I’m excited to announce the publication in Malaria Journal, the leading journal in malaria research,

Mechanistic within-host models of the asexual Plasmodium falciparum infection: a review and analytical assessment.

Flavia Camponovo, Tamsin E. Lee, Jonathan Russell, Lydia Burgert, Jaline Gerardin, Melissa A. Penny

The lead author is my good friend Flavia Camponovo, who was a PhD student in the same research group as me (she is now at the Communicable disease dynamics, Harvard). She had a keen interest in developing a model of the within-host dynamics of a person infected with malaria. Like any good scientist, she started collecting information about the current within-host models. However, she’s a very thorough scientist, so instead of writing a paragraph summarising the current state of research, she went much further and started reproducing a lot of the current models, coding them all in Matlab. Granted, some codes were provided, but as anyone who has tried to reproduce just one paper knows, this is a huge task! So in the way that research can take unexpected directions, reproducing and comparing current models became a paper in itself. This deep dive has been gracefully executed, thereby providing a lot more than a typical review does.

Needing to be needed

As mentioned in a previous post, for nearly two months I had to work from a campsite in a locked down New Zealand. This unique experience taught me that I’m not the type of person who produces her best work when isolated on a beautiful beach. I’ve learnt that I need a windowless cave to work hard! When I did manage to resist the lure of the sea and instead sit at my laptop, I looked at my work for 10 minutes before compulsively updating COVID stats and repatriation information. Fortunately, it was at a time when Flavia’s paper was coming together, and she sent me a copy of her paper. What motivates me is working with other people, and knowing that others depend on my input. So I engrossed myself in the paper, grateful for a tangible task. Still, I was frustrated that my lack of concentration meant I was reading each sentence two or three times. I had little faith in my comments because I was returning to work after three months off. I no longer felt like a scientist but more like a hippy traveller.

A picture is worth a thousand words

I was befuddled when she later text me a photo of a beautiful diagram she was making, which was inspired by one of my comments, also shown in her photo. As I squinted to read my comment, I didn’t recognise it. It sounded so sciency! (I was requesting information about how each model included feedback between the immune response and infected red blood cells.) I didn’t sound like a hippy whose daily routine included emptying a camper toilet and dancing in the sea. What’s more, I didn’t envision that my comment could be addressed with a diagram. Flavia took my comment, agreed with it, and addressed it using her knowledge and skillset.

What a delicious ping-pong between scientists 🙂