People

PI

David Serre, Dr. rer. nat.

David Serre trained in human population genetics and received his Ph.D. from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (Germany) in 2004. He then joined the McGill University and Genome Quebec Innovation Centre for a post-doctoral fellowship, working on the regulation of gene expression and genome-wide association studies. After nine years as a faculty at the Cleveland Clinic and Case Western Reserve University, he joined the Institute for Genome Sciences and the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Maryland – Baltimore in 2017.

Interests: Plasmodium vivax, malaria, vector biology, eukaryotic parasites, gene expression, population genetics

Davids publications

Research Associates

Franck Dumetz, PhD

Dr. Franck Dumetz obtained his bachelor’s in biology from the Université Libres des Sciences et Technologies in Lille, France in 2010 working on Cryptosporidium parvum. He then obtained a master’s degree in molecular and cellular biology in 2012 from the Pierre and Marie Curie university in Paris, France. His master’s research was caried out under the supervision of Dr. Gerald Spaeth at the Pasteur Institute in Paris to study the interaction between MAP kinase 7 and metacaspase in Leishmania major. He then pursued a PhD focusing on this parasite and obtained his PhD from the University of Antwerp (Belgium) in 2018 after working under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Jean-Claude Dujardin at the Institute for Tropical Medicine of Antwerp. During his doctoral investigations, Dr. Dumetz generated experimental evidence of the role of gene dosage in the acquisition of antimony resistance in L. donovani.  He absolved a first postdoctoral training at in the department of pathology at Cambridge University under the supervision of Dr. Catherine Merrick where he demonstrated the involvement of guanine quadruplexes, an RNA secondary structure, in translation repression in the Plasmodium falciparum. This Plasmodium experience led him to join the Serre lab in 2021 for a second postdoc to work on RNA packaging and translation repression in P. falciparum. In 2023, Dr. Dumetz was promoted Research Associate.

My research interest is to provide knowledge on how unicellular eukaryotes (protozoan) use the variety of RNA biological mechanisms to progress in their life cycle. I am focusing on two different species of protozoan of medical interest: Plasmodium, the parasite causing malaria and Leishmania, the agent of leishmaniasis. Those two diseases are the two most prevalent human diseases caused by a parasite. 

Francks publications

Postdocs

Janne Grünebast, Dr. rer. nat.

Janne Grünebast obtained her Bachelor of Science in Biology from the University of Halle-Wittenberg (Germany) in 2014. After a gap year travelling the world, she completed her Master’s degree at the same university in 2018, specialising in genetics, epigenetics and molecular biology. In her Master’s thesis, she investigated host-pathogen interactions of the plant pathogenic ascomycete Colletotrichum graminicola with a focus on epigenetic factors. She then pursued her PhD at the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine (BNITM) in Hamburg, Germany, under the supervision of Dr. Joachim Clos. She worked on the influence of chromatin density on transcription initiation in Leishmania donovani and established new sequencing methods in Leishmania spp.. She received her PhD from the University of Hamburg in 2022 and continued her work at the BNITM as a postdoc for another year to investigate the role of RNA Polymerase Pausing in L. major. In May 2023, she joined the Serre lab as a postdoc.

I am interested in the control of gene expression in Plasmodium falciparum. In particular, the regulation of transcription and translation in quiescent stages and the importance of long non coding RNAs in these processes. I apply different sequencing methods, such as bulk RNA-seq, single cell RNA sequencing and Oxford nanopore sequencing.

Jannes publications

PhD Candidates

Brittany Hazzard

Brittany Hazzard completed her undergraduate degree in Pre-veterinary and Animal Sciences at the University of Delaware in 2013. Following undergrad she took a short break to ride and train horses before returning to research, acquiring a Masters in Cellular and Molecular Biology from Towson University in 2018, while studying the effects of tumor suppressor NME1 on stem cell growth and differentiation. Brittany than began a PhD at University of Maryland, Baltimore in the Molecular Medicine program, joining the Serre Lab as a student in the summer of 2019.

My work focuses on understanding gene expression of P. vivax parasites utilizing various methods of Single Cell Transcriptomics in a non-human primate model. I combined single cell RNA-seq with PacBio sequencing to improve the annotation of the P. vivax genome. My work also focuses on understanding how parasites behave in the mammalian host when multiple genetically distinct parasites are present, utilizing single cell RNA-seq and whole genome sequencing to identify gene expression changes between P. vivax strains.

Kieran Tebben

Kieran Tebben completed her undergraduate studies in Microbiology at The Ohio State University in 2017. During her undergraduate research in the Drew lab, she studied the autophagy pathway in Plasmodium falciparum, using CRISPR/Cas9 technologies to mutate the protein Atg8 to assess its localization and function and using biochemical techniques to manipulate the apicoplast. She completed her masters degree at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in Epidemiology and worked in the Campino lab to understand the association of drug resistance mutations with global drug policies for Plasmodium vivax. Currently she is a 4th year pre-doctoral student at University of Maryland, Baltimore in the Molecular Microbiology and Immunology program and the Medical Scientist Training Program. She joined the Serre lab in the fall of 2020.

My work is primarily focused on host-pathogen interactions. I use dual RNA-seq (studying human and parasite gene expression directly from the same samples) to understand interactions of Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax with their human host and how drug pressure influences these interactions. On the human side, I am interested in understanding how the host immune system responds to Plasmodium parasites under different infection conditions. On the parasite side, I am interested in how parasites adapt and respond to these different immune pressures, as well as how they interact with each other during infection. Additionally, I am interested in how parasites respond to drug pressure and how human polymorphisms influence the activity of common antimalarials such as artesunate.

Kierans publications

Rosita Asawa

Rosita Asawa earned her bachelor’s degree in Biology from Franciscan University of Steubenville in 2016. Following graduation, Rosita completed a post-baccalaureate fellowship at NCATS/NIH where she worked on early-stage drug development using high-throughput screening technologies. She is in her 4th year of the Medical Scientist Training Program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore and is currently a 2nd year pre-doctoral student in the Molecular Microbiology and Immunology graduate program. Rosita joined the Serre lab in June 2023.

Broadly my research in the Serre lab focuses on vaccine and therapeutic development for Plasmodium vivax malaria. My project focuses on the characterization of antibody responses to P. vivax proteins in adults living in the malaria endemic region of Cambodia. Using a high-density peptide array containing the entire known P. vivax proteome, we aim to identify and characterize novel vaccine candidates and biomarkers of hypnozoite carriage.