Advisory Board and Editors Infectious Diseases
Nicky McCreesh
Dr McCreesh is an Assistant Professor in Infectious Disease Modelling at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
She is interested in understanding Mtb transmission patterns, and in how contact data can be used to develop a better understanding of potential M.tb. transmission sites, and to inform intervention strategies. She also works on the calibration and analysis of complex individual-based stochastic models, and is involved with a project to develop a history matching and model emulation R package.
Previous research includes HIV and schistosomiasis modelling, and work on respondent-driven sampling.
Rachel McMullan
Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellow using C. elegans genetics to understand how animals respond to infection. In particular the cross talk between nervous and immune systems that coordinates behavioural and cellular responses to infection. Member of the Genetics society and British Society for Cell Biology.
Héctor Manuel Mora-Montes
In 2010, I established the Laboratory of Fungal Glycobiology at Universidad de Guanajuato, Mexico, with the main goal to understand the synthesis mechanisms of the fungal cell wall and the interaction of medically relevant fungal pathogens with the host. This laboratory is characterized by its facilities to perform chemical, immunological, genetic, molecular, and cellular analyses of human fungal pathogens. Therefore, it is among a handful of research facilities within Mexico and Latin America offering a multidisciplinary and integral approach to understand the host-fungus interaction. Our group has a solid international reputation in the molecular and immunological studies of organisms belonging to the genus Candida and Sporothrix.
Karen L. Mossman
Professor of Pathology and Molecular Medicine and member of the Institute of Infectious Disease Research and McMaster Immunology Research Centre at McMaster University. Associate Editor of PLOS Pathogens and PLOS ONE and Editorial Board Member of Journal of Virology. Recipient of the 2006 Christina Fleischmann Award from the International Society for Interferon and Cytokine Research.
Garry Myers
PhD (1999) at U. Sydney, followed by a postdoc at The Institute for Genome Research (TIGR). I joined the TIGR Faculty in 2005. In 2007, I was a co-founder of the Institute for Genome Sciences at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. In 2014, I joined the ithree Institute at the University of Technology Sydney as Associate Professor. My research interests are the application of bioinformatics and genomic-scale tools to bacterial pathogens and the host response, particularly Chlamydia.
Bernd Neumann
Dr. Bernd Neumann is a German scientist in the field of microbiology. He has a Bachelor´s (B.Sc.) and Master´s (M.Sc.) degree in Human Biology from the University of Greifswald, Division Physiological Proteomics and Bioinformatics at the Institute for Microbiology (supervisor Katharina Riedel). He holds a PhD (Dr.rer.nat.) in Biology from the Technical University of Braunschweig. For his PhD and as PostDoc he worked at the Robert Koch Institute, Division of nosocomial pathogens and antibiotic resistances at the Department of infectious diseases.
Currently he is working as scientist at the Nuremberg General Hospital, Institute for hospital hygiene, medical microbiology and infectious diseases, that also is a university institute of the Paracelsus Medical University. He is working on antimicrobial resistant bacteria (ESKAPE-group) and resistance-mediating mobile genetic elements in the healthcare environment, mainly using molecular approaches as next-generation sequencing.
Marisa Fabiana Nicolás
Dr. Marisa Fabiana Nicolás is a biologist with a Ph.D. in Genetics. She worked as a protein annotator in the UniProt/Swiss-Prot database from 2005 to 2007. Since May 2009 she is an Associate Researcher at the Bioinformatics Laboratory (Labinfo) at LNCC/MCTI Brazil. Dr. Nicolas has experience in Genetics, Molecular Biology, Genomics, and Bioinformatics. She works mainly in Bioinformatics applied to the analysis of genomes and transcriptomes (RNAseq and scRNAseq) and metabolic and regulatory networks in clinically relevant pathogens.
Corey Nislow
Corey Nislow's laboratory develops and uses cutting edge tools to address this central question: how can we understand the biological commonalities in all of the life sciences; from embryonic development, to the spread of infectious diseases to better ways to treat cancer. Each of these disciplines can be explained in the context of competition, interaction and evolution. His lab studies the interface between genes and the environment using parallel genome-wide screens, high throughput cell-based assays and next generation sequencing. Most recently, he and his scientific partner, Dr. Guri Giaever, are exploring how laboratory experiments can co-opt evolutionary processes to understand drug action. He enjoys teaching all aspects of biotechnology, genomics and drug discovery. He got his PhD from the University of Colorado, worked at several Biotechnology companies and was at Stanford and University of Toronto before joining UBC in 2013. He has published 161 papers and run 19 marathons.
Conor P O'Byrne
Director of the Bacterial Stress Response Group, Senior lecturer in Microbiology at the National University of Ireland, Galway. The research focus in my group is on the molecular mechanisms that food-borne bacterial pathogens use to sense and respond to harsh conditions in their environment. Pathogens encounter major physicochemical changes as they transition from food into the host, particularly in relation to pH, osmolarity, oxygen concentration, light and temperature. Understanding how pathogenic bacteria detect and respond to these changes is critical if we are to devise sensible strategies to prevent their entry into the food chain and to prevent infections from arising in the human population. In my laboratory we study two important food-borne pathogens, Listeria monocytogenes and Escherichia coli.
Audrey R Odom John
Chief, Division of Infectious Diseases, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
The primary research goals of our lab are to understand the biological functions of specific metabolic pathways in the malaria parasite--that is, to understand what the parasite needs to make, and why it needs to make it.
Sonia MR Oliveira
Doctor Sonia Oliveira holds a Licenciatura in Biology (pre-Bologna) and a Master in Cellular and Molecular Biology from the University of Aveiro, where she also specialized in medicinal plants, toxicology, murine models, and spermatogenesis. In 2011 she moved to Australia to work in Reproductive Biological Sciences. She later explored the nerve-cancer connection in Cancer, namely in female cancers, and completed her Ph.D. in Human Physiology ( with a significant component in Medical Biochemistry and Neurophysiology) from the University of Newcastle (Australia) in 2018. She then worked with biomimetic systems and nanotechnology in diabetes and stem cells. She explored multiple methods for primary and secondary cell culture, always with a keen interest in histopathology, cell biology, and rare disorders. Participated in >40 event(s). (Co-)Supervised MSc dissertation(s) and final projects for course completion of LSc/BSc. And works mostly in the area(s) of Natural sciences with emphasis on Molecular and Cellular Biology, and Medical and Health Sciences with emphasis on Neurosciences, Cancer, Reproduction, Toxicology, Biotechnology, and Stem cells. Also has collaborations in Microbiology, Biomaterials, and Communication and Information technologies.
Tanya Parish
Tanya Parish a Principal Investigator in the Center for Global Infectious Disease Research, Seattle Children’s Research Institute and a Professor in the Department of Pediatrics, University of Washington School of Medicine.
Her work focuses on the discovery of new drugs that are effective at curing drug-sensitive and drug-resistant tuberculosis with the added goal of shortening the time it takes to cure disease. This encompasses a range of early stage drug discovery including drug target identification and validation, high throughput screening and medicinal chemistry. In addition, her group works to understand the pathogenic mechanisms and basic biology of the global pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis and using this information to inform drug discovery.
Tanya is a microbiologist by training, with a background in mycobacteriology. She received her PhD at the National Institute for Medical Research investigating gene regulation in mycobacteria followed by postdoctoral research at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine studying several facets of the biology of M. tuberculosis. She previously held an academic post as Professor of Mycobacteriology at Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry, and was a Senior Vice President (Drug Discovery) at the Infectious Disease Research Institue.
Tanya has edited several books on mycobacteria and published numerous papers on the basic biology and genetics of M. tuberculosis.