postgraduate study in Infectious Diseases
Academic leadership: LSHTM
The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) is the University of London's major resource for postgraduate teaching and research in public health and tropical medicine, as well as the leading postgraduate medical institution in these subjects in Europe. It has an international standing with a staff that has unique multidisciplinary and international experience.
This course has been designed by staff within the Faculty of Infectious & Tropical Diseases (ITD) which encompasses all of the laboratory-based research in the School as well as that on the clinical and epidemiological aspects of infectious and tropical diseases. The range of disciplines represented in the Faculty is very broad and interdisciplinary research is a feature of much of its activity. The spectrum of diseases studied is wide and there are major research groups focused on malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases, vaccine development and evaluation, and vector biology and disease control.
Course Director
Sara Atkinson
BSc PhD
Sara is a lecturer within the Infectious and Tropical Diseases Faculty at LSHTM. She read Genetics at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. After working at AIIMS, New Delhi on a project identifying the genes involved in thalassaemia she joined LSHTM in 1987. Her PhD focused on linkage studies of genes involved in the susceptibility of infection to intracellular infections, particularly tuberculosis and leprosy in Pakistan. After her PhD, she continued her research at LSHTM on cellular aspects of BCG immunology. Later she returned to her interest in leprosy immunology and studied inflammatory cytokine expression in leprosy patients in Hyderabad, India. More recently, her research work has involved microarray techniques for studying differential gene expression within patients with leprosy undergoing different drug treatments. Her teaching interests are in immunology and intracellular infections. Sara was Deputy Course Organiser of the distance learning Infectious Diseases course in 2005-06, taking over from John Ackers as Course Director in 2006-07.
Deputy Course Director
Patricia Gorak-Stolinska
BSc PhD
Patricia is a lecturer in the Immunology Department at LSHTM. After reading Parasitology at Kings College London and studying for an MPhil in Parasite Immunology at Imperial College, she joined the School in 1994 to work on costimulatory molecules and marginal zone macrophages in a model for Leishmania donvani. After this she moved to the Dept. of Immunology Kings College London to work on human CD4 and CD8 T cell subsets. In 2002 after completing her PhD thesis on T cell Apoptosis at Guy’s Kings and St. Thomas’ School of Medicine, she returned to LSHTM to work on immunity to mycobacteria particularly the immune response to BCG vaccination in which she has a continuing research interest. Her teaching interests are in parasitology and immunology.
Course Content Director
Jackie Cliff
BA MSc PhD
Jackie is a lecturer in the Department of Immunology and Infection, within the Faculty of Infectious and Tropical Diseases at LSHTM. Jackie first came to LSHTM as a student in 1993 to study the MSc in Infectious Diseases, and then went to the National Institute for Medical Research, where she conducted her PhD looking at the role of cytokine production by B cells. She returned to LSHTM in 1999, and has been investigating immune responses to tuberculosis since then. Primarily, her research is directed at identifying host biomarkers which can be used to determine when a TB patient has been successfully cured – such markers will be useful in clinical trials of new drugs and eventually in clinical management of TB cases. Jackie enjoys teaching immunology and infection, especially tuberculosis, and she is the Course Content Director for the distance learning Infectious Diseases programme.
For further information about the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine please refer to the LSHTM website [external link].