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PLoS Pathogens Editor-in-Chief

Biography for Kasturi Haldar

Kasturi Haldar, the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Pathology at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, is an authority on the mechanisms by which human malaria parasites remodel their host cells. Her laboratory pioneered the application of modern cell biological tools to studying malarial infection of the erythrocyte. They identified a novel transport signal that enables parasite protein to access the host erythrocyte and thus defined secretome of several hundred parasite effectors involved in virulence and structural remodeling of the host. Other major achievements include the identification of the pathway of parasite protein export to the erythrocyte and demonstration that the host targeting signal of malaria parasites is shared by the Irish potato famine pathogen Phytophthora infestans.

The Haldar lab also identified novel malarial Golgi dynamics that underlie a lipid rich, nutrient import pathway in infected erythrocytes and enable transport of cholesterol-rich host 'raft' complexes, essential nutrient solutes and lipids to the malarial vacuole. They have further established that the sterol biosynthetic pathway and cholesterol are important to intracellular infection by Salmonella.

In addition, Haldar and her colleagues have shown that adrenergic signaling is an active process in erythrocyte and required for malaria invasion and growth. They have established erythrocyte signaling pathways can be targets for malarial infection and may be important for treatment of malaria.

Education

Awards and Honors

Selected Publications

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