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Research Focus & Interests   

Main research areas: Malaria vaccine design; malaria antibodies; cryo-electron microscopy; structural biology; computational biology; antimalarial resistance; membrane transporters

Malaria has been a plague on humanity for thousands of years and is still today one of the deadliest infectious diseases, each year causing hundreds of million infections that result in hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide.  The malaria parasite, Plasmodium spp, has a remarkable ability to evolve resistance to drugs and to evade the human immune system.  Thus, the world urgently needs better vaccines and antimalarials.

My lab is interested in both basic and applied aspects of malaria and malaria therapeutics, and is focused on two main projects: 1) how does the immune system respond to the malaria parasite, and how we can use these data to develop better vaccines? 2) how do membrane transporters contribute to antimalarial resistance? 

We are structural biologists, meaning we aim to understand the 3D organization of biological macromolecules, like proteins and nucleic acids, in order to understand their function.  Our primary tool is cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), which allows us to generate atomic models of the 3-dimensional structure of our protein of interest.  We use these data to understand, for instance, how a human antibody neutralizes Plasmodium and prevents infection, or how a mutation in a parasite transporter confers resistance to an antimalarial compound. 

We then apply the principles of computational biology to rationally engineer protein-based malaria vaccines and test these in animal models for vaccine efficacy, with the long-term goal of testing improved malaria vaccine designs in humans in malaria-endemic regions, like sub-Saharan Africa and South America.

We also work with clinicians to apply our structural biology approach to ongoing clinical trials of malaria vaccines to provide a more complete picture of the variation in vaccine efficacy observed among trial participants, what are the key mediators of vaccine-mediated protection from malaria infection.