graduate Teaching, the All-University Teaching, and Inventor of the Year Awards.

He has served as president of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene and editor of Infection and Immunity and is currently associate editor for PLoS Pathogens, Clinical Infections Diseases and Trends in Molecular Medicine. He has received the Oswald Avery Award of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the Burroughs Wellcome New Investigator and Scholar Awards in Molecular Parasitology, and the Lucille P. Markey Scholar Award in Biomedical Research. He has served continuously since 1993 on advisory committees for the NIH and is recognized as a “Best Doctor in America”.

Petri spends three months each year caring for patients on the general medicine and infectious diseases services and the remainder is focused on research on infectious diseases, especially the molecular pathogenesis of diarrheal infections in children living in poverty in Bangladesh and the immunology of C. difficile infection in a mouse model and in patients at UVA hospital.

Congratulations to Dr. Petri on his distinguished career and on this well-deserved recognition.