Kasturi Haldar MD

Kasturi Haldar, the Julius Nieuwland Professor of Biology and Parsons-Quinn Director for the Center for Rare and Neglected Diseases at the University of Notre Dame 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 the 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.