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My name is Peter Preiser and I am
from Germany originally and now I am in
Singapore at the Nanyang Technological University
where I have a couple of positions. I am the associate provost for graduate
education, which means responsible for all Ph.D.s
and Master's students at the university, and I am also the chair
of the School of Biological Sciences. And I run a research project on malaria.
And I'm mainly interested in host-pathogen interactions.
In MaHPIC my role is actually as an advisor
so I'm not actually involved in any of the direct research.
going on, but i'm supposed to advise the scientists in the
project and give feedback based on
our own experiences we have in the research we do. There is probably a lot of
overlap. I guess that is why I am playing a role here as an advisor.
in the things that we do.
So today, again, it's just about listening to what is being done
trying to help them along to do things better if that's possible at all.
Well, I think the big advantage of MaHPIC is
that it is really trying to put a fully integrative
approach looking at the important questions
questions of malaria pathology and disease development.
It combines, really, a wide diversity of
of expertise, so not just people working on malaria, but
people working on computational biology who bring in
a lot of technology platforms. I think, also, one of the real big advantages
it is a fully integrated approach
that MaHPIC takes by combining genomics
with transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics
in most likely the best models we have
for human pathology, which are the primate systems.
And trying to integrate the data. A lot of the data that is out there is
sort of single studies....either transcriptome or proteome
but here everything's put together. That
has a potential creating fantastic new insights into
parasite biology which in the future will
have potential to lead to better interventions
and better understanding of the parasite biology.
Another big advantage is,
you know, by integrating all the data you are
creating a much better understanding of all
the factors that contribute to disease outcome. Now that's challenging
and I think this is the team that they put together is most likely best suited to
actually address this because
different expertise available. How did I get interested in malaria? That is a kind of
interesting story. I actually did my PhD
on Drosophila genetics..so...fruit fly..I did a post-doc on
splicing in human cells.
and then I was about to move back from United States where I had
done all this, to Europe, and I had
three opportunities. One was to work on viruses
and at the University of Würzburg, one was to
work on hamster at the German cancer center, and the other one was to go to London and work,
start working on malaria. And
that was quite a challenging decision to make so I decided it was going
to travel around the world a little bit and I spent
two months in Southeast Asia and I was sitting on a beach in Bali
and I decided... you know I was thinking... if on work on malaria
then there might be an opportunity to go back to
working sometimes in the tropics. And, that is how I
started getting into malaria. And I also hadn't lived in London before so I
London sounded as an attractive place to move to.
and the fact that is a tropical disease so there
at that stage I was twenty seven years-old there was no big thought about, you know,
but there is one other issue
and I always felt that when I was talking to my parents at the breakfast table 'what do
you do?'
I said 'working on a fruit fly', so 'Why is that important?' and it gets a little bit awkward
when I said' I work with malaria, it kills
millions of people every year'...so much easier
to justify to your parents! What I would say you know
why would anyone want to work on malaria or
or in these areas? I think there are a number of
reasons. One is that think it's just really exciting biology
Forget about how its impact on health ...but really
it is one of these fantastic systems
which is really confounding
scientists. So if there is you know if you want to really
go out there and be challenged intellectually
this is the way to go. The other thing is obviously
it is a real health problem.
so you're working something that has real impact if you
do something and
move the field along. And
you know, if you understand or start working on
malaria and working on these projects that are developed
at MaHPIC you know, you can translate that information to any
other system. So you're not fixed,
stuck in malaria in the long run. You can go and say this is
you know is a challenge , the things that I can learn from this I
can translate into other fields and I think this is
always important thing to remember for someone starting off as a research scientist.
The project work on as a Ph.D. student or
post doc does not mean that is what you have to do for the
rest you life. I think what is really
fantastic about MaHPIC is the
the integration of different fields
you know that they have really reached out to get the best people
not just sticking in the field of who does
something in malaria. They've gone out and tried to get the best people.
The fact that it's really international
researchers in all these areas is now global
effort. Its interdisciplinary and is
international and it's very important that
mechanisms are put in place to allow this to happen.
You know, you always hear you know you have to work interdisciplinary, and you have to work
global, but often there are no mechanisms of actually
really making this happen in terms of
funding opportunities, etc. Here now we have
something in place which is at least starting
to really go out international.