January 2023: PhD and postdoc positions on projects funded by the ERC and Wallenberg Foundation.

Become part of the vibrant environment of infection researchers at MIMS, the Swedish EMBL node. Enjoy the beauty and quality of life in Sweden’s beautiful North, while being connected to the European network of research excellence of the Nordic EMBL Partnership.

We now recruite talented and creative individuals who like to work as part of an interdisciplinary team. The transmission of malaria parasites to their mosquito vectors depends entirely on the sexual reproduction of the parasite in the mosquito midgut. Much of the underlying biology remains poorly understood. With the advent of genetic screening technology in the rodent model parasite Plasmodium berghei it has now become possible for the first time to screen systematically for essential parasite gene functions in transmission. 

PhD position

Driven individuals who want to develop a PhD project in the broad research areas listed below are encouraged to send a CV and cover letter explaining their motivation to oliver.billker@umu.se .

Postdoctoral positions and fellowships

A postdoc position has become available. The formal applications process will start shortly.  If you want to know more, get in touch or just send a CV and cover letter explaining your motivation to oliver.billker@umu.se

Consider how a genetic screen that opens up a new area of biology can become a springboard for starting your own lab!

Projects

These are examples of the type of work we like to do. Don’t hesitate to get in touch with oliver.billker@umu.se to discuss. The lab would like to attract a broad set of interests and skills to at these questions and we like to collaborate across disciplines. There are opportunities to use traditional genetic and biochemical techniques, to apply machine learning approaches to reveal insights from large datasets, or to use our cutting edge facilities in cryoEM, single cell genomics and metabolimics to get at parasite vector interactions.

1. Using our unique ability to carry out forward genetics screens (Bushell et al., 2017), we have now identified hundreds of fertility genes. From this, many opportunities have emerged to dissect the molecular mechanisms of reproduction and transmission of malaria parasites. You can delve into the details of fertilisation or meiosis, or you could devise secondary screens to stratify our hits further. Either way, you will be able to gain deep insights into how malaria transmission works and how it could be blocked. You will also contribute to our understanding how sex has evolved in the first eukaryote.
2. Mechanisms of post transcriptional regulation during Plasmodium sex determination. Our screen of sexual determination and development genes (Russell et al., 2023) has opened up fascinating questions of how gene regulation controls development in divergent eukaryote. There are some startling parallels with germ line determination in animals that we want to explore further.
3. Single Cell Biology of Malaria Transmission. We have established single cell genomics methods to study mosquito tissues and how they interact with malaria parasites (e.g. Raddi et al., 2020). This now opens up avenues to get at how malaria parasites infect cells of the midgut and the salivary gland, how they mature inside their vector and how the mosquitoes respond.