Falling Walls Falling Walls Science Summit 2023

Fighting Malaria: Falling Walls Breakthrough Conversation with Jane Achan

Jane Achan, Filipe Almeida

2022 Breakthrough Conversations

In this Falling Walls Breakthrough Conversation, digital participants had the chance to engage in a live conversation with Jane Achan who is part of the Falling Walls Female Science Talents Program. She talked about her role as a Senior Research Advisor at the United Kingdom-based non-governmental organization Malaria Consortium and her fighting Malaria in sub-Saharan Africa. The interview series provided an intimate personal atmosphere, in which high-level guests, speakers and panelists of the Falling Walls Science Summit 2022 talked about their individual research, career paths and experiences.

The Falling Walls Breakthrough Conversations are supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and Springer Nature.

Jane Achan

Malaria Consortium, Kampala, Uganda

Dr. Jane Achan is a medical doctor with a PhD in Biomedical Sciences, a master’s degree in Pediatrics and Child Health and master’s training in Clinical Trials. She is the Senior Research Advisor at Malaria Consortium, a United Kingdom-based non-governmental organization, where she oversees and supports the research agenda across several countries in Africa and Asia. She has been involved in clinical and operational research in the fields of infectious diseases, maternal and child health and health systems for the past 20 years. Her professional interests include evaluation of chemotherapeutic interventions to guide health policy, evaluation of health-related impact of interventions and operational health systems research. More recently she has been involved in evaluating potential interactions between COVID-19 and malaria and exploring the role of innovative strategies for malaria burden reduction in special risk populations in high burden settings.

I want to see malaria eliminated in sub-Saharan Africa. I want this, because malaria continues to cause significant illness and death in sub-Saharan Africa. I can do this, because I am part of a team implementing innovative malaria control and elimination programmes and research which contribute to significant burden reduction.

Filipe Almeida

Springer Nature

Filipe studied the influence of the biomechanics of the tumor microenvironment at The Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, and most recently developed composite biomaterials for the delivery of anticancer drugs at NOVA University of Lisbon. Previously, at Queen Mary University of London, where he obtained his PhD in 2015, where he studied how skin cells respond to their microenvironment by using advanced microfabricated biomaterials, and developed micropatterned surfaces for high-content imaging and drug screening. Filipe’s interests span mechanobiology, biomechanics, cellular imaging, tissue engineering, nanotheranostics and cancer therapies. Filipe joined Nature Biomedical Engineering in November 2021 and he is based in Berlin.

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