LSTM is delighted to announce the appointment of Professor Martin Donnelly as Head of the Department of Vector Biology.
Professor Donnelly, who is a Royal Society Wolfson Fellow and an Honorary Faculty Member at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, has taken up the position following Professor Hilary Ranson stepping down from the role to become REF coordinator for LSTM’s 2021 submission.
Training at Girton College, Cambridge University, Professor Donnelly studied for his MSc and PhD at LSTM. He was awarded an American Society of Microbiology Fellowship, spending two years at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, USA. He returned to LSTM, joining the Department of Vector Biology in 2001 and being named as its Deputy Head in August 2017.
He said: “I am delighted to be leading the department at a time of great expansion, with a number of recent new appointments across the full spectrum of our research. Professor Ranson has been an excellent Head of Department, and I am determined to protect her legacy and steer the department through the very exciting times we have ahead.”
A major area of interest is the evolution of insecticide resistance in the malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae. His team use a variety of genomic, transcriptomic and proteomic approaches to identify and validate insecticide resistance associated loci. He also collaborates with an established network of sub-Saharan Africa partners to integrate these diagnostics into both malaria control programmes and randomized control studies designed to assess the epidemiological impacts of insecticide resistance.