Veterinary professor receives research foundation professorship

Mary Brown, Ph.D., a specialist in infectious diseases at the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine, has received a UF Research Foundation professorship.

Sponsored by the university’s Division of Sponsored Research, the professorships are awarded to tenured faculty campuswide for distinguished research and scholarship. The honor includes a $5,000 salary increase each year for three years and a one-time $3,000 award for research support.

Brown, a professor in the UF veterinary college’s department of physiological sciences, specializes in bacteria called mycoplasmas. For the past 22 years, Brown has studied infections in creatures from alligators to humans. She has studied the role of mycoplasma in the premature birth of babies and in a respiratory ailment of environmentally threatened tortoises.

The smallest free-living bacteria, mycoplasmas need intimate contact with a host, for instance in the respiratory or urogenital tract, and establish a chronic disease that usually is not fatal because they need the host to survive. The bacteria are spread through direct contact and can cause a wide spectrum of diseases in humans and animals, such as pneumonia, mastitis, urinary tract infection, genital infections, neonatal infections and more rarely, arthritis. “Walking pneumonia” is one example of a mycoplasmal disease that occurs in people.

Most recently, Brown has been studying the role of mycoplasmas in a respiratory infection that has spread rapidly among Florida gopher tortoises, a species of special concern, as part of a National Science Foundation project. The gopher tortoise population has declined in part because of loss of habitat. Infectious disease has also been a contributing factor to population declines. The NSF project examines the interactions between infectious disease and human-induced changes to the environment on tortoise health and populations.

With funding from the National Institutes of Health, Brown has studied the role of mycoplasma in recurrent urinary tract infections in women. The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of Defense have also supported her studies of mycoplasmal disease in food animals.

Brown has been a member of UF’s veterinary college faculty since 1985.