Alpha Delta Gamma Reunion 2009

Mike Schurr

It’s a little difficult for me to summarize two days of laughing in a short blurb. Some of those stories should be recorded as evidence that initiation rites are a very important part of being a member of a fraternity. Those were the very events we remembered most vividly after 25 yrs and I honestly believe the glue that held us together. I can’t wait to do it again!!

Pledged Fall 1979, Graduated 1983.

After graduation from Loyola, I worked full-time as a surgical orderly from 1983-1985 at Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas where I “scrubbed in” to over 600 surgical procedures as a retractor holder. I will never own a motorcycle because of this experience. After doing that, I decided it was time to go back to school so I enrolled in the Molecular Biology program at the University of North Texas (January 1985).

I earned my way through graduate school as a teaching assistant and taught almost every laboratory offered by the Department of Biology at North Texas. This was an invaluable teaching experience but it curtailed research progress and I finally graduated in 1992. I also met my beautiful wife, Jill, at North Texas.

After graduating with my Ph.D., I did a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UTHSCSA) working on bacterial pathogenesis. While at UTHSCSA, I earned a postdoctoral fellowship from the Cystic Fibrosis (CF) Foundation (CFF) as our laboratory was (and still is) working on a bacterial pathogen that infects people with CF.

In 1994, Jill and I married and we lived in San Antonio until 1996. In 1996, my postdoctoral mentor moved to the University of Michigan Medical School. We went with him and since I had earned a New Investigator award from the CFF, I was promoted to Research Assistant Professor. We stayed at Michigan for 2 yrs, watched them win a National Championship in football (Go BLUE!!) and in 1998 I got my first independent tenure track faculty position at Tulane Medical School.

We were in New Orleans from 1998 to 2006 where I earned promotion to Associate Professor with tenure (2004). After Katrina, we decided to relocate to The University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine. My laboratory, so far, has graduated 3 PhD students, trained 3 postdoctoral fellows and been funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), NASA, Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, and the state of Louisiana Health Excellence Fund and Board of Regents Support Fund. I have published 36 peer-reviewed primary research articles and one book during my academic career, to date. I have taught medical microbiology lectures and labs to medical students every year since 1996. I have taught graduate level bacterial physiology, genetics and pathogenesis to graduate students since 1998. I currently serve on the editorial board of Infection and Immunity and have served on many NIH study section panels. More details about my specific research interests can be read at: http://uchsc.digitalassetsinc.com/Faculty/Schurr.php.