Friday Conference: Malaria Transmission In Tanzania

Jessica Lin, MD, MSCR, is an Associate Professor of Medicine-Infectious Diseases and Microbiology & Immunology at UNC and serves as an Associate Program Director for the UNC Infectious Diseases Fellowship. She did her infectious disease training at UNC (2009-2012), afterwards joining the faculty and helping to found the Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Ecology Lab (IDEEL). When she is not seeing patients in clinic or attending on the MedK service/General ID consults, she is usually thinking about malaria. Her research marries fieldwork and molecular methods to understand malaria epidemiology and clinical outcomes. Early in her career, she helped describe key molecular correlates of failure to frontline malaria therapies in Southeast Asia. Her current projects are based in East Africa and focus on 1) the asymptomatic infectious reservoir for malaria transmission, 2) the emergence of Plasmodium ovale, and 3) barriers to “last-mile” malaria elimination in Zanzibar, including the role of human mobility and malaria importation. Her talk will focus on a large field study her team completed in 2021 that used mosquito feeding assays to detect those capable of transmitting malaria to mosquitos, including lessons learned about who makes up the infectious reservoir and determinants of infectiousness to mosquitoes.