This student project is available for Honors, Masters and PhD candidates and will develop skills in genetic and next-generation sequencing techniques, epidemiology, computational data analysis, and will involve work with international collaborators.
During my PhD I investigated the genetic epidemiology of the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum in Bongo District, Ghana in the laboratory of Professor Karen Day. I discovered that residents of all ages harbored infections that were genetically diverse and structured to ensure lifelong carriage of parasites. The findings from my PhD have supported the development of a novel malaria surveillance tool called the “varcode” that can be applied to genetically fingerprint parasites based on variant antigen genes.
This collaborative project aims to build the capacity for a novel genotyping tool for tracking malaria infections over space and time and quantifying clones within individual infections for improved malaria surveillance in the Asia-Pacific region. This tool is based on amplicon deep sequencing and will be optimized and validated on samples collected from Papua New Guinea and Myanmar. This tool can be used in a range of applications, including but not limited to, longitudinal studies, clinical efficacy trials, and to answer fundamental research questions about the biology of Plasmodium spp, such as discriminating recrudescence vs reinfection vs relapse.
This collaborative project aims to describe the genomic epidemiology of continued disease transmission of P. falciparum in Ecuador after considerable progress towards elimination in previous years. By applying novel genetic tools, we aim to better understand factors underlying continued transmission after an outbreak in Ecuador by investigating parasite microevolution and transmission dynamics to inform whether malaria cases in Ecuador are locally-acquired or imported from neighboring countries.