Recruitment Seminar: Assistant Professor in One Health Against Pathogens (OHAP) in the Institute of Parasitology
You are cordially invited to attend the seminar of Dr. Sarah Buddenborg, a candidate for the tenure-track position of Assistant Professor in One Health Against Pathogens in the Institute of Parasitology.
Title: Helminthology in the Genomics Era
Parasitic worms (helminths) infect over 1.5 billion people and countless animals worldwide. In humans, chronic helminth infections can cause debilitating diseases in the poorest and most neglected communities, contributing to sustaining poverty. In animals, they cause significant disease and death, reducing productivity and imposing a substantial economic burden. Currently, the only effective strategy for control is through the recurrent large-scale administration of anthelmintic drugs. However, extensive overuse and mismanagement of anthelmintics for nematode infections have resulted in the rapid and widespread development of resistance. As such, there is an urgent need to identify new therapeutics with a One Health approach to reduce dependency on any one control method, ensuring the sustainability of livestock farming and improving human and animal health.
Recent advances in helminth genomics offer an opportunity to understand helminth biology and identify new targets for control. The manually curated, chromosome-scale genome and transcriptome of the human-infecting helminth Schistosoma mansoni, are invaluable resources for understanding the biology and sex-specific development of schistosomes and for interpreting genomic and functional studies. Developing, optimising, and applying powerful modern genomic techniques like single-nuclei and spatial transcriptomics to the most common gastrointestinal helminth of small ruminants, Haemonchus contortus, reveals sex- and stage-specific cell clusters. Ultimately, this data can be used to characterise the molecular mechanisms underpinning helminth success, like environmental resilience, drug resistance, molting, exsheathing, reproduction, and sexual differentiation to develop novel strategies for helminth control.
About the speaker
Sarah Buddenborg
Candidate for the Assistant Professor Position, One Health Against Pathogens
Sarah is a classically trained parasitologist who uses both molecular and computational tools to understand the developmental biology of helminths of human and veterinary importance.
Sarah is a Senior Postdoctoral Fellow in the Helminth Genomics group led by Steve Doyle at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in the UK. Currently, Sarah is leading the development of single-cell and spatial transcriptomic approaches to understand the biology and life cycle of Haemonchus contortus, an economically important pathogen of small ruminants.
Prior to this, Sarah was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Parasite Genomics group led by Matt Berriman at the Sanger Institute. Sarah led the generation of the comprehensive transcriptome and chromosome-scale genome assembly of Schistosoma mansoni, a human-infecting helminth that causes the neglected tropical disease schistosomiasis.
Sarah received her PhD in Biology from Sam Loker鈥檚 lab at the University of New Mexico, where she studied snail-schistosome transcriptomics in field-derived samples.