Collaborators & Partners
Alfredo Mayor, PhD
Alfredo Mayor is an Associate Research Professor at Instituto Salud Global (ISGlobal), Barcelona Center for International Health Research (CRESIB) and Manhica Health Research Center (CISM, MOZAMBIQUE), specializing& in malaria parasitology. The overall goal of Dr. Mayor’s translational research is to contribute to the development of new tools for the control and eventual elimination of malaria through the understanding of key malaria physiopathology events. His research team ‘Malaria Physiopathology’ combines molecular biology, immunology and clinical medicine with innovation in multiplexed platforms to decipher the interplay between malaria transmission, parasite factors, immunity and disease. With collaborators at the Manhiça Health Research Centre (CISM; Mozambique) and the St Joseph Catholic Hospital (SJCH; Monrovia), his group has described the immunological and parasitological factors involved in the progression of malaria disease in children and pregnant women. His group is currently applying molecular and immunological techniques to understand the physiopathology of malaria in the most vulnerable populations, as well as to develop new diagnostic and surveillance tools for malaria monitoring and response in elimination contexts.
Amy Wesolowski, PhD
Amy Wesolowski is an Assistant Professor in the department of Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University. She is interested in understanding how human behavior can impact infectious disease dynamics. She uses a range of statistical and dynamical models to better understand disease transmission and control. She also works to use novel data sources to describe human populations. She primarily works in Africa and Asia supporting both field and modeling studies. She completed her PhD in Engineering and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University in 2014.
Chris Drakeley, PhD
Chris Drakeley is a Professor of Infection & Immunity at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. He has more than 30 years experience of working on malaria with much of his time spent working overseas in a variety of African countries including Tanzania & The Gambia. His research centres on developing a better understanding of malaria transmission of parasites in different settings. This includes studies aimed at understanding the fundamentals of malaria transmission dynamics including risks factors for transmission in endemic populations and defining the infectious reservoir of malaria. His group is involved in the comparison and optimisation of approaches to measure transmission with a focus on serological markers for exposure to infection. These components are linked together by the evaluation of strategies designed to reduce and block transmission including transmission blocking vaccines and drugs.
David Smith, PhD
David L Smith is a Professor of Health Metrics Sciences, and heads the Malaria Control and Elimination team at IHME at the University of Washington. His team uses multiple quantitative methods in an expansive research program that addresses questions in basic science, computational epidemiology, disease ecology, mathematical modeling, and policy analytics for global health. A key goal is to quantify and propagate uncertainty to improve scientific inference and provide robust policy advice. Smith has published on several diseases including malaria, influenza, rabies, dengue, yellow fever, cholera and nosocomial bacterial pathogens such as Staphylococcus aureus and enterococci. His research has covered themes relating to mosquito ecology, mosquito-borne pathogen transmission, human and mosquito mobility, the spatial dynamics of infectious diseases, evolution of resistance, disease control, and malaria elimination and eradication. Smith is a member of the Malaria Atlas Project, a contributor to the Global and Local Burden of Diseases Studies, and PI of the Malaria Modeling Consortium Secretariat.
Derek Cummings, PhD
Derek Cummings is a Professor of Biology at the University of Florida and an Adj. Professor of Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University. His research focuses on emerging pathogens has included studies of MERS, Ebola and novel influenza, observing and characterizing transmission dynamics in the early days of outbreaks. Particular areas of focus include speed and patterns of transmission and the natural history of a pathogen. Cummings and his colleagues collaborated to develop an infectious disease surveillance system for targeting Ebola and other infectious diseases before they proliferate and become serious threats to public health.
Henrik Salje, PhD
Henrik Salje established the Pathogen Dynamics Group at Cambridge, where he is a Professor fo Genetics. His research combines the development of analytical approaches with empirical research to better understand the transmission dynamics of different infectious diseases with the ultimate goal of helping guide control efforts. In particular, this involves working with genetic, antigenic, and epidemiological data alongside information on how populations behave, interact with their environment. He has an undergraduate degree in Biochemistry from Oxford University, a Master's degree in Biostatistics from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and a PhD in Epidemiology, also from Johns Hopkins.
Jeff Bailey, MD, PhD
Jeff Bailey is an Associate Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Brown University. He studies infectious disease genetics and genomics aiming to understand host and pathogen interactions within the context of immunity and human disease. His research is integrative combining experimental and computational approaches. The majority of his current research relates to the parasitic infection malaria—including the direct consequences of infection, parasite genome structure, tracking the spread of drug resistance, and the examination of related diseases including the cancer Burkitt lymphoma. He has made major contributions to methods for analyzing whole genome sequencing in particular to study segmental duplication and copy number variation as well as more recent methods for high-throughput pathogen targeted sequencing to track pathogens across space and time.
Kevin Tetteh, PhD
Kevin Tetteh is an Associate Professor of Infectious and Tropical Diseases at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. His research examines the molecular genetics and characterization of antigens associated with the merozoite stage of the malarial parasite Plasmodium falciparum, as well as vaccine discovery/design, focused on blood stage of infection.
Prasanna Jagannathan, MD
Prasanna Jagannathan is an Assistant Professor of Infectious Diseases at Stanford University. His research focuses malaria-specific immune responses in pregnancy and infancy. His aim is to is to further our understanding of the mechanisms of clinical immunity to malaria through field-based studies, and to better understand the immunologic consequences of malaria control interventions. Given the profound global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, his team also tests novel immune modulating therapeutics for the treatment of SARS-CoV-2 infected patients with mild infection. In this study 120 SARS-CoV-2 infected patients (both symptomatic and asymptomatic) are randomized to receive Lambda vs. placebo to test the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2-infected individuals given Lambda at the time of diagnosis have a shortened duration of viral shedding in comparison to patients given placebo.
INSTITUTIONS:
Infectious Diseases Research Collaboration (IDRC)
The Infectious Diseases Research Collaboration (IDRC) is a non-profit research organization based in Kampala, Uganda, since 2008. IDRC conducts research in infectious diseases including Malaria, HIV and Tuberculosis. Their studies have led to over 300 publications and have impacted on the management of infectious diseases in Uganda. IDRC currently manages over 41 Grants with an annual budget of $11 million. IDRC was established by Ugandan health scientists from Makerere University College of Health Sciences, University of California, San Francisco and the Uganda Ministry of Health.
CZB
In 2016, the Chan Zuckerberg initiative was launched with a bold vision: to cure, prevent or manage disease in our children’s lifetime. The Chan Zuckerberg Biohub was created to support that vision — by understanding the fundamental mechanisms underlying disease and developing new technologies to lead to actionable diagnostics and effective therapies.
We are a regional research endeavor with international reach — where the Bay Area’s leading institutions (Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCSF) join forces with the Biohub’s innovative internal team to catalyze impact, benefiting people and partnerships around the world.