Dr Mario Rodriguez-Perez

Center for Biotechnology and Genomics (CBG), National Polytechnic Institute (IPN), Reynosa, Mexico

Dr. Rodriguez-Perez studied his B.Sc. (Biology) and M.Sc. (Medical Entomology) at the Autonomous University of Nuevo Leon, Mexico (1984-1990), his PhD (Biological Sciences) at the University of Salford Manchester, England, U.K. (1995-9), completed his Postdoctoral research fellow at the University of California, Riverside, U.S.A. (2004), Center for Biological Research & Nacional Unit for Proteomics (Nacional Center for Biotechnology, CSIC), and National Center for Microbiology (Carlos III Public Health Institute), Madrid, Spain (2007-8, 2015-6, respectively). He is currently the Director, Head of a Research Laboratory, and Full Professor at the Center for Biotechnology and Genomics (CBG), National Polytechnic Institute (IPN). He is also a National (Mexico) Investigator Level III (effective from 2016-20) at the Mexican National System for Research (CONACyT). He has been a consulting-collaborator for Entomology/Epidemiology, since 1995, of the Onchocerciasis Elimination Program for the Americas (OEPA: The Carter Center/ Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation/ Merck Sharp & Dohme/ Lions Club International); and, since 2002, he has been a member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences.

His lab initiated work on onchocerciasis in 1990, performing studies on entomology and epidemiology of onchocerciasis, where they evaluated the ivermectin program since its beginning to the time it was suspended, given that they could demonstrate that the parasite transmission had been interrupted. They continued investigating onchocerciasis until they demonstrated that transmission had not resumed in the three foci of Mexico during the three years since the last distribution of ivermectin occurred; it was concluded that transmission remained undetectable without intervention, and Onchocerca volvulus has been eliminated from Mexico. Several peer-reviewed articles on surveillance and elimination of onchocerciasis resulted from those studies.

He has contributed new knowledge on black fly vectors of onchocerciasis for their surveillance and control. A Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grant was awarded to Dr. Rodriguez-Perez to develop novel black fly traps for these purposes. He is especially interested in infectious diseases transmitted by arthropod vectors, and has also investigated the epidemiology of other vector borne diseases such as Zika, and Chikungunya. He has been studying mosquito-borne virus ecology and transmission for over 15 years. For dengue and other mosquito vectors, his work has used multidisciplinary approaches to studying these complex diseases, including bioinformatics, molecular biology, vector ecology/biology, and DNA barcoding of vectors. An ongoing line of research of his lab is on biological control of vectors. He has investigated and developed novel methods for biological control of dengue vectors using entomopathogenic fungus.

Updated 27 November 2023