Areas of Interest:
Dr Modahl is a group leader in the Centre for Snakebite Research and Interventions (CSRI). Her research involves characterizing snakebite pathology, developing new therapeutics for snakebite envenoming, and engineering toxins for vector control. She has been studying toxinology internationally (USA, Singapore and now in the U.K.) for over 15 years and is well known in the field for her expertise in omic (genomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic) approaches to profiling venoms and functional characterisation of toxin activities.
Background:
Dr Modahl started working with venomous snakes and venoms as a zookeeper at the Kentucky Reptile Zoo, one of the largest collections of venomous snakes in the USA. She then completed her PhD at the University of Northern Colorado, USA, where she characterised novel neurotoxins from understudied snake species and profiled venoms using a combination of high-throughput transcriptomics and proteomics. She spent five years as a post-doctoral research fellow at the National University of Singapore, continuing venom -omic work and expanding into vector biology, leveraging these same techniques to decipher mosquito immune responses to various pathogenic viruses.
In 2021 she joined LSTM as part of CSRI and holds a joint appointment in both Tropical Disease Biology and Vector Biology departments.