Emerging Artemisinin Combination Therapy in East African Plasmodium Falciparum Populations

Dr. Melissa Conrad has a PhD in Biomedical Sciences from NYU School of Medicine, where she studied the population genomics of Trichomonas vaginalis. She did her postdoc at UCSF, focusing on the molecular epidemiology of antimalarial drug resistance in Uganda. As faculty at UCSF, she is working to characterize emerging artemisinin combination therapy resistance in Uganda, using genomic and parasitological approaches. Recently relocating to Johns Hopkins University, she collaborates with investigators in Uganda and Zambia to perform molecular and parasitological surveillance for antimalarial resistance, utilize genomics, ex vivo drug susceptibility and clinical phenotypes to identify novel mechanisms and markers of resistance, and to use gene editing approaches to validate the role of natural occurring variation in resistance.