Paola Carrillo-Bustamante

Dr. Paola Carrillo-Bustamante, mum of a 2 year old, was born and raised in Ecuador and moved to Germany in 2003 sponsored by a full scholarship of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) to start her studies in Electrical Engineering at the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology. 

In 2010, she started a PhD in Computational Biology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, where she graduated in 2015. She moved back to Germany to further pursue a career as a scientist, and conducted two postdoctoral Research positions: one in Heidelberg University and another one at Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, where she currently works as a staff scientist. 

In her work, she studies the transmission of mosquito-borne diseases by using novel computational modelling. 

I want to eradicate mosquito-borne diseases. I want this because they pose a major health burden worldwide and we still lack effective permanent solutions. I can do this because I combine novel computational modelling tools that can unravel current misconceptions of transmission.