Former researchers
Chantal Sharples
Lab Technician
Chantal worked with us from January 2021 to September 2022. She joined us right after graduating with an M.Sc. in Molecular Cell Biology and took over the work focussing on Onchocerciasis as well as lab management and admin.
She moved on to return to plant science, where she is now working towards a PhD engineering Coriander.
LinkedIn: Chantal Sharples
Dr Teteh Champion
PhD Student
Teteh completed her PhD in 2022 and is now working in policy and research implementation at Cancer Research UK. Her PhD research was focused on investigating soil contamination by human faeces. She developed an environmental DNA (eDNA)-qPCR-based method to detect S. mansoni in soil samples. She field-tested this assay using soils from a community in Uganda with a high schistosomiasis endemicity and low coverage of safely managed sanitation. In addition to specifically detecting S. mansoni, she also used faecal indicator bacteria as a proxy for the presence of S. mansoni in soils.
She can be contacted via her LinkedIn.
Dr Billy Sands
Lab Technician
Billy isolated microfilaria of Onchocerca volvulus for genome sequencing. This is part of a study to infer the parenthood of microfilaria from infected individuals before and after ivermectin treatment to determine whether the drug is able to kill adult worms and whether post treatment microfilaria result from new infections. Her also dabbled in transcriptomics/genomics from blood taken from S. mansoni infected individuals with an aim to understand infection profiles.
Email: william.sands@glasgow.ac.uk
Research gate: William Sands
Dr Rachel Francoeur
PhD Student
The focus of Rachel’s research was on pharmacokinetics and immune responses in high endemic areas of schistosomiasis infection. She looked at absorption rates of the treatment drug, Praziquantel in non-clearers as well as immune function as an indicator or susceptibility to reinfection. Rachel is now a Zoology Lecturer at the University of Chester.
Dr Christina Faust
Research Associate (2016-2019)
Christina was a post-doc on SCHISTO_PERSIST and investigated the population genetics of Schistosoma mansoni in Mayuge District and implications of mass drug administration on parasite populations. Her research focused on the epidemiology and parasite population genetics across a spectrum of diverse demographics in communities, including pre school aged children and fisherfolk, to better understand persistent transmission hotspots. Christina moved on to a PDRA position at Penn State University and is now an independently funded NERC fellow in the SBOHVM, University of Glasgow.
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=y609nQ8AAAAJ&hl=en
ORCID: 0000-0002-8824-7424
Dr Keila Meginnis
Postdoctoral Researcher (2018-2019)
Keila used economic tools to understand community acceptance of policy interventions directed at mitigating schistosomiasis in rural Uganda. Her work examined how communities perceive the parasite, behaviours that put individuals at risk, and what cost-effective interventions would be most accepted, up-taken and useful to eradicate this problem. Keila then became a Research Fellow at the University of Stirling working on an ESRC project entitled: The Economics of Marine Plastic Pollution, before starting a Lectureship at the University of Glasgow . She is now working for
Email: keila.meginnis@glasgow.ac.uk
ORCID: 0000-0002-4154-5192
Millicent Opoku
Research Assistant (2019)
Millicent joined the Lamberton Lab on an exchange program in parasitology for capacity strengthening for early career researchers at the Wellcome Centre Integrative Parasitology, University of Glasgow (funded by the Global Challenges Research Fund). She has been trialling genetic techniques to identify adult worm genotypes from microfilariae (mf), generating whole genome sequence data from adult and pooled mf used to identify single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) which can differentiate Onchocerca mf and their parents. Millicent is currently a PhD student at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.
ORCID: 0000-0003-0074-1661
Ben Lukubye
MSc Student (2020)
Ben carried out an MSc (Biology - Microbiology and Parasitology at Mbarara University, Uganda) project at the Lamberton Lab in 2020. He investigated the Schistosoma population dynamics of schistosome populations undergoing treatment using microsatellites and other genetic markers with miracidia to characterise the adult populations pre- and post-treatment among cohorts. Ben is currently a PhD student at Emory.
