Events Calendar
To Friday 19 August 2016 - 05:00pm
Kuching, 18 August 2016 - The Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences (FMHS) UNIMAS hosted the Public Lecture by Professor Dr. Balbir Singh today at PUSTAKA Negeri Sarawak.
The public lecture are discussing about The M&Ms: Malaria, Man, Monkeys & Mosquitoes. Malaria in humans was thought to be caused by four species of Plasmodium, until the landmark discovery by Professor Balbir Singh and his team that there is a fifth species, P. knowlesi, commonly found in monkeys, that can be transmitted to humans.
Prof Balbir, who has been a ‘malaria detective’ for almost 3 decades, talks about how his team has used molecular tools to discover monkey malaria in humans, how they demonstrated that infections originate from monkeys and also the work they undertook to identify the mosquitoes that are responsible for transmitting P. knowlesi to humans.
The lecture also include a brief history of this monkey malaria parasite, which can cause a life-threatening infection, occurs throughout Southeast Asia and has recently become the most common cause of human malaria in Sarawak and Sabah.
Professor Balbir Singh, the founding director of the Malaria Research Centre (MRC), UNIMAS, obtained his BSc, MSc and PhD degrees from the University of Liverpool (1976-1984).
His interest in malaria began at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine when he initially worked as a Postdoctoral Research Assistant and later as a Beit Medical Fellow.
He returned to Malaysia in 1992 and was a lecturer at Universiti Sains Malaysia for seven years before moving to UNIMAS in 1999. Prof Balbir’s research has been aimed at obtaining a greater understanding of the epidemiology, evolutionary history and pathophysiology of malaria.
Research at the MRC, UNIMAS has been funded by local and international funding agencies including the Wellcome Trust, UK.
His research has been published in leading international journals and his publications have been cited 2,929 times with an h-index of 27.
His team’s work on knowlesi malaria has attracted considerable media attention and was featured in a documentary by ABC Australia and in a news report by Al Jazeera.
Prof Balbir has been invited to speak at numerous conferences in Europe, USA, Canada and Australasia, to review research grant applications from the UK and Australia, and to review manuscripts for publication from 23 international journals.
He was the local secretary for Malaysia, for the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, UK (1994-2007) and has served as an advisor to the World Health Organisation.
His contributions to Science in Malaysia were recognised by the Academy of Sciences Malaysia when they selected him as one of the Top Research Scientists Malaysia in 2012 and invited him to become a Fellow of the Academy of Sciences Malaysia in 201
