Lorraine Fuller is honored with the Tyson Foods Inc. Support Personnel Award

This award acknowledges the contributions by support personnel and recognizes outstanding support of research, extension, or teaching programs in poultry science. This is an annual award.

 

Lorraine Fuller, Research Professional, University of Georgia, Athens GA, has worked at the University since 1976. She was working in developmental biology and genetics after her undergraduate degree, and became interested in parasitology by way of Jerry Paulin and Barclay McGee who introduced her to chickens as hosts of some pretty interesting and costly parasites. Following this lead, she found a lab headed by Larry McDougald in Poultry Science at UGA. After that, the opportunity to work with Malcomb Reid, Larry McDougald, Joyce Johnson, Peter Long, and Greg Mathis, to name a few fell into place. Her Masters and PhD work was on the mechanisms of site finding and penetration by Eimeria of host cells. After completing her PhD in 1999, she remained at UGA to finish prior work by Peter Long and Joyce Johnson on an attenuated vaccine for coccidiosis. Working with the sponsorship of Merial/Select labs she became a pivotal part of the team that successfully formulated a viable live attenuated vaccine for the poultry industry, HatchPak III/V. As part of this effort, she also became interested in immunomodulation of the vaccine response using chemical extracts of natural plant products as immunomodulators.

Over time, she has been responsible for designing, performing, and analyzing battery, floor-pen and in-vitro studies to determine the efficacy of many types of products used for the control and chemotherapy of coccidiosis and histomoniasis in different host species. One of her research interests has been to define the relationship between E. maxima isolates from field strains, and their interaction with the host. Recently she has begun to work in developing testing protocols and reagents for FDA approval of active compounds for treatment of ascariasis and helmenthiasis in poultry.

She has helped more than 30 graduate students on their research, is author and co-author on 49 papers, and holds 2 patents.