Amaya Ortega

Amaya Ortega is a PhD student under the supervision of Prof. Stephen Rogerson, Dr. Elizabeth Aitken and Dr. Amy Chung. The group is located at the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity in Melbourne. Broadly, Amaya’s PhD project targets pregnant women living in areas with high transmission of malaria. But more specifically, her aim is to decipher the joint activity of antibodies and the innate immunity system, with a focus on monocytes, and how that affects the development of the protective immune response against the parasite. Hopefully, this will contribute to the design of a vaccine for pregnancy-malaria.