 My name is Olivo Miotto, and I work on malaria genomics, and I'm based at the Mahidon Oxford Research Unit in Bangkok, Thailand. Genomics is the study of the DNA, complete DNA in a particular parasite, and actually it's made a big difference in a lot of diseases. For example, in malaria, when we study parasite genomes, we can determine the factors that make them, for instance, resistant to drugs, or they make them evade the immune system, so it's useful, for instance, for designing vaccines. But also we can study the human genome and identify what makes certain people less prone to develop the disease or more prone to develop it in a severe form. The way to explain genomic epidemiology is basically to think of human populations. When human populations migrate around the planet, they intermix, they change, they adapt to their environment, they diversify. And similarly, parasite populations do the same, with one big difference, that a parasite life cycle is very, very short compared to a human life cycle. So what takes millions of years to happen in a human population takes only very few seasons to happen in a parasite population. This actually means that we can study parasite evolution almost in real time as it happens. And this is very convenient because often parasites evolve precisely because of human intervention. So studying the evolution of the parasite allows us to find out what has happened and what is the result of our intervention. So a typical pattern of evolution is that in a certain population you'd normally expect the genetic makeup to be very varied. That's the same amongst humans. You generally expect children to look a bit different from their parents and so on. Sometimes we find populations of parasites where this diversity is no longer there and they have either expanded clonally, as we say, so that they all kind of look identical. Or perhaps only certain area of the genome has sort of been transferred across to all parasites. So what we then suspect is that there is some evolutionary selection that's ongoing and we drill into those signals to identify what is happening. Actually over the last few years genomics is really one of the fields that has most changed and that has most evolved in science. Suffice us to say that the first genome sequence of malaria parasite was in 2002. And now we're in 2018 and we are literally routinely sequencing thousands of genomes at the cost of probably about tens of dollars each. Now this means that we can actually conduct very large scale studies over quite an extensive geographical reach and we can now get a sort of fairly subtle phenomena that we can observe within the genome. Genomic epidemiology actually starts from the field. We base our observations on the parasites that actually circulate in the field and so from the very start it has a translational goal which is to describe what actually is infecting people. And in order to do this we compare thousands of genomes together with the clinical data that comes with them in order to identify what mutations are markers for this resistance. Once we've done that that enables us to monitor the drug resistance mutations that circulate in the countries and this is precisely what we do. We get a small blood spot from every patient in the health centers across the country and we analyze them and we map out drug resistance in the country. And this data goes back directly to the national malaria control programs that are doing the elimination work and hopefully helping them in their decision making.