Sunetra Gupta, MD PhD

Keynote lecture: Prof. dr. Sunetra Gupta, MD PhD

 
"Surviving pandemics: a pathogen's perspective"

One of the biggest challenges faced by pathogens in their bid for survival is the host immune response. Within an infected individual, pathogen populations face direct attack by the different processes of the immune system; at a community level, immunity affects pathogen fitness by reducing the pool of susceptible persons. I will discuss how pathogens have evolved under this form of natural selection and found solutions that allow them to persist within individuals and within communities using examples from malaria, bacterial meningitis and influenza.

Research Interests
My main area of interest is the evolution of diversity in pathogens, with particular reference to the infectious disease agents that are responsible for malaria, influenza and bacterial meningitis. I use simple mathematical models to generate new hypotheses regarding the processes that determine the population structure of these pathogens. I work closely with laboratory and field scientists both to develop these hypotheses and to test them.

About Sunetra Gupta
Sunetra Gupta is an acclaimed novelist, essayist and scientist. Her fifth novel, So Good in Black was published in February 2009. She has just been named as the winner of the 2009 Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Award for her scientific achievements. Sunetra, who lives in Oxford with her husband and two daughters, is Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at Oxford University's Department of Zoology, having graduated in 1987 from Princeton University and received her PhD from the University of London in 1992. Sunetra was born in Calcutta in 1965 and wrote her first works of fiction in Bengali. She is an accomplished translator of the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore.
Sunetra's childhood and her family's peripatetic lifestyle have had a great impact on her work. Her early years were spent moving between Ethiopia, Zambia and England. When she was 11 the family returned to Calcutta, a city which continues to inspire her writing.