Would you like to work on the next critical global health problem? Artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs) are used by hundreds of millions of people each year to treat malaria. But, reports of artemisinin-resistant genotypes in Aug 2020 (Rwanda) and Nov 2021 (Uganda) have put the efficacy of ACTs at serious risk. These are inexpensive, readily available treatments across all of Africa, with no second option available should they begin to fail in Africa in the coming year.

A recent update (Aug 2023) in the New England Journal of Medicine shows that things are getting worse: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2211803 .

We are part of several consortia and international collaborations developing the preparations and responses to artemisinin-resistance in Africa and we are looking for new team members to contribute — probably for the remainder of the decade.

So .. the Boni Lab in the Department of Biology at Temple University is recruiting highly-motivated young scientists to start their PhD in either Biology or Bioinformatics, centered on questions of drug-resistance management (or other evolutionary/quantitative questions in epidemiology). You will be joining a team of 6-8 scientists, and will have the opportunity to branch out into other areas of computational epidemiology and global health.

Our lab is based at the Institute for Genomics and Evolutionary Medicine (IGEM) in Temple University's Biology Department, in sunny Philadelphia. Our malaria modeling work is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. We are part of the global Applied Malaria Modeling Network (AMMNet), and we collaborate routinely with partners at Oxford, Imperial College, and the Swiss Tropical Public Health Institute (e.g. see https://mol.ax/pdf/watson22.pdf). We provide malaria advice and analytics to WHO regularly, and we have continuously running partnerships with the Rwanda Biomedical Centre and the national malaria programs of Rwanda, Uganda, and Burkina Faso. We also work with MMV and UNITAID and larger consortium projects on planning and evaluating strategies for Africa-wide artemisinin-resistance response.

Successful candidates for a PhD position will:

· have a bachelor's or master's degree in a quantitative area like applied math, computer science, computational epidemiology, or another area in the computational sciences
· have a strong coding background
· have strong motivation to apply their quantitative skills to global health problems
· be willing to learn about the needs and requirements of national malaria control programs in malaria-endemic countries, or other policy-related aspects of disease control in a range of international settings

Candidates are encouraged to apply if they are interested in developing applied epidemiological skills through the use of computation, simulation, and new software development, and if they have a keen interest in emergency-level global health response for one of the developing world's most pressing current health problems.

Applicants should contact mboni@temple.edu for any informal inquiries and should apply to Temple's Biology or Bioinformatics program by Dec 15 (Jan 5 for the Bioinf program).

https://www.temple.edu/academics/degree-programs/biology-phd-st-biol-phd/cst-biology-phd-admissions

Links to relevant lab research interests are shown below

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.12.12.22283369v1
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-39914-3
https://twitter.com/maciekboni/status/1687289671724777472
https://journals.plos.org/globalpublichealth/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgph.0002200
http://mol.ax/pdf/boni22.pdf