Podcast 'Genomics and Global Health'

Naked Genetics Podcast: Discussion on new study of genetic varients

BBC interview: Understanding what's going on in the mosquito population is crucial

Dominic Kwiatkowski is director of the Centre for Genomics and Global Health. He holds a joint position as MRC Clinical Research Professor at Oxford University, and as a Principal Investigator at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.

Dominic's labs at Oxford and Sanger work together as a single group. The overarching goal of their research is to translate advances in genome science into clinical and epidemiological applications that will help to reduce the burden of infectious disease in the developing world. They are developing methods for large-scale analysis of genome variation at the population level and using these to investigate, for example, how children living in malaria-endemic regions develop protective immunity against malaria, or how malaria parasites develop resistance against anti-malarial drugs. They work mainly on malaria, but many of the tools and methodologies that they are developing also have applications for other diseases.

One of the main interests of Dominic's research group is helping to develop data-sharing networks to tackle fundamental scientific problems that can be solved only by engaging many different research groups around the world. As the MalariaGEN Resource Centre, the group provides support and training in genetics, statistics, informatics and ethics for researchers in 15 malaria-endemic countries.

Dominic trained in clinical paediatrics. He started research on cytokines in Charles Dinarello's laboratory in Boston in 1985, and the following year he went to The Gambia to study the molecular mechanism of malaria fever with Brian Greenwood. In 1989 he moved to Oxford University Department of Paediatrics, while maintaining a clinical research programme in The Gambia. His group started working on genetics around 1994, as a way of getting at basic questions about malaria pathogenesis. In 2000 his laboratory moved to the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics in Oxford, and in 2005 he took up a joint appointment at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.