Prof Christiane Hertz-Fowler

I have two key strands to my research interests. Firstly, I work on kinetoplastid parasites, a group of pathogens that cause devastating diseases in humans and animals in large parts of Africa, Asia and South America. I leverage comparative genomic approaches to investigate pathogenicity and understand host-restriction. I also work on one of the human diseases, Human African trypanosomiasis, a neglected tropical disease of sub-Saharan Africa that claims the lives of tens of thousands of people a year in some of the poorest and most remote areas of the world, significantly impacting on the economy and development of affected countries. As part of the Wellcome Trust-funded TrypanoGEN consortium, I am interested in understanding the genomic signatures that underlie human host susceptibility and disease progressions once infected with the Trypanosoma brucei parasite. Secondly, I focus on developing and maintaining database/data-mining infrastructure, combined with expertise in curation and annotation, to provide robust, scalable, cost-effective support for researchers working within the fungal and kinetoplastid global research communities as part of the EuPathDB project.