Dr. Scott P. Commins completed his undergraduate degree (B.S.) at Wake Forest University in 1996. He subsequently began training in the Medical Scientist Training Program at the Medical University of South Carolina (Charleston, SC), earning MD and PhD degrees in 2004. His PhD work was supervised by Dr. Thomas W. Gettys and focused on the role of leptin and uncoupling proteins in obesity. In 2007, Dr. Commins completed an Internal Medicine residency at The University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA), where he remained to complete a fellowship in Allergy and Clinical Immunology under the direction of Dr. Thomas Platts-Mills. After 6 years as a faculty member in the Allergy / Immunology Division at UVa, Dr. Commins moved to The University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill in 2015.
Currently, Dr. Commins is an Associate Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics at UNC where he maintains an active research laboratory and clinical practice. Dr. Commins is a member of the UNC Food Allergy Initiative and the focus of his research is a carbohydrate, alpha-gal, which he and colleagues described as a novel food allergen in red meat in 2009. Since that time, he has published evidence relating the development of the red meat allergy to tick bites. Awareness of this allergy continues to increase with patients described throughout Europe, in Scandinavia, Central America, Australia and Asia. The significance of investigating these reactions comes not only from the obvious importance of understanding a novel, life-threatening form of food allergy but also in defining a totally new mechanism for sensitization and reactions related to an important food substance.
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Tuesday, February 21, 2023
12:45 PM – 1:45 PM
