 Hi, I'm Andrea Drucker and I'm a post-doctoral researcher here at the malaria department in Moru in Bangkok. Malaria is very unusual because it has a very complicated life cycle and usually when you infect it with malaria you have the two different stages inside your red blood cells. You have the one stage that makes you very sick. We call it the asexual stages. So you have the disease symptoms and this is the one we have to treat. Otherwise you'll be very very sick and you may die. But at the same time you also develop these other stages inside the red blood cells, which are sort of dormant. They don't cause any disease symptoms, but these are the stages we call him gametocyte, gametocyte stages, which are responsible for the infectivity into the mosquito and they are responsible solely responsible for the transmission from person to person, person, mosquito to another person. We're trying to stop malaria spread by treating the patient that is sick with malaria. Not just only treating the disease symptoms, but also giving the person a drug that then kills those gametocyte stages. So those gametocytes can't infect the mosquito. Well, I'm enjoying this research because I really want to make a difference. I want to help people and I really want to help eliminate malaria and I don't think we can eliminate malaria unless we look at all the the whole package of the malaria parasite, which includes transmission stages. Their life cycle is very intriguing and looks very, the cell biology from our cell biological point of view, looks very exciting and I'm trying to figure out in the lab by when I treat them with drugs how we can stop them from developing further and we can look at this in a very, very fine setting in the lab and it's just very exciting to look at them and try to then feed that back into the field and hopefully have an impact. Well, the challenges of particularly in this kind of work is that we are growing those transmission stages, the gametocytes, in the lab. So in the human body, it takes approximately 8 to 10 or 12 days to develop to before they can actually infect the mosquito to then spread malaria and we have to grow them in the lab, which takes approximately two weeks. But their viability is very delicate and sometimes we grow those stages for two weeks and then they're not viable. So we can't do any experiments with it. So that's they are very challenging to grow on a day to day basis. Our research is really important because if we want to understand malaria transmission, we need to understand those transmission stages, the gametocytes, and we need to understand how they respond to drugs. And we need to end vaccines and we need to also understand how they respond under the current setting of drug resistance and how drug resistance spreads. This is a very unique approach because not many places have the have the tools that we developed previously. We want to be able to constantly cross talk between the lab and the field. And that is why I think our work really is fitting right in translational research and medicine.