Our speaker this week will be Shirley Luckhart, a professor at U of I in the Entomology, Plant Pathology & Nematology Department. She is an expert on the transmission of Malaria by the female Anopheles Mosquito. For thirty years her team at U of I has been researching the "biology of the blood feeding interface – that is, how factors in mammalian host blood (drugs, cytokine
s, parasite factors) influence parasite development and transmission to the mosquito host."