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The Le Souef Research Fellow for Tropic Diseases, Dr Mitali Sarkar-Tyson, is officially onboard at the Marshall Centre for Infectious Diseases.

Mitali specializes in molecular microbiology and in vitro infection models. She is particularly interested in Burkholderia pseudomallei – a bacteria responsible for a fatal tropical disease that is endemic throughout Northern Australia and South East Asia. B.p s e u domallei is resistant to many types of antibiotics making it even more hard to cure.

“The Fellowship is an exciting opportunity for me to further my interest in understanding the molecular mechanisms by which bacteria cause disease in humans and animals”, said Mitali.

Mitali’s interest in tropical diseases initiated during her Ph.D. at the University of Manchester where she was investigating the different life cycle stages of the tropical parasite Trypanosoma brucei which causes African Sleeping Sickness. Following on from this, Mitali did a Post-doctoral research fellowship with Professor Alan Fairlamb at the Wellcome Trust Centre in Dundee on the related tropical parasite Trypanosoma cruzi .

Since then, Mitali’s research interests have broadened as a result of her engagement as a principle scientist at the UK’s Defence Science Technology Laboratory where she was seeking to understand and gain new knowledge about bacterial interactions and how this could be used to develop novel therapies.

Mitali’s new role sees her building her own research group to focus on exploring specific bacterial components for the development of novel drugs. Furthermore in collaboration with other scientists at the School of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine (PALM), she is investigating the broader use of these novel drugs to treat other diseases such as Leishmaniasis and bacterial meningitis.

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For more information, please contact Josephine Muir