People

Umeå Team

Oliver Billker

Oliver obtained his PhD from Imperial College London in 1999. His interest in parasite cell biology and the molecular basis of infection goes back to his undergraduate studies in Biology at the Free University in Berlin. Following a postdoc in bacterial pathogenesis at the Max-Planck-Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, he was funded through two consecutive personal research fellowships by the UK Medical Research Council (2002-2012) to lead a research team working at signal transductin in Plasmodium sexual stages at Imperial Collage London. From there, he moved to the Wellcome Sanger Instiute in 2007, to build an interdisciplinary team focussing on scaling up experimental manipulation of the P. berghei genome. In 2018 the team moved to Umeå University, where Oliver became the director of the Swedish EMBL node, the Laboratory for Molecular Infection Medicine Sweden. He also took on a professorship in the Department of Molecular Biology.