About Cristina

Dr Cristina Ariani leads the Malaria Parasite Programme at the Genomics Surveillance Unit.

Previous work

Previously she led the genomic surveillance operations for Covid-19 at the Wellcome Sanger Institute by championing change and continuous improvement, liaising with internal and external stakeholders. She was responsible for the continual development and day-to-day delivery of the Covid-19 sequencing service, ensuring collaboration across the internal delivery teams and a wide range of external stakeholders including Public Health Agencies and the Department of Health and Social Care.

Cristina is an evolutionary biologist by training. She did her PhD at the University of Cambridge, in which she studied the genetic variation of traits that affect disease transmission in a major mosquito vector – Aedes aegypti. She joined Prof Dominic Kwiatkowsky’s group after her PhD to work on malaria parasites and vectors, with a focus on developing tools to sequence their genomes. Previously she worked as a research assistant at the Institute of Zoology in London working on the conservation genetics of endangered species. She holds a Master degree from the State University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, studying the ecology of lizards.