The progression of Rocky Mountain Laboratories, a National Institutes of Health facility located in Hamilton that focuses on biomedical research, will be the theme of the annual Medical History of the West conference set for Tuesday, Oct. 17, at Montana State University.

The free public event, “Built on a Tick: The Progression of Rocky Mountain Laboratories from Log Cabin to Biosafety Level 4,” will be held from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at Inspiration Hall in Norm Asbjornson Hall on the MSU campus.

The conference will begin at 5:30 p.m. with a welcome and introductions. It will be followed at 5:40 p.m. by a talk, “A Frontier of Science Comes to Montana: The Short and Splendid Career of HT Ricketts,” given by Dr. Frederick Meier. That talk will be followed at 6:40 p.m. by a second talk, “Rocky Mountain Labs: Battling Pandemics from the Lab to the Silver Screen,” given by Dr. Marshall Bloom.

Meier taught and practiced at Dartmouth Medical School/Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, Virginia Commonwealth University/Medical Center of Virginia Hospitals, Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia/duPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington, Delaware, and Wayne State University/Henry Ford Health in Detroit. After retiring from Henry Ford Health, he spent a year teaching and practicing at Mbarara University of Science and Technology/Mbarara Regional Hospital in Uganda. Since returning from Uganda, he has continued to teach medical students at Wayne State University via Zoom.

Bloom is chief of the Biology of Vector-Borne Viruses Section in the Laboratory of Virology at Rocky Mountain Laboratories, a National Institutes of Health facility located in Hamilton that focuses on biomedical research. He joined the facility in 1972 as a research associate. From 1975 to 1977, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Laboratory of the Biology of Viruses in Bethesda, Maryland. He returned to Rocky Mountain Laboratories in 1977 as a tenured investigator. Bloom is regarded as a world expert in the biologies of parvoviruses and tick-borne flaviviruses, as well as an authority in biocontainment. In 2002, he was appointed associate director for Rocky Mountain Laboratories’ Division of Intramural Research, and in 2008, he was named associate director for science management for that division. Bloom has also served as acting chief of the Laboratory of Virology and the Laboratory of Human Bacterial Pathogenesis. In 2020, he was inducted into the Montana Bioscience Hall of Fame.  

The conference is free and open to the public, but participants are asked to register by Oct. 3 to aid in planning and for future conference mailing lists. To register, email wwami@montana.edu with your first and last name as well as the number of people you are registering.

The conference is sponsored by the MSU WWAMI Medical Education Program, with support from the Volney Steele Endowment Fund at the MSU Alumni Foundation.

For more information, contact Kayla Ouert, MSU WWAMI program manager, at 406-994-4411 or kayla.ouert@montana.edu.