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Author: Donna Huber

Silvia Moreno named Corresponding Member of the Latin American Academy of Sciences

Silvia Moreno

Silvia Moreno was recently named Corresponding Member of the Latin American Academy of Sciences. She is a distinguished research professor in the department of cellular biology and also serves as director of CTEGD’s NIH-funded Training Grant in Interdisciplinary Parasitology, Vector Biology, Emerging Diseases. Her research team works with Toxoplasma gondii, an apicomplexan parasite that infects almost one-third of the world population.

The Academia de Ciencias de América Latina, created in 1982 under the sponsorship of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, promotes and contributes to the advancement of mathematical, physical, chemical, earth, and life sciences, and to their application to the development and integration of Latin America and the Caribbean. The Academy promotes cooperation among scientific institutions and the exchange of persons and scientific knowledge for the integration of Latin American and the Caribbean; studies of sciences policy that contribute to the stable and continuous development of the countries of Latin American and the Caribbean; science at different educational levels and among the entire population.

 

Silvia Moreno named Distinguished Research Professor

Silvia J. Morenoa professor in the cellular biology department and director for the NIH Training Grant in Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases, is recognized for her studies on calcium signaling in parasitic protozoa.

Her work defined the link between calcium signaling and pathogenesis of infectious organisms. Her research focuses on Toxoplasma gondii, a pathogen that infects one-third of the world population. She and her team discovered mechanisms of calcium signaling in parasites and novel compartments that store calcium that are different from those present in mammalian cells. Her laboratory developed new genetic tools to study calcium that could be used for high-throughput assays to find new pharmacological agents for the potential treatment of parasitic diseases.

Based on another fundamental discovery from her lab, that Toxoplasma takes specific nutrients from its host, she proposed the development of therapeutics that combine host-encoded and parasite-encoded functions as a novel approach for chemotherapy.

Anat Florentin receives 2018 Postdoctoral Research Award

Anat Florentin, a postdoctoral researcher in Vasant Muralidharan‘s laboratory at the Center for Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases, studies molecular mechanisms that drive life stages of Plasmodium falciparum, the deadliest of parasite species that infect humans with malaria. During her exceptionally productive years at UGA, she has advanced two related areas of research to learn more about the functions of P. falciparum gene and metabolic pathways. First, she established a highly efficient, markerless system to create mutants more rapidly using the powerful CRISPR-Cas9-based genetic editing tool. Her data from this project was published in the high-impact journal mSphere. Second, she used the CRISPR-Cas9 tool to understand P. falciparum’s unique plastid known as the apicoplast, which harbors essential metabolic pathways for the parasite’s growth and whose biological processes could be ideal parasite-specific drug targets. This work has been recognized by multiple invitations to present her work and a first author publication in Cell Reports.

Created in 2011, the Postdoctoral Research Award recognizes the remarkable contributions of postdoctoral research scholars to the UGA research enterprise. The UGA Research Foundation funds up to two awards a year to current scholars.