The main focus of my research is to use genomics and genetic approaches to understand more of the biology of infectious diseases, particularly malaria, arboviruses and tuberculosis.

We use large whole genome sequencing data sets to shed light on evolution and population genetics, which can be use to forecast how infectious microorganism will change in response to interventions and to drive the development of novel diagnostics and surveillance tools. We are particularly interesting in malaria surveillance and we develop genetic barcodes that include a small number of polymorphisms, to identify the species, geographic origin and drug resistant profile of parasites.This barcode could be directly use in field-settings to support malaria surveillance as well as be used to quantify the extent of co-infections in public sequence data. This barcode can also be the basis for a diagnostic tool. We are presently exploring the use of the isothermal RPA enzyme, previously use to detect Ebola and recently Zika virus in mobile labs, to develop a point-of-care and field-use diagnostic tool capable of distinguish all 6 human malaria species and also a range of other pathogens, such as leishmania and arboviruses.

My teams has also projectes using whole genome and target sequencing  to explore the genetic diversity and insecticide resistance in many vectors, including mosquitoes, sandflies and ticks.

We are also involved in a project that aims do investigate current infectious disease outbreaks of Zika and malaria in Cape Verde, an island that is in a malaria pre-elimination stage. We are screening mosquitos and also humans to  discover the origin of the outbreaks, their spread and the efficacy of control measurements.