Panpim Thongsripong

While growing up in rural Thailand, I became especially aware of how the tiniest creatures such as mosquitoes could create big problems in public health. I became interested and started doing research in mosquito-borne diseases during my undergraduate training in Thailand; raising mosquitoes in an insectary, collecting mosquitoes from field sites, and learning advanced techniques in laboratory molecular biology. Since then, I have been fortunate to receive graduate training from many inspiring scientists in the Department of Tropical Medicine at the University of Hawai'i and the Department of Microbiology at the California Academy of Science in San Francisco. I worked in multidisciplinary teams with scientists in numerous fields to more completely understand and address mosquito-borne diseases such as Dengue fever. Through these interactions, I developed research skills in ecology, entomology, virology, and bioinformatics. My work on multidisciplinary teams taught me that effective infectious disease control programs demand understanding of not only molecular biology and immunology, but also the ecology of pathogens and hosts.

Currently, I am pursuing a PhD at Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in the wonderful city of New Orleans. My research combines interdisciplinary approaches from ecology, medical entomology, and virology to better understand the risks of mosquito-borne disease transmission in the Southern United States.

March 2016