Trained in both human medical and veterinary sciences, Xiang-Jin Meng has made numerous contributions to the field of comparative viral pathogenesis. His achievements concerning emerging, reemerging, and zoonotic viral diseases include the discovery of swine and avian hepatitis E viruses (HEV) and the invention of a commercial vaccine against porcine circovirus type 2 (PCV2), a common pathogen reported in pigs. For these and other accomplishments, Meng, a University distinguished professor of molecular virology at Virginia–Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2016. Meng’s Inaugural Article reports the establishment of an animal model for chronic HEV, a virus that causes more than 20 million liver infections in humans each year. The chronic hepatitis E model will help test promising antiviral drugs against this infectious agent, which in its zoonotic genotypes can infect several animal species.
Xiang-Jin Meng. Image courtesy of Virginia Tech/Logan Wallace.
Meng was born and raised in Gaomi, Shandong Province, China. “My dream college after high school was a chemical engineering school located only about one hour away from where I was born; however, my national college entrance exam score was not good enough to be admitted to this school,” recalls Meng. With the local engineering school scratched off his list of possibilities, Meng applied to Binzhou Medical College, where he was admitted in 1980 as a medical student.
After receiving his medical degree in medicine in 1985, Meng did not wish to practice medicine full time. He traveled to southern China, where he pursued a Master’s degree in microbiology and immunology at Wuhan University College of Medicine (formerly Hubei Medical College). “It was there I began to develop a …