Current Lab Group

Saurian and Avian Malaria Parasites
Current Lab Group	Former Graduate Students		Undergraduate Research
Field Sites	Techniques		Funding Sources
Lizard Malaria Parasites	Avian Malaria Parasites	Research Results	Publications

Current Lab Group


Since 1978, the malaria research lab has been an active group of undergraduates and graduate students and lab guide Dr. Joseph Schall. The current group includes (from left) undergraduate Research Apprentice Nate Nicks, Senior Honors Student Katie St. Denis, Graduate Student Alli Neal, Senior Honors Student Alice Flynn Ford, and Dr. Schall. The photo was taken one late summer day after the new lab t-shirts arrived. On the shirts is seen the most recent, well-resolved, phylogeny of malaria parasites that was recovered by lab graduate student Ellen Martinsen (now at the National Zoo). A brief biography of each lab member appears below.

	Jos. J. Schall Professor of Biology University of Vermont e-mail Prof. Schall
J. J. Schall has been on the faculty of the University of Vermont since 1980. He received his BS from Penn State, the MS from the University of Rhode Island, and the Ph.D. from the University of Texas. His interests in graduate school were community ecology and geographic trends in species richness. He conducted field work in the diverse Cnemidophorus lizard asemblage in the desert of SW Texas. Some of this work was published with his mentor, Eric Pianka. Schall's interests then shifted to parasites, and he was awarded an NIH individual postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked with noted parasitologist John Simmons. Since 1978 he has conducted a long-term study of the malaria parasites of lizards at a site in northern California (UC's Hopland Research and Extension Center field station), and several Caribbean sites, including a long-term study on the tiny islands of Saba and St. Martin and the LTER site at El Verde in Puerto Rico. A study in Sierra Leone, west Africa, while productive, had to end because of civil war. In a break from studies on parasites, he worked with graduate students Denise Dearing and Steve Ressel on diet selection by herbivorous lizards on small Caribbean islands. Schall has been honored by the University of Vermont with the two highest awards for teaching excellence, and the university's highest award for research excellence. His research has been continuously funded for many years by the NSF, and for the recent studies on avian malaria parasites, by the Morris Animal Foundation.

	Allison Neal Graduate Student in Biology University of Vermont e-mail Allison
Alli entered our graduate program in the fall of 2009, but was already very familiar to all of us. She graduated with her BA in Biology in the spring after completing her Senior Honors project in the lab! Each year, the department honors the graduating senior with the highest GPA, and Alli was our 2009 winner! Naturally, we tried to lure Alli into staying on as a graduate student, and were very pleased that she has accepted. Alli did field work at the California (Hopland) field site with undergraduate Honors student Jennifer Fricke in the summer of 2008 (Jennifer and Alli grew up in houses across the street in Northfield Vermont and both went on to distinguished careers in biology here at UVM), and then spent the entire summer at the site in 2009 to get her graduate research jump-started. Alli's research examines the gametocyte sex ratio of Plasmodium mexicanum, particularly the influence of clonal diversity within an infection on the parasite's sex ratio. She uses a combination of classical parasitological techniques (hundreds of hours on the microscope) and modern molecular methods (genotyping infections using variable genetic markers). Alli has already demonstrated that there is genetic diversity for sex ratio when parasites are in single-clone infections, only the second time this has been documented (although the effect may be common). Her work this past summer examined the fecundity of the parasite's male cells; her results will go off to a journal very soon, so watch here for the full story!

	Alice Ford Undergraduate Honors Student University of Vermont e-mail Alice
Alice joined the lab during her first semester, and now is a Senior Honors Mathematics major. She is a member of the Math-Bio program organized by Dr. Lori Stevens of the Biology Department and funded by NSF. The goal of this ongoing project is to encourage students who are expert in both mathematics and life science to merge their two interests. Alice plans a medical career, and so wanted to participate in biological research with medical implications. In the summer between her Sophomore and Junior years, Alice joined the lab of Dr. Jane Carlton at NYU, one of the world's best known biologists working on the genomics of malaria parasites. In the summer of 2009, Alice worked in our lab on a fellowship offered by the Math/Biology program, and in the fall began her Senior Honors research in the lab. Alice's research examines the change in relative clonal abundance of mixed-genotype infections of the malaria parasite Plasmodium mexicanum over the course of an infection. During her first three years in the lab, Alice worked up the methods to monitor changes in clonal abundance, using microsatellite genetic markers; this is the first time this has been accomplished. She asks if infections that increase in parasite density more rapidly are those that show shifts in clonal abundance. Alice is also collaborating with the Dr. Anne Vardo-Zalik and Dr. Guiyun Yan of UC Irvine to examine shifts in clonal abundance of the human malaria parasite, P. falciparum in natural infections sampled in Kenya by the Yan team. Alice is already a published scientist! She is coauthor of a paper that appeared in Parasitological Research, a respected international journal.

	Katie St. Denis Undergraduate Honors Student University of Vermont e-mail Katie
Katie joined the lab in the summer of 2009 on a Fellowship from the McNair Scholars Program. In the previous spring she was a student in the advanced course in Ecological Parasitology and became interested in the ecology and evolution of parasites. For her summer project, Katie examined the genetic variation in the cytochrome b gene of Plasmodium mexicanum, by designing primers to amplify most of this important mitochondrial gene, and then sequencing more than a hundred infections from the Hopland site and several other sites from a few km to hundreds of km away (thanks to collecting effort by graduate student Alli Neal). This issue is important because some research teams propose that even a single base substitution (SNP) in the cytochrome b gene represents a separate evolutionary lineage of parasite worthy (species). Very few data have been published in the variation of this gene within species, so Katie's work will be sure to garner considerable interest. In the fall, Katie began her Senior Honors research project in the lab, with further studies on the genetic diversity of P. mexicanum. The goal of this research is to follow genetic changes in the parasite over many years using stored blood samples taken every year since 1978 at the study site. Katie plans a career in veterinary medicine, so her studies of a pathogen of lizards fits into those plans.

	Nathan Hicks Undergraduate Student University of Vermont e-mail Nate
Nate is the newest member of the malaria lab and we are very happy to have him in the group. He is now a Research Apprentice in the lab under the Biology Department's program to bring enthusiastic students into research projects. Nate is a Junior Biology major with plans to pursue a medical career. Working in a malaria research lab certainly fits into Nate's career goals! Within days of joining the lab, Nate joined graduate student Alli Neal on her project, and quickly started to pick up the skills to identify and count malaria parasites under the microscope. Soon he will begin learning the molecular techniques needed to genotype infections of malaria parasites. Nate's also an enthusiastic fencer and is a member of the fencing club on campus.