Ananias A Escalante

Biography

Dr Escalante received his PhD in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UC Irvine and moved to the CDC in Atlanta, as a postdoctoral fellow, in late 1995. After that first appointment, he maintained joint appointments at the CDC as a guest researcher and at the Venezuelan Institute of Scientific Research as a researcher for almost 8 years. In 2005, he joined Arizona State University where he stayed until 2015 when he moved to Temple as part of the Institute for Genomics and Evolutionary Medicine (iGEM). His professional life has centered in translating concepts from evolutionary genetics theory into epidemiology and in deepening our understanding of the origin of malarial parasites and their genetic diversity.

Research Interest

His research interests are: i) translation of evolutionary biology concepts into malaria control programs, ii) the origin and spread of drug resistance in malarial parasites, and iii) evolutionary history of Plasmodium vivax and related non-human malarial parasites. Dr Escalante's long-term goal is establishing bridges among the anthropological, epidemiological, ecological, and evolutionary biology perspectives to address infectious diseases. Nowadays, his team is linking population-level research with comparative genome approaches to understand the origin and demographic history of P. vivax, as well how such historical processes affected genes encoding proteins that are involved in the invasion of the red blood cell, a crucial step in the parasite life cycle.