Anna-Bella Failloux

Anna-Bella Failloux did her PhD on population genetics of mosquito vectors in Prof. Nicolle Pasteur’s unit at the Institute of Evolutionary Sciences at Montpellier. In French Polynesia, at the Institut Louis Malardé, she made her first move into medical entomology by studying the adaptation of the vector Aedes polynesiensis to local parasite populations of the filaria Wuchereria bancrofti. In 1994, she joined the Institut Pasteur in Paris where Prof. François Rodhain gave her the opportunity to tackle another vector/pathogen system in the unit of “Ecology of Vectorial Systems”. In 2004, she decided to investigate another vectorial system, Rift Valley fever, in the unit of Dr. Michèle Bouloy. She was also actively involved in defining the vector status of the mosquito Aedes albopictus during the last emergences of Chikungunya. She is now head of the Arboviruses and Insect Vectors Unit in the Department of Virology at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. Her main projects are focused on interactions between arboviruses (chikungunya, dengue, Rift Valley fever, West-Nile, Yellow fever, Zika) and their mosquito vectors. Her main interest is to decipher the factors leading to the viral emergence by dissecting the vectorial system at the level of vector competence.