Research Opportunities

Globally, HIV and schistosomiasis are leading causes of death due to infectious diseases. Despite available interventions, the infections remain uncontrolled in low-income settings causing acute and chronic morbidities. Intestinal schistosomiasis is caused by a parasitic blood fluke, most commonly of the species Schistosoma mansoni, and is predominantly found in sub-Saharan Africa. Chronic infections lead to advanced disease including liver fibrosis, portal hypertension, upper gastrointestinal tract bleeding, and severe anaemia. In the context of coinfections, severe clinical outcomes including death may be likely due to immune failure, interactions related to general fibrosis, and responses to starting antiretroviral therapy. In this project, you will have the opportunity to work with cutting-edge statistical and big data approaches alongside state-of-the art immunology to examine disease progression in the context of schistosome and HIV coinfections in arguably some of the poorest settings worldwide.

The group of Associate Prof. Chami studies schistosomiasis evaluating transmission, clinical outcomes, and treatment strategies, especially for liver fibrosis, in the SchistoTrack Cohort with the Uganda Ministry of Health. This Cohort is the largest individual-based cohort tracking individuals prospectively in the context of schistosomiasis. At Oxford, students can get exposure to computational, big data approaches to clinical epidemiology and field experience in global health research.

The group of Dr. Sereti studies HIV immune pathogenesis with a focus on inflammatory complications related to HIV and coinfections. Studies on biomarkers and how they may assist in identifying early people with HIV who may develop inflammatory and other adverse complications is currently an active area of investigation in the lab as they can also inform disease pathogenesis and new targeted interventions.

At the NIH, students can get experience in immunology research (wet lab) with optional exposure to complicated cases within a clinical setting.

In this project you will use state-of-the-art viral sequencing data, combined with epidemiological data and mathematical modeling, to create an integrated understanding of HIV transmission. HIV places an enormous burden on global health. Implementing treatment and interventions can save millions of lives, but to do this effectively requires us to be able to predict the outcome of interventions, and to be able to accurately assess how well they are working once implemented. For HIV, these efforts are hampered by long durations of infections, and rapid within-host viral evolution during infection, meaning the virus an individual is infected with is unlikely to be the same as any viruses they go on to transmit.
 
For this project, you will identify individuals enrolled in the Rakai Community Cohort Project, based in Uganda, who are part of possible transmission chains, and for whom multiple blood samples are available throughout infection and at the time of transmission. These samples will be sequenced using state-of-the-art technology developed at the University of Oxford enabling the sequencing of thousands of whole virus genomes per sample, without the need to break the viral genomes into short fragments (whole-haplotype deep sequencing). Using this data, you will comprehensively characterize viral diversity during infection and at the point of transmission.

Key questions you will tackle are:
 
- Do ‘founder-like’ viruses (similar to those that initiated infection) persist during chronic infection?
- Is there a consistent pattern of evolution towards population consensus virus?
- Are ‘founder-like’ viruses, or ‘consensus-like’ viruses more likely to be transmitted?
- Does the transmission of drug-resistant virus depend on the history of the transmitting partner?

*This project is available for the 2021 Oxford-NIH Pilot Programme*