MeBOP

Ibrahim Abbasi Ph.D. is an assistant professor at the Department of Biology and Biotechnology at Al-Quds university in Jerusalem.  Dr. Abbasi received his M.Sc. in Parasitology from Yarmouk University in Jordan and his PhD from The Hebrew University, Hadassah Medical School in Jerusalem. He has been interested in diagnostic work of various parasites including Schistosoma and Leishmania. 

Joanne Cono, MD, ScM is the Director of the Office of Science Quality. Most recently she was the Special Advisor for Science Integration in the Office of Infectious Diseases, facilitating scientific activities and planning across CDC's three infectious disease national centers. Previously at CDC, she has served as an Associate Director for Science in the former National Immunization Program, Division of Epidemiology and Surveillance, and in the former Coordinating Office for Terrorism Preparedness and Emergency Response. As Senior Medical Officer in the Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Program, National Center for Infectious Diseases, she helped lead CDC's smallpox preparedness and vaccination activities and co-led the epidemiological team for CDC's response to the 2003 US monkeypox outbreak. She has led CDC's Clinician Communication Program, served as Senior Advisor for Science and Senior Advisor for Global Health in the Coordinating Center for Infectious Diseases, and has completed numerous international assignments and consultancies. During the emergency response to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, she served as Chief Medical Officer overseeing CDC's public health response teams in Atlanta and Haiti. Her current scientific interests include global health, emerging infectious diseases, public health preparedness, and One Health.

Kirk W Deitsch Ph.D. is a professor of Microbiology and Immunology at the department of Microbiology and Immunology, Weill Cornell Medical College, New York, USA.  Dr. Deitsch received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.  His research focuses on how malaria parasites regulate expression of the var gene family and how they generate diversity within these antigen encoding genes.  Parasites isolated from different geographic regions typically have completely different var gene repertoires, thus preventing their human hosts from generating an immune response that can recognize all parasites. Thus var genes appear to be diversifying much more rapidly than the rest of the genome. This process of diversification involves frequent gene conversion events that are initiated by DNA double strand breaks.

