Sitara Ajjampur

Christian Medical College, Vellore, India

Sitara SR Ajjampur is a Professor of Microbiology at The Wellcome Trust Research Laboratory, Christian Medical College (CMC), Vellore in southern India. Her training background includes MBBS, MD and a PhD with training at CMC, Vellore and Tufts Medical Center, Boston and post-doctoral research at NUS, Singapore. Her research focusses on the epidemiology, impact and prevention of endemic parasitic infections, especially enteric protists that cause early childhood diarrhoea, Cryptosporidium and Giardia as well as soil transmitted helminths with funding from ICMR, DBT, DST, NIH, BMGF, CIFF and GCRF (One Health). She serves as an Associate Editor for the parasitology section for PloS NTD and BMC Infectious Diseases and Academic Editor for PLoS Global Public Health. She is a council member of the International Society of Infectious Diseases, a member of the UKRI International Development Peer Review College and co-chair of WHO DTAG subgroup on clinical diagnosis, imaging and microscopy for NTD. She is involved in teaching parasitology and tropical medicine both for students at CMC and in international workshops with MSF. She also oversees a busy parasitology diagnostics laboratory at CMC hospital which receives over 40,000 samples annually.