Commemorating World Malaria Day – April 25, 2016
Rick Fairhurst, MD, PhD – an NIAID physician-scientist and director of the NIH MD/PhD Partnership Training Program – has now trained seven NIH-OxCam students in malaria research, in collaboration with seven different professors at the Universities of Oxford or Cambridge. Recent graduates include Jeanette Beaudry, MD, PhD, who just matched into her top choice pediatrics residency program at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, Michael Krause, DPhil, who is completing medical school at Case Western Reserve University, and Aaron Neal, DPhil, who is currently completing a post-doctoral fellowship in the Fairhurst laboratory and applying for positions at the CDC. Current students include Jessica Hostetler, Kimberly Faldetta, Megan Ansbro, and Erin Coonahan. All of these PhD and MD/PhD students have challenging projects, such as discovering new mechanisms of antimalarial drug resistance or identifying new malaria vaccine candidates, and the opportunity to work in remote malarious areas of Mali and Cambodia. On some days, these students are spread across four continents. In the Fairhurst laboratory, every day is World Malaria Day!
Photo courtesy of the Fairhurst Lab shows Michael Krause, an NIH-OxCam student in the Fairhurst laboratory, as he helps to enroll 1500 children into a four-year cohort study of malaria risk in Kenieroba village, Mali. The findings from this study were later published in Lancet Infectious Diseases, the world’s top-ranked Infectious Diseases specialty journal