 My name is Dr. Charlta Goti, I work in the program as a molecular epidemiologist and my focus has mainly been viruses and especially rotavirus. So my job really is to use molecular tools and bioinformatics tools to understand the various pathogens. So I work on rotavirus and as you will know, rotavirus is the leading cause of diarrhea globally. Up to about 100,000 children die every year and we do have vaccines actually against rotavirus and the disappointing bit though is that they are not working optimally in populations that need them most and that's the low middle income settings and my interest is why this vaccine is not working optimally. So I'm using a variety of tools including genomics, molecular diagnostics and epidemiology to understand why this rotavirus vaccines are not working optimally in our settings. Diarrhea is really an important public health problem in the tropics and my research focusing on virus infection that we have a vaccine on but not working optimally is contributing to fighting illness in the tropics. In particular I'm interested to know where are the strengths for instance which are circulating the post vaccine era originating from and I'm using tools which are now readily available including genomics and to answer such a very important question. The other thing which we know about pathogens which we are fighting at the moment and especially viruses they change rapidly and once you have a vaccine in place there is potential that the virus will evolve and have another type that is not included in the vaccine. So what you are doing is characterizing these trends and trying to look at the vaccine strength to understand whether there is vaccine escape and that is going to point towards do we need to rethink about the vaccine strength including the vaccine for instance. So that's how I'm trying to provide information from the best science I'm doing such that it can go to the vaccine developers for instance. The other thing which I might want to add on the diagnostics are really important. Diarrhea is caused by a variety of pathogens and in particular we have up to 30 agents and by involving my work which in looked at how molecular tools can address that I'm able to tell you whether an infection is not from rotavirus and that can stop for instance giving unnecessary antibiotics. All of an infection is from a parasite so it helps guide the clinician now when a child is coming in with an infection whether they need to give them some set of treatment or preventative measures and that's all important in addressing problems at the tropics. Some very important lines of research have been developed actually in the last couple of years for instance understanding on how co-infections influence vaccine immunity. When a child receives that vaccine what other infections they have in the gut and how does that influence how they are going to respond to the vaccine. When you are seeing a child in the hospital you are finding them with rotavirus what other infections they have. It could be actually rota is just a bystander in such a child. So things to do with reinfections so there are children who get repeatedly infected with this virus for instance so that's really important to understand. Genomics is another area which has developed in the last couple of years. How can we utilize and stop what's coming through genomics to understand infections in the tropics and we are trying to understand genomic variation to help us understand vaccine escape mutants to help us develop diagnostics so those are some of the new lines of research which are now developing and emerging. It's really important for us to invest in understanding for instance why vaccines are suboptimal in populations that need the most especially in low and middle income countries because for every improvement of vaccine effectiveness you increase, you are saving lives. My research fits into translational medicine indirectly as I started from the beginning I'm more of at the basic science level but this is part of the continuum of how you get understanding of a pathogen in the lab to how you develop a product in the end and by understanding what characteristics we have of the viruses we see in children who come to the hospital that's going to inform how we're going to constitute the vaccine for instance by understanding which trends are still in circulation and understanding where are they coming from even when you are vaccinating it's going to help us point where we need to focus on intervention mechanisms for instance so we are producing information at the basic level for instance of how much co-infections are occurring and that's going to help for instance public health experts know what else they need to do at the community to prevent children from carrying this lots of infections that we find as co-infections in the rare cases at the hospital.