Chris Plowe

University of Maryland, Maryland, USA

Chris Plowe is a physician and malariologist who leads a multidisciplinary clinical translational malaria research program at the University of Maryland's Center for Vaccine Development, with field sites in Malawi, Central Africa and in Mali, West Africa and molecular parasitology laboratories at the CVD in Baltimore, Maryland, USA.

He is presently helping to lead malaria vaccine trials in Mali, but is best known for his work on the molecular epidemiology of drug-resistant malaria. Working with African colleagues, his team developed rapid molecular assays to detect drug-resistant malaria and used these tests to understand the population genetics of malaria and to control malaria outbreaks and inform treatment policy decisions.

Professor Plowe's work encompasses malaria drug resistance, molecular and genomic epidemiology, molecular evolution, rapid diagnostics, pathogenesis, immunology, international research ethics, interactions between HIV and malaria, and clinical trials of drugs and vaccines. His group is currently focusing on understanding and mitigating the impact of genetic diversity on malaria vaccine efficacy and on developing strategies to deter the emergence and spread of drug resistant malaria.

Professor Plowe has degrees in philosophy and in medicine from Cornell University and in public health from Columbia University, and he completed fellowships in malaria research at the U.S. National Institutes of Health and in infectious diseases at Johns Hopkins University before joining the faculty of the University of Maryland School of Medicine, where he is Chief of the CVD Malaria Section, Professor of Medicine, of Microbiology and Immunology, and of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine, a Doris Duke Distinguished Clinical Scientist, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.