Cristian Koepfli
University of Notre Dame, IN·Public Health & Epidemiology
Malaria programs count sick patients, but most transmission is invisible: people carrying parasites without symptoms, and parasites that arrive with travelers rather than being picked up locally. Work in this lab targets those blind spots, asking where infections actually come from and whether control tools shrink the hidden reservoir of infection.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Microbiology & Immunology
Biology
- Topics
malaria
Plasmodium falciparum
Plasmodium vivax
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jul 2028
What they work on
- 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.
- Determine whether chains of genetically related or clonal malaria infections persist across space and time in the highlands, and whether asymptomatic infections sustain transmission through the main rainy season.
- Measure antibodies against Anopheles mosquito salivary gland antigens, markers of recent biting, in more than 2,000 people living between 1,600 and 2,900 m altitude and in travelers returning from the lowlands.
- Quantify whether spatial repellents reduce asymptomatic Plasmodium falciparum prevalence, screening 9,000 blood samples by quantitative PCR and microscopy within a cluster-randomized trial in western Kenya.
- Compare human-to-mosquito and mosquito-to-human transmission in repellent and control clusters, relating gametocyte prevalence and density to mosquito density, sporozoite rate and the entomological inoculation rate across 20 clusters at three time points.
More about the research
Two projects pursue this with the same combination of molecular parasite detection, genome sequencing, antibody measurements and mosquito data, in field settings in Ethiopia and Kenya.
Why it matters
Elimination programs need to know whether remaining cases are homegrown or carried in, and whether new tools reach the symptomless carriers who drive most transmission. Results could guide where Ethiopia targets highland control and whether spatial repellents belong in malaria control packages, and the genomic and serological methods established could be adapted to surveillance of mosquito-borne diseases elsewhere, including locally transmitted malaria, dengue, Zika, chikungunya and West Nile virus in the United States.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Importation or local transmission? Genomics and serology to determine the sources of Plasmodium vivax and Plasmodium falciparum malaria in the Ethiopia highlands
NIH · Aug 2026 – Jul 2028
The Impact of Novel Vector Control Tools on Asymptomatic Plasmodium falciparum Infection Prevalence and Transmission Potential
NIH · Jun 2024 – Apr 2027
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.
Jonathan Juliano
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Microbiology & Immunology·Early-career
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.
Joseph Vinetz
Yale University, CT·Public Health & Epidemiology
Estimate how much of each person's malaria (re)infection risk in residual-transmission areas of the Peruvian Amazon comes from human genetics versus changeable social, behavioral and environmental factors, and define risk profiles.
The school
University of Notre Dame: 19 labs on PI Pages, $346M a year on research, 277 research doctorates a year.
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