Nature publication for Network researcher Jan Slapeta

21 February 2008

Jan Slapeta, has tramped a winding road to his current position as lecturer in Veterinary Parasitology at the University of Sydney. Jan did his undergraduate studies in veterinary medicine at the University of Veterinary and Pharmaceutical Sciences, Brno, in the Czech Republic. This led him to the decision that research was the world for him, so he undertook a very successful PhD in parasitology at the same university, publishing extensively on the molecular and evolutionary biology of coccidian parasites. Jan then accepted a Fogarty Fellowship to work as a postdoctoral researcher at the National Institutes of Health's Wadsworth Centre in Albany, New York, working on S-adenosylmethionine synthetase involved in the plant-like polyamine biosynthesis of Cryptosporidium as well as characterising the relict mitochondrion of that parasite.

After a stint as a French Research Council Postdoctoral Scholar at Unite d'Ecologie, Systematique and Evolution, Orsay, France, Jan came to Australia as a postdoctoral fellow with Nick Smith and Sabina Belli at the University of Technology, Sydney, working on the development of the oocyst wall in Eimeria. The move proved a beneficial one as, a year or so later, he was offered a tenured lectureship at the University of Sydney, where he is apparently flourishing as evidenced by his participation in a team that recently published an article in Nature that documents a highly unusual and intriguing organism (Moore et al., 2008 A photosynthetic alveolate closely related to apicomplexan parasites. Nature 451: 959-963).