Edana Cassol
Assistant Professor
| Degrees: | MSc (South Africa), PhD (Italy) |
| Phone: | 613-520-2600 x 4462 |
| Email: | edana.cassol@carleton.ca |
Edana Cassol received her BSc in Life Sciences from Queen’s University in Kingston Ontario. In the summer of her fourth year she interned with the Enhancing Care Initiative in Durban South Africa conducting epidemiological and field research on home based care for patients living with HIV and TB in rural communities. While there, she fell in love with the country, the people and the research and after graduation returned to South Africa to complete a MSc in Medical Science at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Moving to Italy, Edana received her PhD in Cellular and Molecular Biology from the Open University (England) and Universita Vita-Salute San Raffaele (Italy). Her work focused on the role of macrophage polarization in HIV pathogenesis. As part of her PhD she also worked with scientists and clinicians at the University of Pretoria examining the role of aberrant systemic and intestinal inflammation on therapeutic responses in African AIDS patients initiating antiretroviral therapy. As an CIHR funded post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Cancer Immunology and AIDS at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Department of Microbiology and Immunobiology at Harvard Medical School, Edana’s research integrated large clinical and immunological datasets, metabolomics, and computational modeling to understand how metabolic abnormalities influence HIV pathogenesis and clinical outcomes including age-related co-morbidities in HIV patients on antiretroviral therapy.