Professor Jo Lines
BSc MSc PhD
Professor
of Malaria Control and Vector Biology
Originally trained as a population geneticist, I studied Medical Parasitology at the School, and since 1983, I’ve been working on practical methods for malaria vector control.
For the first eight years of my career, I lived and worked in Tanzania. I'm still involved in field research on nets and their effects on mosquitoes.
I’ve also worked as a consultant, often working with implementers to design and/or evaluate projects and programmes, and more recently working with donors and international agencies in higher-level strategy and policy-development activities. I’ve worked in about 20 different countries, mostly in Africa and Southeast Asia, but also a little in Latin America and China.
My interests include the links between basic biology and public health, and the multi-sectoral nature of malaria: the influence of landscape, land-use, housing and development, and what residents can do for themselves to reduce the risk of malaria, while they are waiting for the government to deliver the promised interventions.
Affiliations
Centres
Teaching
I'm a keen teacher.
Until recently, most of my classroom teaching was with the MScs in Medical Parasitology and the Medical Entomology for Disease Control.
In 2013 I become Co-Course Director for the MSc One Health, which is run jointly with the Royal Veterinary College.
I also enjoy working with PhD students.
Research
Most of my career has been concerned with malaria vector control, especially insecticide treated nets. This work included the first entomological studies in the 1980s, the large child-mortality trials of the early 1990s, and the pilot implementation projects of the late 90s. On the way, I made methodological contributions concerning mosquito sampling methods, quantifying transmission, insecticide resistance testing, and operational research on net-delivery systems. I was the first to predict, and then to demonstrate, that community use of treated nets can have a "mass effect", reducing the transmission capacity of of the local mosquito population, and thus giving extended protection to non-net-users in the area.
In the mid-2000s I became concerned that malaria control leaders were ignoring the problem of insecticide resistance. For this reason, between 2009 and 2012, I went to work for the World Health Organisation as Coordinator of Vector Control, where I initiated and led the development of the Global Plan for Insecticide Resistance Management (GPIRM).
These days, I'm interested in the question of what will render the absence of malaria stable in Africa. I am currently the PI of a programme funded by the CGIAR (Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research) on various agriculture-health interactions, especially the the effects of agricultural landscapes on vector borne disease, and anti-microbial resistance.
Selected Publications
