Ross Boyce
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Public Health & Epidemiology
Malaria remains a heavy burden in rural sub-Saharan Africa. Existing tools, such as insecticide-treated bed nets and preventive drug doses, leave serious gaps.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Microbiology & Immunology
- Topics
malaria
Plasmodium falciparum
MiP
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- Determine the feasibility and acceptability of focal mass drug administration with dihydroartemisinin-piperaquine (DP) for household members of pregnant women, through a three-arm randomized pilot at a rural Ugandan health center.
- Estimate whether household DP treatment creates a parasite-free 'safe zone', measuring clinical malaria by RDT, silent and placental P. falciparum infection by PCR, and adverse birth outcomes through delivery.
- Test whether three monthly DP rounds for children, with or without larvicide (Bti) around homes, sustain a reduction of at least 30% in malaria after severe flooding, using a cluster randomized trial in 50 villages.
- Track how Anopheles mosquito populations, feeding behavior and sporozoite infection rates change for a year after flooding, using weekly household and peri-domestic surveillance.
- Evaluate the cost-effectiveness of post-flood chemoprevention and its effects on household income, health spending and mental health using longitudinal surveys.
More about the research
Coverage is incomplete, doses are missed, and drug and insecticide resistance is growing. Both projects test practical ways to cut malaria transmission in rural western Uganda. Each targets the reservoir of malaria parasites carried in people at moments of high risk: during pregnancy and after severe flooding. Both use the antimalarial combination dihydroartemisinin-piperaquine (DP).
Why it matters
Pregnant women and young children in high-malaria regions of sub-Saharan Africa face severe illness and poor birth outcomes. These trials could provide evidence for low-cost additions to current prevention: treating household members to shield pregnant women, and time-limited drug campaigns and larvicide after floods. Health programs could use the results to respond to climate-driven flooding and to fill gaps left by missed doses and resistance.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Robert McCann
University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
Measure how readily the two main Malawian malaria mosquitoes, Anopheles funestus and Anopheles arabiensis, become infected with Plasmodium falciparum, using membrane feeding assays with field-collected mosquitoes.
Jessica Briggs
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
Genotype every Plasmodium falciparum infection in a Ugandan birth cohort of 924 children to estimate the molecular force of infection (the rate at which new parasite clones establish infection) and compare children given DP chemoprevention with those given placebo.
Jessica Lin
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Microbiology & Immunology
Test whether primaquine failures in a Thai Plasmodium vivax relapse trial were driven by a high burden of hypnozoites, dormant liver-stage parasites, using molecular inversion probe sequencing to detect circulating variants and gauge infection complexity.
The school
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: 72 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 523 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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