Rate My Professor Karen Day

Professor Karen Day is a Professor of Population Biology and Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, School of Biomedical Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Born in Melbourne, she obtained her BSc (Honours) and PhD in molecular parasitology from the University of Melbourne, completing her doctoral research at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute. Following her PhD, she conducted postdoctoral research and held positions in molecular epidemiology at Imperial College London and the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford. Appointed a Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford in 2003, she became one of the few women dons in science at the university. Professor Day was a Founding Partner of the Wellcome Trust Centre for the Epidemiology of Infectious Disease and the interdisciplinary Peter Medawar Pathogen Evolution Research Centre at Oxford, and served as a Visiting Professor at the Harvard School of Public Health. From 2014 to 2019, she was Dean of Science at the University of Melbourne. She now heads the Day Laboratory at the Bio21 Molecular Science and Biotechnology Institute.

Professor Day's research employs molecular epidemiology to examine how genomic variation in humans and Plasmodium parasites modulates transmission dynamics, with a focus on malaria genomics, epidemiology, and control. Her laboratory investigates malaria epidemiology and elimination in high-transmission West African settings, genomic epidemiology for surveillance, malaria as a complex system, antimalarial drug resistance responses to interventions in Ghana, diversity of Plasmodium falciparum variant antigen genes, and quorum sensing in malaria parasites. Key publications include "Microsatellite markers reveal a spectrum of population structures in the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum" (2000, Molecular Biology and Evolution), "Several alleles of the multidrug-resistance gene are closely linked to chloroquine resistance in Plasmodium falciparum" (1990, Nature), "Mating patterns in malaria parasite populations of Papua New Guinea" (1995, Science), "Twelve microsatellite markers for characterization of Plasmodium falciparum from finger-prick blood samples" (1999, Parasitology), and recent works such as "The dynamics of asymptomatic Plasmodium spp. infections following 10 years of malaria control interventions in Northern Sahelian Ghana" (2026). Her contributions have garnered over 8,500 citations. Professor Day has been awarded the Member of the Order of Australia (AM), the 2015 Advance Global Australia Life Sciences Award, and nearly US$3 million in funding from the US National Institutes of Health for malaria research. She maintains a strong record in interdisciplinary training of infectious disease epidemiologists.