Opendra "Bill" Narayan (November, 1936-December 24, 2007)[1] was an AIDS researcher at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the University of Kansas Medical Center. A veterinarian, Narayan researched animal models of HIV. His focus on finding a vaccine for retroviral infection had some success against a monkey retrovirus, SIV,[2] and he is best known for engineering a type of HIV that could cause AIDS-like disease in monkeys.[1]
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Born in Guyana, Narayan earned his doctorate in veterinary medicine (DVM) from the University of Toronto in 1963. In 1970, he received a PhD in virology from the University of Guelph.
Narayan trained as a postdoctoral researcher with renowned neurovirologist Richard T. Johnson at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine beginning in 1972.[1]
Narayan remained at Johns Hopkins as a faculty member and became director of the Retrovirus Biology Laboratory. Narayan left Johns Hopkins in 1992. He moved to the University of Kansas, where he was named Distinguished Professor and director of the Marion Merrell Dow Laboratory of Viral Pathogenesis. Narayan remained at Kansas until his death in 2007.[1] While at the University of Kansas, Narayan received nearly $50 million in grants, including almost $20 million from the National Institutes of Health.[2]