Steering Committee
Amee Manges, PrePARE Steering Committee Member, School of Population and Public Health, UBC
Dr. Amee Manges is a Professor, and molecular epidemiologist, in the School of Population and Public Health at UBC. Her primary research focus is on understanding how communities of microorganisms that live within us affect the development and maintenance of our health. Dr. Manges research seeks to examine the microbiota’s role in child undernutrition, environmental enteric dysfunction and antibiotic resistance. Dr. Manges is also working on the development of a next generation sequencing-based diagnostic tool for infectious agents, in collaboration with BugSeq Bioinformatics.
Daniel Coombs, PrePARE Steering Committee Member, Department of Mathematics, UBC
Dr. Daniel Coombs is a Professor in the Department of Mathematics and the Institute of Applied Mathematics at the University of British Columbia. His research uses mathematical modeling to understand infectious disease dynamics and how viral infections change over time, contributing to our understanding of infection and immunity across scales, from subcelular processes of immunological recognition to virus dynamics at the single-patient level, to epidemiological modeling across human communities. Dr. Coombs has worked closely with experimental scientists at UBC and BC Children’s Hospital Research Centre, as well as public health experts at the BC Centre for Disease Control.
Ted Steiner, PrePARE Steering Committee Member, Division of Infectious Disease, Department of Medicine, UBC
Dr. Theodore Steiner is a Professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases in the Department of Medicine at the University of British Columbia and an Investigator at the BC Children’s Hospital. His research focuses on the intestinal immune system and its ability to respond to dangerous infections while remaining tolerant of the normal, healthy bacteria. Dr. Steiner studies immune responses to the bacterial, viral, and environmental antigens to better understand C. difficile infections, and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), and food/antibiotic allergy syndromes, and ultimately to develop novel treatment by creating “super-suppressor” cells to reduce gut inflammation.
Staff
Emily Altiere Kerr, PrePARE Program Coordinator
Dr. Emily Altiere Kerr is the Program Coordinator for the Prepare for Pandemics Through Advanced Research in Evolution (PrePARE) research cluster. She is responsible for program coordination, planning organizational events to enable collaboration among members of the cluster, and communication and information exchange between the UBC community and the public. Emily completed her Ph.D. in Physics at the University of British Columbia and holds a certificate in project management. She was a founding member of the Physics and Astronomy EDI group at UBC in 2017, which enables education, support and development of strategic initiatives in the department.
Contact: emily.altiere@ubc.ca