IID Seminar Series – Ashley Vaughan

Title Talk

“TBC“

THIS SPEAKER WILL BE IN PERSON IN  FXB 301. 
The event will be hybrid.

Speaker Information

Ashley Vaughan

Associate Professor, University of Washington School of Medicine

Ashley received his PhD from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and studies the disease malaria, caused by Plasmodium parasites. Ashley and his team have shown the importance of the parasite’s fatty acid synthetic pathway for sporozoite and liver stage maturation. The team also researches how to elicit the most protective immune response after vaccination with genetically attenuated parasites. Ashley and his team have led significant advances in the use of human liver-chimeric mouse models for studying human malaria parasites. This includes complete liver stage development and the transition to blood stage malaria in the mouse for the human malarias Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax. The team have also used this mouse model for the creation of experimental Plasmodium falciparum genetic crosses, a significant advance that aids in our understanding of P. falciparum drug resistance and linking genotypes to phenotypes. More recently, the Vaughan lab has used the human liver-chimeric mouse model to study the formation of the P. vivax dormant liver stage hypnozoite as well as hypnozoite persistence and activation. Ashley continues to be fascinated by basic parasite pre-erythrocytic biology – the mosquito and liver stages of the life cycle and to this end the team also use rodent malaria models for parasite transgenesis to understand how the parasite interacts with its vector and host during sporozoite and liver stage development. Ashley collaborates with Dr. Kappe and Sather at the Center for Global Infectious Disease Research. He also collaborates both nationally and internationally with malaria experts including Dr. Jetsumon Sattabongkot at Mahidol University, Bangkok, Thailand, a leading expert in the field of P. vivax research.