The Vice Chancellor's Biography

Eon Nigel Harris is Vice Chancellor of The University of the West Indies, has held this position since October 2004. Previously, he was Dean and Senior Vice President of the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia from 1996 to 2004.

Professor Harris received his B.S. degree in Chemistry (Phi Beta Kappa honours) from Howard University in 1968, Master of Philosophy (M.Phil) degree in Biochemistry from Yale University (1973) and M.D. (with Honours) from the University of Pennsylvania (1977). After completing his M.D. degree, he moved to The University of the West Indies at Mona in Jamaica, where he completed a residency in internal medicine, receiving a D.M. (Doctor of Medicine) in 1981. Subsequently, he went to the Royal Postgraduate Medical School, Hammersmith Hospital in London, England to do a Fellowship in Rheumatology. It was at the Hammersmith Hospital, in collaboration with Dr. Azzudin Gharavi and Dr. Graham Hughes, that he devised the anticardiolipin test, which is now used widely in the world today for the diagnosis of an auto immune disorder that they named the “Antiphospholipid Syndrome” – a disease which causes recurrent blood vessel clotting (resulting in strokes, deep vein thrombosis etc) and pregnancy losses (due to clotting of the fetal placenta). He returned to the USA (the University of Louisville) in 1987, where he and a colleague, Dr. Silvia Pierangeli, continued to do work on the Antipholspholipid Syndrome. They developed a mouse model of the disease to understand its pathogenesis and introduced a modified test for diagnosis that is used commercially.