Jonathan Juliano
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Microbiology & Immunology·Early-career
Malaria still kills roughly 619,000 people a year, mostly children in Africa, and the tools used to control it are losing ground. Parasites are becoming less responsive to the main drugs, and malaria species that can lie dormant in the liver keep transmission going even where the deadliest species is in retreat.
- Fields
Microbiology & Immunology
Public Health & Epidemiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
malaria
Plasmodium falciparum
Plasmodium vivax
- Grants
- 3 known grants, through Aug 2030
What they work on
- Build a temporal deep learning surrogate, a neural network trained on simulation output, to predict how antimalarial drug policy changes would alter resistance and transmission in Kinshasa Province, Democratic Republic of the Congo.
- Develop spatial deep learning surrogate models that forecast the geographic spread of artemisinin partial resistance across the African Great Lakes region and Ethiopia using large epidemiological and parasite genetic datasets.
- Define the transmission biology of Plasmodium ovale and Plasmodium vivax through community and clinic surveillance in Dschang, Cameroon, using field-deployable molecular diagnostics and high-throughput parasite genotyping.
- Characterize relapse patterns from dormant liver-stage hypnozoites and measure how much these relapses contribute to the reservoir of people infectious to mosquitoes.
- Investigate the mechanisms by which Plasmodium vivax invades red blood cells in African populations previously considered resistant, using genomic and single-cell sequencing approaches.
- Compare genomic methods for tracking parasite movement and transmission chains in low- and high-transmission settings through the CAMMM study, to determine which approaches work where.
More about the research
Work in this lab connects three strands: mathematical prediction of how drug resistance spreads, field and genomic study of relapsing malaria species in Africa, and the training of clinician-scientists in translational malaria genomics.
Why it matters
National malaria control programs need to know where drug resistance will appear next and which populations sustain transmission, so they can place drugs, nets and surveillance where they matter. These projects could supply forecasting tools for artemisinin partial resistance in central and eastern Africa, evidence and diagnostics for relapsing Plasmodium ovale and Plasmodium vivax infections, and methods for tracing parasite movement. Because P. vivax is among the most commonly imported malaria species, the findings may also inform preparedness against malaria reestablishment in receptive settings such as the United States.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jessica Lin
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Microbiology & Immunology
Test whether primaquine failures in a Thai Plasmodium vivax relapse trial were driven by a high burden of hypnozoites, dormant liver-stage parasites, using molecular inversion probe sequencing to detect circulating variants and gauge infection complexity.
Cristian Koepfli
University of Notre Dame, IN·Public Health & Epidemiology
Sequence more than 1,000 Plasmodium falciparum and more than 800 Plasmodium vivax samples collected since 2019 in the Ethiopian highlands to distinguish imported from locally transmitted infections and test whether imported parasites spread locally.
Steve Taylor
Duke University, NC·Microbiology & Immunology
Test whether parasite overexpression of mutant Pfsa3 (PF3D7_1127000), a putative protein phosphatase, nullifies sickle trait's protection, by engineering transgenic Plasmodium falciparum lines expressing wildtype and mutant forms.
The school
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: 72 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 523 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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