I am a staff scientist at Texas Biomed focusing on the genetics of parasites to better understand their life history traits. These include host specificity, production of larvae, or drug resistance. My main model is the human blood fluke schistosome. Schistosomes cause schistosomiasis, an important tropical disease occurring in South America and the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. An estimated 200 million people worldwide are infected with this parasite which lead to an estimated 200,000 deaths each year. Schistosomiasis is a waterborne disease. Infected freshwater snails release larvae (cercariae) which can infect humans during their water related activities.

In addition of parasite genetics, I have developed an interest for microbiome in the context of parasitism. We are focusing on understanding how the snail microbiome can play a direct or indirect role in snail infection outcome.

My work relies heavily on processing and analyzing genomic and transcriptomic data. For this, I use Jupyter notebook and custom scripts (bash and R mainly). If you want to know more about how the analyses help to answer important biological questions, feel free to read the papers associated to the analyses (links available in each repository).

Stay tuned for more exciting findings!