Articles Categorized in Member Q&A

Abdoulaye Djimde, PharmD, PhD, was elected to the ASTMH Council in 2016. He is the Society’s first international Councilor. Prof. Djimde has a long association with ASTMH. He is a 20-year member and has missed only two Annual Meetings during that time. He also earned his PhD while working as a graduate student with two ASTMH Past Presidents, Christopher V. Plowe at the University of Maryland and Thomas E. Wellems at the NIH.

Brandy St. Laurent, PhD, is a postdoctoral fellow at the NIH Laboratory of Malaria and Vector Research. Brandy is a mosquito ecologist working with ASTMH Councilor Rick Fairhurst, MD, PhD, where she characterizes the vectors responsible for the transmission of artemisinin-resistant malaria in Cambodia. The lab side of that work was recently published in Nature Communications. Brandy also spends several months a year in Cambodia collecting mosquitoes. Brandy is an ASTMH member in ACME and was recently awarded a Gates Grand Challenges Explorations grant to explore the use of cow-baited tents as a malaria control and monitoring tool.

At this year's Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, Christopher Plowe, MD, MPH, FASTMH, an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Founding Director of the Institute for Global Health at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, ended his term as ASTMH President and handed the reins to President-elect Stephen Higgs, PhD, FRES, FASTMH, Director of the Biosecurity Research Institute at Kansas State University

ASTMH President Christopher V. Plowe, MD, MPH, FASTMH, and ASTMH member Myaing Nyunt, MD, MPH, PhD, led efforts to convene the historic conference -- held in Washington, D.C. August 2-4 -- on eliminating malaria in Myanmar. Plowe, founding director of University of Maryland School of Medicine’s Institute for Global Health (IGH), along with Nyunt, assistant professor of Medicine, and director of the IGH’s efforts in Myanmar, have been studying the disease and its impact on Myanmar for the past two decades. Following the conference, ASTMH checked in with Plowe and Nyunt to get their reflections and insights. 

This month we checked in with Kim Lindblade, PhD, who is currently in Guinea to address Ebola.

This month, we interview the Society's new Assistant Scientific Program Chair Stephanie Yanow, PhD, Program Leader, Research and Development, Alberta Provincial Laboratory for Public Health, and Assistant Professor at the University of Alberta. Yanow's research is primarily focused on the development and application of molecular diagnostics for the detection of malaria in different public health settings. She is also involved with efforts to expand point-of-care disagnostics for malaria and has worked with colleagues around the world on trials.

At ASTMH in Peru, Sandy Olkowski -- a PhD candidate in entomology at the University of California, Davis, and an active trainee in the ASTMH Committee on Global Health -- connected with Alejandro Castellanos-Gonzalez, PhD, a new memer of the Society who has attended the Annual Meeting for most of his career. Castellanos-Gonzalez is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Internal Medicine, Division Infectious Diseases at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.

This month, we spoke with Christine Petersen, DVM, PhD, Director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases and an Associate Professor at University of Iowa, College of Public Health. An active member of the American Committee of Molecular, Cellular and Immunoparasitology (ACMCIP), Petersen teaches joint veterinary and graduate coursework and conducts outreach related to the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of zoonotic diseases within companion animal and human populations.