Nicholas Svitek

Dr Nicholas Svitek is an accomplished microbiologist specializing in virology and immunology, with a strong focus on innate and cellular immunology, molecular virology, and bacteriology. With a career spanning over a decade at ILRI, Nicholas has been at the forefront of ground-breaking projects, including utilizing artificial intelligence and recombinant viral vectors to induce partially protective cellular immune responses against the parasite Theileria parva, the causative agent of East Coast fever (ECF). Notably, he contributed to successfully harnessing the CRISPR-Cas technology to genetically engineer the African swine fever virus for attenuation as a vaccination strategy. Nicholas's expertise has also been instrumental in assessing immune responses to vaccination against Rift Valley fever and peste-des-petits-ruminants viruses. Since 2019, he has been leading at ILRI several projects with a total budget responsibility of over 3M US$. Among those, is a One Health project on using bacteriophages as an alternative to antibiotics to reduce drug-resistant nontyphoidal Salmonella in poultry farms in Kenya. During his capacity as co-principal investigator on this project, he led a team that successfully isolated Salmonella-specific phages that were further characterized and included in a prototype phage cocktail in collaboration with the Université Laval. More recently, Nicholas has been leading the development of CRISPR-powered pen-side biosensing tests for cattle pathogens, alongside leading a project to uncover immune and cellular mechanisms conferring tolerance to T. parva in cattle. Prior to joining ILRI, he was investigating morbillivirus immunosuppression mechanisms in ferrets and orthoreovirus mechanisms of infection. His work has resulted in more than 70 research outputs, including 30+ peer-reviewed scientific publications in journals such as the Journal of Immunology, Journal of Virology and Nature Partner Journals, and 35+ papers presented at international scientific conferences.

Nicholas holds a BSc degree in Microbiology and Immunology and an MSc degree in Molecular Virology from the University of Montreal (Canada), as well as a PhD degree in Virology and Immunology (2010) from the INRS-Centre Armand-Frappier Santé Biotechnologie-University of Quebec (Canada), a member institute of the "Institut Pasteur International Network." He also completed Postdoctoral training in Virology at the Emerging Infectious Diseases Programme at Duke-NUS (Singapore) and in Cellular Immunology and Reverse Immunology (Immunoinformatics) at ILRI (Kenya), a Certificate of training in Genome Engineering & CRISPR-Cas Technology at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Germany, and is an EMIB candidate at ESCP Business School. Nicholas is Canadian.

#EastCoastFever , #AfricanSwineFeverVirus , #BluetongueVirus , #RiftValleyFeverVirus , #AMR , #Bacteriophages , #Morbilliviruses

Publications: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4539-5806