Richard Oberhelman, MD
Chair of the Department of Global Community Health and Behavioral Sciences and adjunct professor of pediatrics.
Biography
Dr. Oberhelman is a board-certified pediatric infectious diseases specialist with more than 30 years of experience in applied and clinical child health research with collaborators in Peru, Kenya and Cambodia.
Dr. Oberhelman's research focuses on infectious diseases in children from resource poor areas, particularly diarrheal diseases, tuberculosis and newborn sepsis, with emphasis on applied translational methods to detect, treat, or prevent these conditions. Examples include evaluations of new diagnostic techniques for pediatric tuberculosis in Peru and a clinical trial of Lactobacillus reuteri, a probiotic or "friendly bacteria", for childhood diarrhea in the Peruvian Amazon.
Dr. Oberhelman also directs interdisciplinary international research training through two NIH-supported training grants: 1) the "Tulane-Xavier Minority Health International Research Training" (MHIRT) program places undergraduate and graduate students in nine training sites in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and 2) the "Inter-American Training for Innovations in Emerging Infectious Diseases," a program that builds interdisciplinary teams of postdoctoral researchers from the US and Latin America.
