MeBOP 2018

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. 

Richard Burchmore
In addition to heading Proteomics at Glasgow Polyomics, Richard is a Senior Lecturer in the Institute of Infection, Inflammation and Immunity at the College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences. Richard obtained his PhD from the University of London in 1993 and completed postdoctoral fellowships in Oregon, London and Glasgow, becoming a PI at the University of Glasgow in 2003. Richard has longstanding interests in host–pathogen interactions. Over the past decade he has focussed on the application of proteomics to understand the response of pathogens to challenges presented by drugs and hosts. These approaches can readily be brought to bear on a broad range of biological questions and he is consequently involved in collaborative research in areas as diverse as food security, forensics and ecology.

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.

Freddy Frischknecht
Freddy is Professor for Integrative Parasitology at the University  of  Heidelberg Medical School.  Freddy is mainly interested in how malaria parasites move, especially the ones injected by the mosquito into the skin of the host. These sporozoites move at very high speed through the dermis and search for blood vessels that they need to enter. In the lab we use a number of different imaging and biophysical technologies along with classic molecular genetics to understand more about sporozoite biology, from parasite formation to motility and differentiation into red blood cell infecting parasites
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Mehdi Ghorbal

Mehdi Ghorbal completed his PhD at Institute Pasteur in France, where he focused on biochemical, functional and structural characterizing of a DNA-recombinase of Plasmodium and its role in genetic diversification. In 2012, he started a postdoc to explore the DNA-repair mechanisms and gene regulation in Plasmodium falciparum. During his postdoc, he participated in implementing the genome-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9 for P. falciparum. He is currently involved in scaling up the CRISPR-Cas9 technology for Plasmodium.

Alex Grinberg
Alex Grinberg DVM, Ph.D. is a senior lecturer in microbiology and public health at the School of Veterinary Science, Massey University, New Zealand.  His research and expertise focuses on diagnostic bacteriology and molecular epidemiology of infectious agents. Significant areas of research include Cryptosporidium and cryptosporidiosis, Staphylococcus aureus and antimicrobial drug resistance.
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Gerry Graham
Gerry is Professor of Molecular and Structural Immunology at the Institute of infection, immunity and inflamation. His lab has had a long-standing standing interest in chemokines and their receptors and have been working in this field for 18 years. Currently, the lab has a number of projects that relate to various aspects of chemokine and chemokine receptor function: Studies into the biological function of the D6-chemokine decoy receptor.

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Omar S. Harb
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Philipp Olias

Philipp is a group leader at the Institute for Veterinary pathology at the University of Bern in Bern, Switzerland.  His groups is interested in the molecular mechanisms as to how  apicomplexan parasites interact with their host cells and cause disease.  The main organisms utilized in the lab are the cattle pathogens Theileria annulata and Theileria parva, which both have a substantial socio-economic impact, and the zoonotic parasite Cryptosporidium parvum. Cryptosporidium parasites are the leading cause of diarrhoea in calves, one of the most important diseases in cattle. Cryptosporidium parasites are also leading diarrheal pathogens in humans, resulting in substantial child mortality globally.

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Charles  Jaffe

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Poppy Lamberton
Shulamit Michaeli
Mattie Pawlowic

Mattie Pawlowic, Ph.D. is a group leader in the Division of Biological Chemistry and Drug Discovery (BCDD) and the Wellcome Centre for Anti-Infectives Research (WCAIR) at the University of Dundee, Dundee, Scotland.  Her lab focuses on understanding the biology and biochemistry of Cryptosporidium with the goal of developing new anti-parasitic drugs.  Mattie previously studied the parasite Leishmania during her undergraduate and graduate years at Texas Tech University, and subsequently was a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Boris Striepen at the University of Georgia. During her time in the Striepen lab, Dr. Pawlowic developed genetic tools for studying Cryptosporidium.

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 currnetly the CEO of TROZON X17, a charity company designing diagnostics for Tropical Zone Diseases which are simple to use in any environment.  Previously she was based at the School of Biosciences at the University of Kent, UK where she worked 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 Zurich 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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Chris Tonkin

Chris is interested understanding the molecular pathways that are responsible for causing disease in apicomplexan parasites. In particular, he aims to understand how parasites are able to sense their environment and regulate infectivity as well as modify their environment for their own benefit. Chris completed his PhD at The University of Melbourne on the relict plastid of apicomplexan parasites and then undertook a postdoc investigating the molecular basis of antigenic variation in malaria parasites. He now heads up a laboratory at The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne Australia, where his group primarily uses Toxoplasma to understand fundamental principles driving infectivity and persistence and how they relate to disease of apicomplexan parasites as a whole.
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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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Akhil Vaidya

Dr. Akhil B. Vaidya is a Professor of Microbiology and Immunology and the Director of the Center for Molecular Parasitology within the Institute for Molecular Medicine and Infectious Disease at Drexel University College of Medicine. He is a molecular parasitologist who has carried out seminal research on mitochondrial physiology and bioenergetics in malaria parasites as well as on mechanisms of antimalarial drug action and resistance.  Dr. Vaidya's research interests also include development of new antimalarial drugs, parasite genomics, and global health challenges.  He has served and continues to serve on numerous review panels at NIH, NSF, CDC and Veterans Administration. In addition to his research activities, Dr. Vaidya continues to participate heavily in teaching activities in both the medical and graduate student programs.

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