Hugh S. Mason

Dr. Mason, an Associate Professor at Arizona State University, was the first to publish peer-reviewed work on the use of plants for production of vaccine antigens, showing expression of authentic hepatitis B surface antigen in tobacco (Mason et al., 1992). He was a leader in this field for many years and continues to publish work in plant-based vaccines (Kim et al., 2015). With funding from NIH-NIAID, Dr. Mason focused on oral delivery of vaccines for enteric diseases including Norwalk virus (Mason et al., 1996) and enterotoxic E. coli (Haq et al., 1995), and demonstrated oral immunogenicity in mice after ingestion of transgenic potato tuber.