Kayla Barnes is an associate professor at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, and she is based at the Wellcome Center in Malawi. Kayla’s lab focuses on two programs that bookend the dynamics of health in low-income countries. These include tracking viral pathogens and understanding vaccine response, at the omics level. Kayla leads a multi-country analysis for arbovirus burden and immunogenicity (Wellcome). Her lab is also investigating immune responses over the first year of life in infants and how this relates to vaccine success (BMGF). Her goal is to use surveillance, genomics and immunology to inform better vaccines for LICs.
Previously, Kayla was a NIH career development fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health which funded her single cell program in Malawi — exploring infant health dynamics. Prior to her fellowship at HSPH, Kayla was a postdoc at the Broad Institute with Pardis Sabeti where she studied susceptibility to Ebola Virus Disease and Lassa fever as well as numerous projects exploring viral genetics, novel CRISPR diagnostics and single cell genomics. During her postdoc, Kayla was awarded a NIH-K01, the ASTMH Shope and the Broad Next 10 fellowships.