New pathogen surveillance approaches for detection of priority infectious diseases in Malawi, South Africa, and Zambia
Background
In Africa, where the burden of infectious diseases is highest, undertaking public health surveillance to understand transmission patterns and direct targeted prevention interventions is extremely challenging. A key barrier is the lack of population seroepidemiological data resolved at fine spatiotemporal scale. Community-based prevalence surveys are extremely resource intensive, difficult to sustain within public health programmes, and often recruit a biased sample of participants.
Project details
Nested within a newly-funded £2.8million Wellcome Discovery Award to the School of Health & Wellbeing at the University of Glasgow (PI: Prof Peter MacPherson), the PhD candidate will investigate new approaches to undertake convenience sampling and efficient testing for priority public health pathogens in Malawi (Blantyre), South Africa (Cape Town), and Zambia (Lusaka).
Initially, they will work with bioarchieved serum samples already collected in pilot studies from young children attending primary clinics, and adolescents and adults recruited from randomly sampled households in the community. They will prioritise a set of public health pathogens for testing using novel CRISPR-based methods, which will likely include tuberculosis, arboviruses, and vaccine-preventable diseases. They will integrate laboratory testing results with high-resolution georeferenced demographic and clinical data to model transmission dynamics at fine spatiotemporal scale.
Subsequently, they will embed prospective research within the implementation of the ZAMSA-TB study in Malawi and Cape Town to investigate public health impact of targeted interventions, and model impact on disease incidence.
Key skills and support
The candidate will be dedicated to improving the health of people in low income countries, and have experience in infectious disease diagnosis and epidemiology. They will have a keen interest in developing quantitative data skills. Candidates who have a proven track record in engaging communities and stakeholders across diverse cultures will flourish, particularly during visits to study sites. The successful candidate will benefit from being based within the Athena Swan Gold-accredited School of Health & Wellbeing at University of Glasgow and collaboration with international universities and the Centre for Virus Research in Glasgow. They will work within a dynamic, multidisciplinary team based between Scotland and Africa, and will receive a dedicated programme of training and career support.
Contact
Informal contact to discuss the project is welcomed: peter.macpherson@glasgow.ac.uk