Karine Frénal  Ph.D. is a member of the laboratory of Dominique Soldati-Favre at the department of Microbiology and Molecular Medicine at the University of Geneva, Switzerland.  Her work focuses on apicomplexan invasion mechanisms using Toxoplasma as a tool.
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Omar S. Harb
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Volker Heussler is a professor in molecular parasitology and cell biology and acting director of the Institute of Cell Biology, University of Bern, Switzerland.  Dr. Heussler received his Ph.D. at the University of Bern.  His research group is interested in the role of host cell autophagy in liver stage Plasmodium development, daughter cell development during malaria liver stages, parasite egress from liver cells and survival mechanisms of dormant parasite liver stages.
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Demien Jacot
Demien Jacot Ph.D. is a member of the laboratory of Dominique Soldati-Favre at the department of Microbiology and Molecular Medicine at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. Dr. Jacot works on apicomplexan metabolism and the role of protein phosphorylation in parasite invasion and intracellular survival using Toxoplasma as a model.
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Charles Jaffe Ph.D. is the Michael and Penny Feiwel Professorial Chair in Dermatology at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  Dr. Jaffe received his Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute of Science.  His research focuses on the biochemistry and immunology of the parasitic protozoa Leishmania, the development of vaccines and diagnostic test for visceral leishmaniasis and the role of protein kinases in development of the parasite.
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Ibrahim Adib Abdel-Messih Khalil MD, MPH is a senior associate at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA.  Dr. Khalil received his MD from Cairo University, Egypt and has previously served as Senior Program Officer, Enteric and Diarrheal Diseases at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  Dr. Khalil's interests lie in  the epidemiology and disease burden of diarrheal diseases in children.
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Poppy Lamberton Ph.D. is a senior lecturer in Parasitology at the University of Glasgow and an honorary senior lecturer at the Faculty of Medicine, School of Public Health, Imperial College, London, UK.  Dr. Lamberton received her Ph.D. from the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology, Imperial College, London, UK.  Her current research focuses on utilising field epidemiological data, laboratory experiments and population genetics to understand population structure, transmission dynamics and effects of long term mass drug administration programmes on neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) such as schistosomiasis, soil-transmitted helminths, opisthorchiasis and onchocerciasis.
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Sebastian Lourido
Sebastian Lourido Ph.D. is a fellow at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Boston, USA.  Dr. Lourido received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington, St. Louis, USA.  His research group is interested in the molecular events that enable apicomplexan parasites to remain widespread and deadly infectious agents. These single-celled eukaryotes comprise a phylum of organisms that parasitize diverse animal hosts. Many important human pathogens belong to this group, including the causative agents of malaria (Plasmodium spp.), cryptosporidiosis (Cryptosporidium spp.), and toxoplasmosis (Toxoplasma gondii). Dr. Lourido's group uses T. gondii to model features conserved throughout the phylum, such as their reliance on calcium signaling to regulate motility. In addition, they use a combination of several approaches that span phospho-proteomics, chemical-genetics, and genome editing to investigate the unique biology of these organisms.
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Shula Michaeli Ph.D. is a professor at Bar-Ilan University and dean of at the Mina and Everard Goodman Faculty of Life Sciences.  She earned her Ph.D. in microbiology from Tel-Aviv University, Israel.  Dr. Michaeli's research group focuses on RNA molecules that participate in RNA trans-splicing unique to these parasites. They are interested in the structure and function of novel anti-sense non-coding RNAs, as well as the mechanism behind a novel RNAi silencing event discovered in their laboratory, snoRNAi, which silences nucleolar RNAs.
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Jeremy Mottram
Jeremy Mottram Ph. D. is Professor of Pathogen Biology and a member of the Centre for Immunology and Infection at the Department of Biology at the University of York, UK.  He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Glasgow (PhD) and his postdoctoral training work at the University of California San Francisco in molecular parasitology, with a focus on gene expression and RNA splicing in African trypanosomes. He has been a member of the MRC Infections and Immunity Board (2010–2014) and has been on both national and international review boards for the Institute Pasteur, INSERM and NIMR.  Dr. Mottram is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology and a Pesquisador Visitante Especial, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
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Paco Pino Ph.D. is a member of the laboratory of DominiqueSoldati-Favre at the department of Microbiology and Molecular Medicine at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. Dr. Pino works on understanding the mechanisms of Plasmodium and Toxoplasma invasion and intracellular survival.  Dr. Pino has been instrumental in developing molecular tools for studying gene function in these pathogens. 
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Isabel Roditi Ph.D. is codirector of the Institute of Cell Biology at the University of Bern in Switzerland. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge, Wolfson College.  She did postdoctoral work with the Medical Research Council in Cambridge and later at the Institute for Genetics and Toxicology at Karlsruhe University in Germany. In 1993, she received the Helmut Horten Förderpreis, and in 2001, she received the Cloetta Prize; in 2001, she was elected a member of the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences. From 2008 to 2010 she was president of the Swiss National Science Foundation Committee for Career Development.  She was an HHMI international research scholar from 2005 to 2010. Dr. Roditi has also been instrumental in facilitating the MeBOP course and serving as the local organizer.
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Barrie Rooney
Barrie Rooney Ph.D. is based at the School of Biosciences at the University of Kent, UK where she works in the group of Professor Mark Smales.  For many years Dr. Rooney's has been involved with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and other teams to developed a simple diagnosis method to identify sleeping sickness more easily, safely and cheaply than ever before.  For her work, Dr. Rooney was the recipient of the 2016 Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council  (BBSRC) Social Innovator of the Year award. 
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David S. Roos
David S. Roos, Ph.D. is the E. Otis Kendall Professor of Biology at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA.  Dr. Roos earned his undergraduate degree at Harvard College and his a Ph.D. at The Rockefeller University.  Work by Dr. Roos' group seeks to integrate diverse disciplines, from molecular cell biology and pharmacology, to computer science and international public health. Current interests focus on protozoan parasites, including Toxoplasma and Plasmodium. Research in the Roos laboratory has yielded genetic tools for the dissection of parasite pathogenesis and drug resistance mechanisms, new insights into the evolution and function of subcellular organelles, and computational tools including databases making genomic-scale datasets accessible to scientists worldwide.
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Lilach Sheiner
Lilach Sheiner Ph.D. is a research fellow at the University of Glasgow, UK and a PI at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Molecular Parasitology.  She received her Ph.D. from the University of Geneva under the supervision of Dr. Dominique Soldati-Favre and completed her post-doctoral training at the Center of Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases, University of Georgia, USA.   Research in the Sheiner lab centers around fundamental cellular biology, focusing on eukaryotic parasites, mainly using Toxoplasma gondii as a model organism. She put together one of the most widely used genetic manipulation systems for conditional gene depletion in Toxoplasma and made substantial contribution to the understanding of apicomplexan plastid and mitochondrial biology.  Dr. Sheiner is a passionate activist for peace and equality and is a founding member of the Middle East Biology of Parasitism initiative.
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Boris Striepen
Boris Striepen Ph.D. is a professor of Cellular Biology,  Microbiology,  Biochemistry & Molecular Biology at the Center for Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases at the University of Georgia, USA.  Dr. Striepen earned his Ph.D. from Philipps-Universitat, Marburg, Germany.  His group is interested in the cell and molecular biology of protozoan parasites.  His lab uses a broad array of modern genomic, genetic, cell biological and biochemical approaches to understand fundamental parasite biology and use this knowledge to identify and develop targets for intervention. Research topics in the lab include, the function and cell biology of the parasite chloroplast, novel targets for the treatment of Cryptosporidiosis and forward genetic analysis in Toxoplasma gondii.  Recently the Striepen lab was the first to develop genetic tools for Cryptosporidium.
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Rick  Tarleton
Rick Tarleton Ph.D. is a Distinguished Research Professor of Cellular Biology at the Center for Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases at the University of Georgia, USA. Dr. Tarlton earned his Ph.D. in biology from Wake Forest University.  Research in his lab focuses on Trypanosoma cruzi infection and Chagas disease; parasite-host interactions; relative roles of immune system and parasite in Chagas disease; antigen processing and presentation by parasite-infected cells and the role of CD8+ T cells in immunity to T. cruzi; genome-wide scans for vaccine and diagnostic candidates; tool development for genome and proteome analysis.  Recently the Tarlton lab adapted CRISPR technology for use in T. cruzi.
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Andy Waters
Andy Waters Ph.D. is the Director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Molecular Parasitology and a Professor in Biomedical and Life Sciences at the Institute of Infection, Immunity and Inflammation, University of Glasgow, UK.  Dr. Waters is also a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow. The major objective of his work is to understand the molecular developmental biology that is associated with sexual development in Plasmodium. His lab focuses on three research areas: triggers for gametocytogenesis, influence of host environment on parasite development and the development of tools for the more sophisticated genetic engineering of malaria parasites.
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Kerry Woods
Kerry Woods Ph.D. is a group leader at the Institute of Animal Pathology at the University of Bern, Switzerland.  Dr. Woods received her Ph.D. from the University of Glasgow where she studied regulators of autophagy in Leishmania with Dr. Jeremy Mottram.  Her group studies host-parasite interactions in Theileria in particular networks that occur at the schizont surface, both in terms of host cell signal transduction and the association of the schizont with the host cell cytoskeleton.
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