Postgraduate

MSc and Postgraduate Diploma in Infectious Diseases

Lead College

Academic leadership: LSHTM

The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) is the University of London's major resource for postgraduate teaching and research in public health and tropical medicine, as well as the leading postgraduate medical institution in these subjects in Europe.

It has an international standing with a staff that has unique multidisciplinary and international experience.

This course has been designed by staff within the Department of Infectious & Tropical Diseases (ITD) which encompasses all of the laboratory-based research in the School as well as that on the clinical and epidemiological aspects of infectious and tropical diseases. The range of disciplines represented in the Department is very broad and interdisciplinary research is a feature of much of its activity. The spectrum of diseases studied is wide and there are major research groups focused on malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases, vaccine development and evaluation, and vector biology and disease control..

The Course Director is Sara Atkinson, a lecturer within ITD. She read Genetics at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. After working at AIIMS, New Delhi on a project identifying the genes involved in thalassaemia she joined LSHTM in 1987. Her PhD focused on linkage studies of genes involved in the susceptibility of infection to intracellular infections, particularly tuberculosis and leprosy in Pakistan. After her PhD, she continued her research at LSHTM on cellular aspects of BCG immunology.  Later she returned to her interest in leprosy immunology and studied inflammatory cytokine expression in leprosy patients in Hyderabad, India.  More recently her research work has involved microarray techniques for studying differential gene expression within patients with leprosy undergoing different drug treatments. Her teaching interests are in immunology and intracellular infections.  Sara was Deputy Course Organiser of the distance learning Postgraduate Diploma/MSc Infectious Diseases course in 2005-06, taking over from John Ackers as Course Organiser in 2006-07.