University of Nottingham
Rita Tewari is Professor of Parasite Cell Biology, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences. Research in her group aims to analyse parasite proteins, in particular kinases, phosphatases and other novel proteins involved in parasite signalling pathways, development and cell division. Work in her group involves uses rodent malaria model Plasmodium berghei. Her work is funded by MRC, BBSRC, EMBO, British Council, Erasmus, Wellcome Trust. She has just been awarded European Research Council Advance grant (2023-2028)
She started to study the malaria parasite at Imperial College, London, and established first genome wide functional screen on kinases in Plasmodium. Her present focus is to understand atypical cell division processes in Plasmodium, mainly parasite stages that are developed and proliferate in mosquito host. The basic processes, whether it’s a human cell or a mouse cell or a parasite cell, are more or less the same. For Rita, that’s the beauty of biology: there are no boundaries if you want to ask simple questions – how does the cell divide? How can I make the cell stop? She can sit at the microscope for hours and people think – “what is there?” – but she still get excited by the same single parasite cell biology because every time you see a cell it looks different, it has something else to show you.