Email: lukubyeben@gmail.com
Twitter: @lukubyebenemma1
ORCID: 0000-0001-9142-8480
Jack Knowles
MRes Student (2020)
Jack joined the Lamberton Lab in 2020 for his MRes (Biomedical sciences at the University of Glasgow) project. He helped to develop a method for assessing DNA quality in microfilariae, which can be applied to Onchocerca volvulus samples and help to identify good candidates for sequencing.
Email: JackKnowles01@outlook.com
Twitter: @jackknowles01
Linkedin: Jack Knowles
Laura A. Sousa Duvergé
MSc Student (2020)
Laura joined The Lamberton Lab in May 2020 to carry out her MSc (Infection Biology at University of Glasgow) project. Her main focus was to investigate the effect of environmental conditions and co-infection on the development of Biomphalaria snails, the intermediate host for schistosomiasis, and Schistosoma cercariae.
Email: laurasousa.duverge@gmail.com
Twitter: @lausousa
LinkedIn: Laura Sousa Duvergé
Sian Doherty
MSc Student (2020)
Sian joined the Lamberton Lab in May 2020 to carry out her MSc dissertation project collating longitudinal data from Uganda on schistosomiasis. She used statistical analyses to identify patterns in infection intensity, condition, side effects and co-infections across schools and years.
Dr Lauren Carruthers
PhD Student (2017-2020)
Lauren’s PhD research focused on the impact gut bacteria have during infection and treatment of Schistosoma mansoni parasites in the context of the SCHISTO-PERSIST project. She compared the bacterial composition of the stool from individuals from a rural Ugandan community, with high and low schistosome infection intensities and explored how these bacterial structures change post-treatment with the anti-schistosomal drug praziquantel.
Email: lauren.carruthers@glasgow.ac.uk
Twitter: @lvcarruthers
ORCID: 0000-0003-4346-2283
Edith Nalwadda
Research Assistant (2017-2020)
Edith is a social scientist and used rapid ethnographic appraisal methods to collect and analyse data for the MRC/GCRF project. Her research contributed to a better understanding of knowledge, attitudes and practices around schistosomiasis, prevention of infection and possible interventions to control transmission among endemic communities.
Dr Tristan Dennis
Post-doctoral Researcher (2018-2021)
Tristan joined the Lamberton Lab in 2018 studying the evolution of Onchocerca volvulus. He developed bioinformatic approaches that use sequences from offspring worms in order to differentiate between reactivation and reinfection in patients that have been treated with drugs in clinical trials in Ghana and Cameroon. Additionally, he used the genomic data generated in these experiments to provide more general insights into the evolution, diversity, and host interactions of these parasites.
Email: Tristan.Dennis@glasgow.ac.uk
LinkedIn: Tristan Dennis
ORCID: 0000-0002-0895-3549
Dr Jess Clark
Post-doctoral Researcher (2020-2023)
Jess joined the Lamberton Lab in 2020 as a mathematical modeller to investigate how effective long-term mass drug administration programmes have been in high endemicity regions, and how best to move towards elimination targets laid out by the World Health Organization.
Email: Jessica.clark@glasgow.ac.uk
Twitter: @iamjessclark
Website: www.iamjessclark.com
Dr Suzan Trienekens
PhD Student (2017-2022)
Suzan joined the Lamberton Lab in October 2017, seeking to further develop her mixed methods research skills. She successfully applied for the University of Glasgow’s 4 year Lord Kelvin/Adam Smith scholarship for interdisciplinary PhDs. Her PhD project combined quantitative and qualitative research methods to understand schistosomiasis transmission in children in rural Uganda.
Twitter: @trienekens
LinkedIn: Suzan Trienekens
ORCID: 0000-0003-2851-185X
Dr Elías Kabbas Piñango
PhD Student (2018-2023)
Elías joined the Lamberton Lab in December 2018 aiming to develop a device capable of detecting a specific schistosome-related antigen, the circulating anodic antigen (CAA) with high sensitivity. This is an improvement to the current diagnostic methods, such as Kato-Katz and urine filtration, which often lack sensitivity; and antibody detection methods, which can lead to false positives as they can only detect exposure to the pathogen and immune recognition. This project was a collaboration with the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) and NG Biotech.
Twitter: @eliaskabpin
LinkedIn: Elías Kabbas Piñango
ORCID: 0000-0002-6290-9493