MeBOP 2017

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. 

Serge Ankri Ph.D. is a professor of medicine at Technion Israel Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. from Universite de Paris-Sud, Orsay, France. His post-doctoral work was carried out in the laboratory of David Mirelman at the Weizmann Institute. Currently, his research group focuses on various aspects of virulence and epigenetic contribution to stress adaptation in the parasite Entamoeba histolytica. 

Jeremy Burrows,, Ph.D., is the Vice President and Head of Drug Discovery in the Research and Development Department of the Medicines for Malaria Venture. In this role, he works on discovering and delivering the next generation of antimalarial compounds for preclinical and clinical evaluation. He trained as a synthetic organic chemist with Jeremy Robertson at Oxford University and recieved his D.Phil in 1996. Since them, he worked at AstroZeneca until 2008 as a medicinal chemist working in areas of rheumatoid and osteoarthritis, diabetes, neurology, and anti-infectives. Following this, he worked in Sweden and UK, leading teams and sections across the drug discovery continuum in Lead Generation and Lead Optimization. He has developed over 35 patent applications and published over 50 papers and book chapters covering medicinal chemistry and various therapeutic areas. Outside of medicinal chemistry and malaria research, Dr. Burrows is on the advisory committees for the Anti-Wolbachia consortium at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, and the Hit-to-Lead Platform for the Global Health Innovation Technology Fund (GHIT) based in Japan.

James (Jim) Collins, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor in the Pharmacology Department at UT Southwestern Medical Campus. Jim Collins received his BS in Biology from Southeast Missouri State University (2003) and PhD from Washington University in St. Louis (2008). He did postdoctoral work with Phillip Newmark (Howard Hughes Medical Institute) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on the basic biology parasitic flatworms called schistosomes. These parasites infect more than 200 million of the world's poorest people, causing morbidity that rivals global killers including Malaria and TB. Despite their devastating global impact, only a single drug is available to treat schistosome infection. As a postdoc Dr. Collins developed new functional genomic tools to study these worms and using these tools discovered a novel population of stem cells that are likely key to parasite survival inside their human host. By studying these stem cells, and applying large-scale functional genomic approaches, his work aims to develop new therapeutic avenues to combat these devastating parasites.

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.

Dr. Eva Gluenz is a professor at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at the University of Oxford. Research in the Gluenz lab focuses on the structure and function of the Leishmania flagellum, use of RNA-sequencing to map gene expression patterns in the insect and mammalian-infective forms of Leishmania mexicana, and developing genome editing tools to harness the information from genome, transcriptome, and proteome data to dissect the cell biology of Leishmania.
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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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Charles  Jaffe

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Poppy Lamberton
Shulamit Michaeli
Paco Pino

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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Dominique Soldati-Favre
Dominique Soldati-Favre obtained her PhD degree at the University of Zürich in 1990. She was then a postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University, Assistant Professor at the University of Heidelberg and Reader at Imperial College London. In Geneva, she was appointed Associate Professor in 2004 at the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Medicine, then full Professor in 2010. Dominique Soldati-Favre is Vice-Dean of the Faculty since 2011.
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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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Karin Troell
Karin Troell, Ph.D. is a researcher at the National Veterinary Institute in Uppsala, Sweden.  Karin's research looks at food and waterborne protozoa (Giardia lamblia and Cryptosporidium species). She develops diagnostic tools for the molecular identification and typing of parasites for genomic and transcriptomic analysis.
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