About
Dr. Fiester’s collaborations with Clemson University and Prisma Health, both as an administrator and faculty member, have resulted in numerous publications and presentations, shared equipment agreements, and other collaborations including a provisional patent Dr. Fiester holds for a novel antibiotic and a funded T35 grant in which Clemson faculty provide research experiences for UofSCSOMG medical students. Dr. Fiester graduated summa cum laude with a B.S. in zoology from Kent State University in 2005. He then pursued a Ph.D. in physiology from Kent State University which was awarded to him in 2011. Following graduate school, Dr. Fiester completed his postdoctoral fellowship at Miami University, where his research primarily focused on the study of the nosocomial pathogen Acinetobacter baumannii. Dr. Fiester joined the Department of Biomedical Sciences at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine Greenville (UofSCSOMG) in 2017 as an Assistant Professor and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2021. He has additionally been a member of the Department of Pathology at Prisma Health Upstate since 2018, the Director of Research Strategy and Operations at UofSCSOMG since 2020 and has held an appointment at the Department of Veterans Affairs since 2022. He currently serves as the President of the South Carolina Branch of the American Society for Microbiology, a member of the American Society for Microbiology Branch Organization Subcommittee since 2022, a reviewer or editor for several journals including a review editor for Frontiers in Bacteriology, and previously served as an American Society for Microbiology Ambassador.
How their research is transforming health care
Dr. Fiester's current research interests focus on the elucidation of factors contributing to the virulence of multidrug-resistant ESKAPE (Enterococcus faecium, Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Acinetobacter baumannii, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Enterobacter species) pathogens, with special attention given to Acinetobacter baumannii, drug discovery, and antimicrobial stewardship all to ease the burden of these infections on patients and healthcare systems. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have categorized Acinetobacter as a serious threat requiring more monitoring and prevention activities due to the occurrence of multidrug-resistant isolates. According to the CDC, Acinetobacter causes 12,000 infections per year with 7,300 of those infections caused by multidrug-resistant Acinetobacter and 500 of those cases resulting in mortality in the United States alone. Unfortunately, the majority of research pertaining to A. baumannii has focused on antibiotic resistance properties while failing to explain the basic pathobiology or underlying virulence mechanisms of this bacterium. This sparsity of data has made drug discovery somewhat difficult due to the lack of candidate therapeutic targets. Dr. Fiester's research aims to better explain the pathobiology of A. baumannii thus uncovering targets for therapeutics. Dr. Fiester is particularly interested in the mechanisms by which A. baumannii is cytotoxic to eukaryotic cells, acquires iron under chelated conditions such as that found in the human host, secretes virulence factors and responds to environmental stressors. Dr. Fiester's research has even contradicted the traditional characterization of A. baumannii as non-hemolytic. In fact, the hemolytic phenotype of A. baumannii is paramount to A. baumannii virulence.
Health research keywords
Infectious diseases, clinical microbiology, bacteriology, antibiotic development, drug discovery, antimicrobial stewardship, Acinetobacter baumannii, Klebsiella pneumoniae
