Wright's interest in infectious diseases grew "with new infections emerging that demanded new therapeutic and preventive approaches," he says. "There is a high 'whodunit' quotient that is based on a thorough history and physical exam."

He began building the international portion of his career in 1974, spending two months in Haiti at l'Hopital Albert Schweitzer, in the country's rural Artibonite Valley. His wife, a nurse who was then pregnant with their third child, and their two young sons accompanied him. While Peter Wright worked as a pediatrician, Penny Wright worked as a nurse—administering medications and giving "injections to babies with TB who were so thin that it was hard to find a place to put the needle," she recalls. Her husband had never seen such extreme poverty, and "it took him a while to get used to it," she remembers. She, however, had had some exposure to poverty growing up because she had lived in Africa with her family. "Once you get past [the poverty]," she says, "you see the soul of the people and how good and kind they are."

The experience in Haiti "proved to be very formative later on in terms of thinking about international health," Peter Wright explains. He and his wife worked at l'Hopital Schweitzer again in 1977 and in 1985. It's "a remarkably well-organized and staffed facility," Wright observes. "But it exemplifies limitations of what can and can't be done in a developing country."

It was also in 1974 that Wright moved his family to Nashville, where he became Vanderbilt's first head of pediatric infectious diseases. "I knew little about Vanderbilt beyond the reputation of the chair of pediatrics, Dr. David Karzon," Wright confesses. "For somebody trained in the Northeast and at NIH, it seemed a bit like stepping off the edge of the earth." In October of that year, the Wrights' five-year-old son, Matthew, was hit and killed by a car. The family was devastated. "His loss impacted us tremendously, with Peter turning to his work as ameans of coping and honoring Matthew's life," says Penny Wright, "and me learning how to use my experiences with loss and grief in my work with women with high-risk pregnancies."

"We both came out of it very dedicated to doing things in hismemory and more

Wright's interest in infectious diseases is due in part to the field's "high 'whodunit' quotient."

introspective, deeper people," says Peter Wright. "It certainly helped me understand the grieving of patients and parents that I cared for." Reeling from the loss, but more determined than ever to make his work count for Matthew's sake, he continued building the infectious diseases division. Later, he directed major research efforts, including the vaccine clinic, a vaccine treatment evaluation unit, a respiratory pathogens research unit, and more. He tested and introduced RSV vaccines, coordinated pediatric trials for swine influenza vaccine, and conducted experiments with live rhesus rotavirus vaccine, as well as other vaccines. In 1987, he created the HIV Vaccine Program at Vanderbilt, and he has subsequently headed international trials of an HIV vaccine.

As the years passed, Wright became ever more involved in international health. During a sabbatical year in 1987-88, he was a consultant for the Expanded Programme on Immunization of the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland. In the 1990s, he began playing a central role with GHESKIO (which, in French, stands for Haitian Study Group on Kaposi's Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections) in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He provided medical expertise, helped to train Haitian physicians, and collaborated on HIV

research. And he has continued to consult for WHO on global health matters, including HIV ethics and polio eradication. He has also helped the organization explore measles eradication and vaccination. He recently began working on a vaccine for dengue, a tropical disease spread by mosquitoes.

His background in infectious diseases and training in microbiology and virology, combined with his experience as a pediatrician in Haiti, give Wright a unique perspective on dealing with global health matters. There are "a lot of epidemiologists and a lot of people with experience in mass epidemiologic approaches or operational research," he explains, but "fewer people"—people like him—"who can think about the problem in terms of the biology of the particular organism that's being discussed."

Thirty years ago, doctors thought antibiotics and vaccines would one day conquer infectious diseases. But it is now "very obvious," says Wright, that "evolutionary ... forces are at work." For instance, "we see the emergence of antibiotic-resistant Staph aureus, which has gotten a lot of publicity recently. We see the emergence of potential pandemics of SARS, of avian flu," he adds, "and we recognize the global interconnectedness of the world and the fact that people can and do travel quickly from place to place and can even be perfectly well while they're traveling [but] incubating diseases."

Now that Wright is spending part of his time at Dartmouth, he hopes to contribute to the infectious diseases program here. "Peter is widely known in infectious disease and international health circles as a physician-scientist of many talents—respiratory virologist, vaccinologist, and expert on HIV infections in the developing world," says Dr. John Modlin, the chair of DMS's Department of Pediatrics. He, too, is an international expert in childhood infectious diseases and, as it happens, trained with Wright at Boston Children's. "I expect Peter will continue his involvement in all these areas at Dartmouth," says Modlin, "and will inspire students and residents to follow his lead."

Meanwhile, Wright continues "building" projects all over the world. With luck, he'll be in Norwich often enough to help complete the building of his new home—scheduled for October 2008.