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MALVISTA: Engineering a human Blood–Retinal Barrier Model to Understand Cerebral Malaria

About the project

The Introini Lab https://mpzpm.mpg.de/research/viola-introini is seeking an outstanding and highly motivated PhD candidate to join the newly established research group at the interface of physics, engineering, vascular biology, and infection biology.

The successful candidate will work on the project MalVISTA aimed at developing a physiologically relevant 3D human inner blood–retinal barrier model to investigate malaria retinopathy, the most reliable clinical hallmark of cerebral malaria.

Despite effective antimalarial therapies, cerebral malaria remains responsible for substantial mortality and long-term neurological disability in children. Current treatments eliminate the parasite but fail to protect the vasculature, highlighting the urgent need for host-directed therapeutic strategies.

The retina provides a unique and clinically accessible window into cerebrovascular pathology. MalVISTA will combine tissue engineering, microfluidics, vascular biology, and malaria biology to understand how vascular architecture, blood flow, and cellular interactions contribute to vascular occlusion, barrier breakdown, and neurological injury during infection.

Research objectives

The successful candidate will develop a human 3D blood–retinal barrier model to investigate how Plasmodium falciparum infection causes vascular occlusion and barrier dysfunction during cerebral malaria. The project combines soft lithography, microfluidics, tissue engineering, vascular biology, microscopy, and single-cell transcriptomics to recreate clinically relevant retinal microvascular networks and identify the physical and molecular mechanisms driving vascular injury.

The PhD candidate will design and fabricate microvessels, culture and characterise multiple retinal cell types, perform infection experiments with malaria parasites, and analyse vascular function using imaging, computational modelling, and transcriptomic approaches.

Application Deadline

September 1st, 2026

Full job offer here.