LSTM is pleased to welcome Dr Grant Hughes as he joins the departments of Vector Biology and Parasitology as a Senior Lecturer in August this year.
A long-term collaborator with LSTM, Dr Hughes comes from the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) where he is an Assistant Professor. At UTMB he manages a lab looking at the interactions between mosquitoes, their microbiome and the pathogens they transmit. His work has been successful in attracting funding from the National Institute of Health.
LSTM’s Professor Martin Donnelly is delighted by the appointment of Dr Hughes. He said: “We are looking forward to Grant’s move to LSTM, which is a strategic appointment that will help expand our work in arbovirus biology and microbiomes, key areas of growth for LSTM. His expertise working with Wolbachia as well as the vectors of diseases like Zika, dengue fever and chikungunya offers LSTM the opportunity to build on our current work to the benefit of people living in disease endemic countries.”
After gaining his PhD from the University if Queensland in Australia, Dr Hughes worked as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Johns Hopkins University and Research Associate at Pennsylvania State University before taking up his position at UTMB. He is excited to continue this work at LSTM. He said: “After working with colleagues at LSTM for a number of years I am excited to be moving to Liverpool. I look forward to utilising the institutional expertise and capacity of LSTM to further develop my work focused on host-microbe interactions in mosquito vectors and to ultimately implement novel vector control approaches in the field.”
Dr Hughes will start his work at LSTM on 1st August 2018.