Dr Jonathan Suurbaar is a postdoctoral research assistant in Professor Andy Waters’ group at the University of Glasgow. He holds a PhD in Infection Biology from the University of Glasgow, completed through the Wellcome trust Integrated Infection Biology Programme, and an MPhil from the University of Ghana, where he trained at the West African Centre for Cell Biology of Infectious Pathogens (WACCBIP).

During his MPhil, he also held an AfOx fellowship to undertake research at the Jenner Institute, University of Oxford. He has also completed advanced training through the Biology of Parasitism course at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, USA. His training spans molecular biology, parasitology, immunology, genomics and infectious disease research.

A major focus of my work is understanding how drug-resistance-associated mutations influence parasite fitness and transmission. I am interested not only in whether a mutation confers resistance, but also in its consequences for gametocyte development, mosquito infectivity and onward transmission. This work seeks to understand why some resistance mutations spread successfully through parasite populations while others impose fitness or transmission costs that constrain their persistence.

I am also developing experimental approaches that move malaria research beyond retrospectively describing evolutionary change towards testing what parasites are capable of evolving next. This includes combining molecular parasitology, genomics, single-cell approaches and synthetic biology to investigate parasite responses to antimalarial drugs, host immunity and transmission bottlenecks.

Research groups

• Host Parasite Interactions & Pathogenesis

Prior publications