Dr. Spinola received his M.D. from Georgetown University in 1978. He completed a residency in Internal Medicine and Pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1982 and served in the National Health Service Corps from 1982 to 1984. He completed a fellowship in Adult and Pediatric Infectious Diseases at the University of North Carolina in 1987. From 1987 to 1993, Dr. Spinola was at the State University of New York at Buffalo as an Assistant and then Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine. He came to IU in 1993 to join the Division of Infectious Diseases in the Department of Medicine and was named the division director in 1995. He is currently a Professor of Medicine, Microbiology and Immunology, Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and was named recipient of the Jacobs' chair in 1999. He is the Director of the Midwest Sexually Transmitted Infections and Topical Microbicide Cooperative Research Center and of a Training Grant in Sexually Transmitted Diseases and HIV, which are both funded by the National Institutes of Health. His areas of research interest are sexually transmitted diseases, particularly chancroid, a genital ulcer disease that facilitates HIV transmission, bacterial pathogenesis and host defenses. Dr. Spinola was elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation and is a Fellow in the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), Chairman of the Publications Committee of the IDSA and a member of the NIAID Microbiology and Infectious Diseases Review Committee.