Silvie Huijben is an evolutionary biologist with a keen interest in the arms-race between us humans and the organisms we aim to control. Most of her work has evolved around the evolution of antimalarial resistance. In her recent work she combines both antimalarial resistance and insecticide resistance. By considering these two fields not as two different entities but as one problem with different faces we can understand the system as a whole better. To understand the evolution of resistance, one needs to understand the evolutionary ecology of the organism with the key question: how can we use this knowledge to design better resistance management strategies?
Silvie Huijben started her PhD in evolutionary biology and infectious diseases at the University of Edinburgh (UK) and later moved to the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics (CIDD) at the Pennsylvania State University (USA). She received her PhD degree from the University of Edinburgh in 2010 and continued with a post-doctoral position at CIDD. She obtained a Science in Society – Branco Weiss Fellowship and a Marie Curie Incoming International Fellowship and for a post-doctoral position at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISglobal, Spain) in 2013 where she is currently based.