Dr Grant Hughes

Grant’s PhD research at The University of Queensland focused on developing a symbiotic control strategy of an agricultural disease caused by a viral pathogen transmitted by Planthoppers. To further his expertise in the vector biology and symbiosis fields he undertook a Postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, and then a Research Associate position at Penn State University where he examined the interactions between Wolbachia, a common bacterial endosymbiont of insects, other microbiota, and Plasmodium parasites in Anopheles mosquitoes. In 2015, Grant joined the Department of Pathology at the University of Texas Medical Branch as an Assistant Professor and focused on examining interactions between the microbiome and arboviruses in Aedes mosquitoes. Grant joined the Departments of Vector Biology and Tropical Disease Biology at LSTM in 2018 where his group works on arboviruses and microbes of mosquitoes.

Research interests

Research in the Hughes lab centres around host-microbe interactions within mosquitoes and understanding the molecular basis for these interactions. Specifically, we are interested in the following topics.

• Examining the tripartite interactions between mosquitoes, their microbiome and the pathogens they transmit.
• Characterising transmission routes of gut associated microbes within mosquitoes.
• Developing new tools for manipulating microbiota and identifying mosquito phenotypes influenced by the microbiome and the genetics that mediate these interactions.
• Exploiting gut associated microbes to deliver molecules to interfere with pathogen transmission in mosquitoes.
• Developing novel tools to engineer mosquitoes.
• Exploiting genetics approaches to render mosquitoes incapable of transmitting pathogens to humans.