Mimi’s interest in infectious disease was sparked by the West Africa Ebola outbreaks in 2013 and the global response to this epidemic, including the military involvement. This interest led her to study human and animal disease at university. She began her education at the University of Warwick in 2015, focussing mainly on Influenza and mathematic modelling of disease transmission. After this, she moved to LSHTM and completed her master’s dissertation on analysis of transcriptomics data of Plasmodium spp. At the developmental switch from asexual parasites to gametocytes.

Mimi is a first year PhD student at the University of Glasgow. She is passionate about furthering the study of vector borne disease, specifically Malaria. Her main avenues of interest are the interaction between Plasmodium parasites and their hosts, and single cell transcriptomic techniques to analyse gene expression.

Mimi’s PhD will focus on genetic determinants of Plasmodium that underpin transmission dynamics, supervised by Dr Virginia Howick and Dr Francesco Baldini. She will focus on single-cell transcriptomic analysis of the parasites, specifically looking at the mosquito stages of the Plasmodium life cycle. “I am really honoured to be at the UoG working with world leading experts in the field of Malaria research. I believe this is a crucial time to be working on infectious disease and am excited for what I can bring to the table through this PhD”.