Humans vs Microbes: Into the Microverse

The skin is your body's first and most underrated defense against influenza. Far more than a passive covering, it acts as a physical barrier, a chemical arsenal, and an immune sentinel — blocking viral entry, triggering antiviral signals, and activating targeted immune responses. Understanding these mechanisms is reshaping how we develop flu vaccines and treat skin-related vulnerabilities. Your skin has been fighting the flu silently, every single day.

Pathogens such as bacteria and viruses are con artists. They trick the cells they infect by using molecules in disguise, “dressed up” to seem like part of the body’s own systems for defense, control and maintenance. Since they resemble the body’s own molecules closely enough, they can interfere with the cell’s regular workings, scrambling and creating chaos from within. How do these molecular impostors work, and why are they so effective? In this talk, we’ll explore striking examples of molecular mimicry and see how microbes use deception to invade, survive and outsmart their hosts.

Schistosomiasis is a debilitating neglected disease, primarily affecting the Global South, caused by worms that live in blood vessels. Due to the inaccessible location of worms, we rely on poo and urine-based diagnostic tools to detect infections and measure disease prevalence. However, these diagnostics are imperfect and huge discrepancies between tools makes the ‘true’ disease prevalence difficult to assess. Here, I’ll discuss a model that estimates ‘true’ prevalence, which could increase the accuracy of drug evaluation and disease surveillance for schistosomiasis and other worm infections.