Alum

Shahiid Kiyaga 

Shahiid Kiyaga

Shahiid is a Visiting Scholar with a focus on Host-Pathogen Genomics, Genetics, and Bioinformatics. He serves as a research fellow for the IMMRSE-U study at IDRC and is a MakDARTA project PhD fellow at Makerere University. He holds a Master's degree in Bioinformatics and a Bachelor's degree in both Biochemistry and Mathematics.
His trining in Genetics, Genomics, Bioinformatics, and Machine Learning Modeling, informs his exploration of transmission dynamics of Plasmodium falciparum in areas with high Malaria endemicity in Uganda. 

Bertha Kasonde

Bertha Kasonde

Bertha was a Visiting Scholar from the Tropical Diseases Research Centre in Ndola, Zambia in early 2024. She has a bachelor's degree in Biological sciences and a masters degree in Medical Parasitology, all from the University of Zambia. Her research interests lie in the application of molecular biology tools in detection of malaria parasites and other infections. At the EPPIcenter, she is working on the ZUMBA study to determine the impact of imported malaria on the local transmission patterns in Ndola.

Sydney Mwanza 

Sydney Mwanza

Sydney was a Visiting Scholar from the Tropical Diseases Research Centre in Ndola, Zambia in early 2024. His interest is the application of molecular biology tools in detection and comprehension of malaria parasites and other infections.

Nathan Lo

NathanLo

Nathan worked with us a Faculty Fellow in Infectious Diseases, before transitioning to Stanford in 2023. He is an infectious diseases epidemiologist and public health scientist. His work draws upon diverse quantitative methodologies to better understand transmission of infectious diseases to design public health policy, focusing on vaccine-preventable infections and tropical diseases, often in collaboration with policy organizations. Nathan received a BS in Bioengineering from Rice University, and MD/PhD (Epidemiology) from Stanford University. He completed clinical residency at UCSF.

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Sophia Tan

Sophia Tan

 

Sophia was a staff member after graduating from UC Berkeley with a double major in Data Science and Molecular & Cell Biology. She moved with Dr Lo to Stanford in 2023. She previously worked with the WASH Benefits team to understand the complex relationships between child biomarkers and child growth and development outcomes. She's interested in exploring the intersection of global health and data science and utilizing computational tools to inform public health policy.

 

Benjamin Singer 

Ben Singer

Ben Singer was a postdoctoral scholar with interests in mathematical epidemiology and global public health, before transitioning to Stanford in 2023. He explored the effective geographical targeting of mass drug administration campaigns for schistosomiasis. Ben’s research career began with an internship at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, where he applied quantitative skills he had learnt studying physics at the University of Oxford to the study of nematode locomotion. Ben further pursued quantitative methods in life sciences in the Interdisciplinary Bioscience Doctoral Training Programme at the University of Oxford, earning a DPhil (PhD equivalent) in mathematical methods for evaluating pandemic risk and control. During these studies he maintained an interest in global public health policy, interning with the UK government’s Department for International Development, where he developed models of international COVID-19 vaccine distribution. 

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Eric Vickers

Eric Vickers

Eric was a Staff Research Associate in our lab.

 

Isobel Routledge 

Isobel Routledge, PhD

Isobel was a Postdoctoral Scholar at the EPPIcenter. She was interested in vector-borne diseases and how their spatio-temporal dynamics are shaped by environmental, demographic and societal factors. She was also interested in methodological approaches which combine diverse data types to understand complex problems in global health. At UCSF, her research focused on combining epidemiological and genetic data to characterize malaria parasite transmission occurring between different geographic locations. She obtained her PhD and MRes in Infectious Disease Epidemiology from Imperial College London, working with Samir Bhatt and Azra Ghani. She has a BA in Biological Sciences from Oxford University. We look forward to working with her at the Dept of Public Health in SF.

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Saki Takahashi 

SakiTakahashi

Saki was a postdoctoral scholar and a 2019 Schmidt Science Fellow. She was broadly interested in understanding the ecological and evolutionary interactions between pathogens and host immunity across scales. At UCSF, she worked on linking data and quantitative models to study the immuno-epidemiology of malaria and other infectious diseases. Saki completed her PhD at Princeton University with Jessica Metcalf and Bryan Grenfell, and holds an ScM in epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and an AB in applied mathematics from Harvard College. We are excited she has taken a position at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

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Keirstinne Turcios

EPPIcenter logo

Keirstinne was a Staff Research Associate in our lab, having earned her MS at SF State. She was our Lab Manager, in charge of lab logistics and compliance for a year, during the pandemic.

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Owen Jansen  

Owen Jansen

Owen was a Staff Research Associate in our lab, having earned his BA in Chemistry from Haverford University. As indicated in his photo, he is an avid mycologist, with a passion for metagenomics and bioinformatics. He left to work in a start-up.

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Jill Hakim 

Jill Hakim

Jill was a Staff Research Associate in our lab, having earned her undergrad degree in public health from Johns Hopkins and an MPH at the University of Michigan. She left us to continue her education at Johns Hopkins Molecular Microbiology and Immunology (MMI) PhD program

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Lloyd Chapman

Lloyd Chapman, PhD

Lloyd was a postdoctoral scholar with us, before moving to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 2021. His research applies novel mathematical and statistical methods to infectious disease data at different scales to improve understanding of disease transmission and inform control interventions. He is particularly interested in Bayesian approaches to missing data problems. At UCSF he is working on modeling longitudinal malaria antibody dynamics and infectious disease outbreaks in vulnerable populations in the US. Previously Lloyd worked on modeling of neglected tropical diseases to support national control programs aiming to achieve the WHO 2020 NTD elimination goals, first as a postdoc in the Neglected Tropical Disease Modeling Consortium at the University of Warwick and then as an assistant professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He holds a MMath in Mathematics and a PhD in Mathematical and Computational Biology from the University of Oxford.

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Sofonias Kifle Tessema 

Sofonias

 

Sofonias was a postdoctoral scholar with us from 2016 to 2019. He worked on population genetic analyses using both targeted and whole-genome sequence data to describe patterns of transmission and parasite connectivity in southern Africa. Sofonias completed MSc in Biomedical Sciences in Ethiopia followed by a Ph.D. in microbiology and humoral immunology from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute for Medical Research, Australia. 

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Elias Duarte

EliasDuarte

Elias was our Lab manager , involved in many of our wet lab projects. He has a BS in Biology from San Francisco State University, and left to pursue his PhD at Berkeley.

Noam Teyssier

NoamTheysser

Noam was one of our a Bioinformatics Programmers. He studied Biomolecular Engineering with a concentration in Bioinformatics and started at UCSF in 2017 after graduating from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He worked on developing pipelines and scripts to process and analyze genomic and proteomic datasets with applications to strain differentiation, longitudinal dynamics of infection, and immunological profiling. He left us to continue his education as a Bioinformatics PhD Student at UCSF.

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Yoon Lee

YoonLee

Yoon was one of our research associates. He focused on malaria genomics and protein microarrays. He completed his degree in plant genomics at UC Berkeley in 2017.