I received my undergraduate training in Zoology from Oxford University and a Masters in Medical Parasitology from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, before moving to the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Rochester (New York State) for graduate school. Following postdoctoral work in Oxford and Milan, I moved to the Texas Biomedical Research Institute (Texas Biomed) as the only parasite biologist in 1999.
I have previously studied mice on the Orkney Islands, butterfly-ant symbioses in Australia, giant rats in New Guinea, Wolbachia endosymbionts in filarial nematodes, and roundworm transmission in Guatemalan villages, before focusing on the genetics and evolution of malaria and schistosome parasites.
Lab goals
My lab aims to bridge the gap between mainstream evolutionary biology and parasitology. We focus on malaria and schistosomes, the most important of the protozoan and helminth parasites infecting humans, which are also genetically and experimentally tractable. We utilize a population/quantitative genetics framework, and both experimental and field-based research to ask questions about the evolution, ecology and transmission of these parasites.
My malaria research focuses on understanding how many times drug resistance has evolved in nature, the role of compensation and epistasis, what genes are involved, the role of copy number variation and SNPs, and the composition of complex parasite infections containing multiple parasite genotypes.
My schistosome research pioneers use of laboratory genetic crosses and association mapping for analysis of drug resistance and host specificity, and sequencing of single miracidia larvae for investigating introgression, epidemiology and population biology.
