School Seminar Series - Associate Professor Diana Hansen - The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute

Associate Professor Diana Hansen - The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute

Systems biology approaches to understanding immunity to malaria: the end of the double-edged sword

Speaker bio:

Diana Hansen completed her PhD studies at the University of Buenos Aires in the context of a collaborative program between the National Institute of Parasitology in Argentina and the National Veterinary Institute in Uppsala, Sweden. She turned to malaria research during her postdoctoral training at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, Melbourne, Australia, where she established an internationally recognised program to investigate inflammatory responses responsible for the induction of severe malaria. Diana is now a Laboratory Head in the Division of Infectious Disease and Immune Defence at Walter and Eliza Hall Institute. She is also an Associate Professor at the Department of Medicine in The University of Melbourne. Diana’s main current research focuses on finding solutions to tackle two devastating mosquito-borne infectious diseases, malaria and dengue, which together account for 600 million clinical cases worldwide annually. In 2020, Diana also turned into COVID-19 research, setting up clinical studies in Australia and overseas .Her main interests include understanding mechanisms regulating pathogenesis and induction of immunity to these infectious diseases and she is pursuing those goals using pre-clinical infection models as well as applying systems immunology approaches to human studies in relevant endemic areas. Diana’s research is primarily funded by the Australian NHMRC, e-ASIA, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Australian Academy of Science.

https://www.dihansen.com/