Professor Ben Makepeace BSc (Hons) MSc PhD

Personal Statement

I have been based in Liverpool since my postdoctoral training at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (starting 2001), where I worked on bovine onchocerciasis in Cameroon as a system to evaluate potential drug and vaccine candidates for use against human river blindness (a neglected vector-borne disease). After my appointment to Lecturer at the University of Liverpool in 2014, I continued this endeavour under the umbrella of The Onchocerciasis Vaccine for Africa initiative TOVA. It was through research on onchocerciasis that I was introduced to the wonderful world of the bacterial endosymbiont, Wolbachia, which has been an obsession of mine ever since, both in parasitic worms and various arthropods, including disease vectors. More recently as Chair in Vector-Borne Diseases, I have overseen the expansion of the Tick Cell Biobank at the University of Liverpool, which is the only dedicated repository of arthropod cell lines globally. I have also established a research focus on the ecology and molecular biology of chiggers and other mites, especially in the context of the zoonotic febrile illness, scrub typhus.