Profile

I have worked for 8 years in rural Tanzania and now in Kenya, trying to find new ways of reducing the contact between humans and malaria mosquitoes. I have investigated repellent lotions, repellent coils, repellent plants used by communities as well as sugar-baits to attract and kill mosquitoes. At the moment I am also working on new ways of finding out if a mosquito is infected with malaria or not using a new method called near infra-red spectroscopy. Basically I look at changes in the spectra from light that bounces off a mosquito and try to find a pattern. I am still trying to figure out if it works.

 
See a video on my work:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0VFna3XEl84T1FYaFZPVDY5Zk0/view?usp=sharing

On exciting days I get to go the field and do work with mosquitoes, I catch them using traps or baits. I also enjoy collecting larvae in rice fields or small puddles.  I collect my samples and take them to the lab where I can sort them and analyze them.

I have also done some work in Scotland using malaria parasites in the lab. I reared them artificially using cell-culture models and then used these parasites to  infect mosquitoes and do experiments with malaria-infected mosquitoes. This involves quite a lot of safety precautions because infecting mosquitoes can be risky if you don’t follow strict protocols.

In Tanzania I often worked inside a biodome where we could release mosquitoes inside a screen house and where they could not escape. We had fake houses inside the screen house and could observe how mosquitoes behaved in semi-natural conditions without putting any one at risk of getting malaria because all the mosquitoes used were reared in our own insectary and did not have malaria. Mosquitoes are not born with malaria, they must bite an infected person in order to become infected so if we rear larvae in the lab they will not be infected for sure.

I would promote a science fair contest at a local school and would donate the money to the 3 best projects.