Alex is Associate Dean of International Programs and Public Health at Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, and is founding Director of Cornell’s new Master of Public Health program. He is also the Faculty Director for the Environment at Cornell’s campus-wide Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future.
Alex works at the interface of public health and wildlife conservation in three ways. In the field, Alex focuses on landscape-scale, business-based interventions that fight human poverty and hunger through promotion of sustainable agriculture and natural resource management practices that conserve both wildlife and ecosystems. His lab studies the fundamental biology of fertilization, with applications in the development of new technologies of assisted reproduction as well as new male contraceptives in both humans and non-human animals. His diagnostic assay for male fertility is currently being commercialized by Androvia LifeSciences. An offshoot of the work on sperm biology led to his use of enzymes tethered to nanoparticles as a platform for point-of-care diagnostic tests. This approach can support multiplexed detection of a variety of biomarkers of different classes, including small molecules not amenable to antibody-based approaches.
He has received multiple awards, including a Rotary International Graduate Fellowship, the University of Pennsylvania’s Leonard Pearson Prize, an NIH Pioneer Award, and a State University of New York Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities. Alex received his AB from Princeton University in 1989 and his VMD and PhD at the University of Pennsylvania.