Zoonotic transmission of intestinal parasites: implications for control and elimination
Start date
03 September 2018End date
02 September 2021Team
Principal investigator
Dr Martha Betson
Associate Professor in Veterinary Parasitology and Head of Department
Biography
Martha graduated from University of Cambridge with a BA in Natural Sciences and went on to do a PhD in cell biology at University College London. She then undertook postdoctoral work at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA, where she used the fruit fly as a model to gain insight into signalling pathways regulating cancer. While in Boston Martha developed an interest in public health and infectious diseases.
After studying for an MSc in Control of Infectious Diseases at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher with Professor Russell Stothard, first at the Natural History Museum and then at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. Here she played an integral role in the Schistosomiasis in Mothers and Infants project, investigating the epidemiology of a neglected parasitic disease in mothers and young children living in lakeshore communities in Uganda. Subsequently Martha took up a post as a research fellow in One Health at the Royal Veterinary College.
Martha joined the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Surrey in May 2015 and is currently Head of Department, Comparative Biomedical Sciences.
Co-investigator
Dr Arnoud van Vliet
Senior Lecturer in Veterinary Microbiology
Biography
Arnoud graduated in 1991 from Utrecht University, The Netherlands, studying Medical Biology. He obtained his PhD in 1995 from the Veterinary Microbiology department of the Utrecht University, working on molecular characterisation and detection of the tick-borne ruminant pathogen Cowdria (Ehrlichia) ruminantium. For his postdoc, he moved to the Department of Genetics of the University of Leicester, UK, working on gene regulation and virulence of the zoonotic foodborne pathogen Campylobacter jejuni.
He then obtained a personal fellowship in 1999 from the Dutch Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) to work on metal metabolism, gene regulation in the human gastric pathogen Helicobacter pylori, first at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and subsequently as lecturer at the Erasmus MC-University Medical Center in Rotterdam. In 2007, he took up a position as Research Leader at the Institute of Food Research, Norwich, UK, where he has led a research group focusing on the foodborne pathogens Campylobacter and Listeria, combining microbiology, molecular biology, genomics and other 'omics with bioinformatic technologies, to understand the processes allowing these bacteria to survive in the food chain and cause illness.
Arnoud has been with the Surrey Vet School as Senior Lecturer in Veterinary Microbiology since October 2016. Here he has established the genomics/bioinformatics infrastructure, working with on genomics of microbial pathogens, as well as collaborating with other Surrey research groups on a diverse range of pathogenic organisms (microbial and eukaryotic) as well as microbiome research.
Research themes
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