Hemingway Award 2021: Dr Maria Eugenia Grillet

The Hemingway Award is a joint award between RSTMH and the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM), who will be jointly delivering this webinar. The award recognises Professor Janet Hemingway’s achievements in delivering and encouraging translational science during her leadership of LSTM. Dr Grillet is a professor and principal investigator at the Instituto de Zoología y Ecología Tropical at the Universidad Central de Venezuela

In her talk, Dr Grillet will be speaking about how the Onchocerca volvulus–Simulium interactions has shaped the population dynamics of onchocerciasis infections and has contributed to the epidemiological patterns of this disease in Latin America. Also, how local adaptation of the parasite-vector complexes has influenced the feasibility and degree of eliminating the parasite reservoir in different foci in the region and Venezuela.

Regarding malaria, Dr Grillet will describe how the spatial and temporal epidemiology of malaria in the last 25 years in the country have allowed us to disentangle the effect of local and global spatial variation on malaria infection as well as the role of local and regional climate factors on long-term malaria dynamics. In addition, she will show how the changes in Land Cover patterns caused by the mining activities in the Venezuelan Amazonian Forests have determined the upsurge and reemergence of malaria in Venezuela with the ongoing spillover of malaria cases across the whole Latin America region.

Finally, Dr Grillet will assess how Venezuela's health crisis has impacted mosquito-borne infectious diseases (MBIDs), reshaped the epidemiological landscape and placed Venezuela as the spotlight of malaria in the region and one of the countries currently reporting yellow fever outbreaks in the Americas.

Dr Grillet was nominated by Professor Alicia Ponte-Sucre, who will be giving an introduction to the webinar. During her introduction Professor Ponte-Suce will talk about María Eugenia Grillet research production on the ecology of vector-borne infection diseases as a solid and widely recognized work with findings that have contributed to understand how and why a stable pathogen-host relationship exists, and elucidate how to disrupt these interactions to minimize disease impact.