Agatha Jassem is a Canadian clinical microbiologist and the program head of the Virology Lab at the

British Columbia Centre for Disease Control The BC Centre for Disease Control (BCCDC) is the public health arm for British Columbia's Provincial Health Services Authority (British Columbia), Provincial Health Services Authority. The BCCDC is located at 655 West 12th Avenue, Vancouver, BC. ...

Public Health Laboratory, and a clinical associate professor in the Department of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine at the

University of British Columbia The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a Public university, public research university with campuses near University of British Columbia Vancouver, Vancouver and University of British Columbia Okanagan, Kelowna, in British Columbia, Canada ...

Vancouver, British Columbia Vancouver is a major city in Western Canada, located in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia. As the List of cities in British Columbia, most populous city in the province, the 2021 Canadian census recorded 662,248 people in the cit ...

, Canada. Jassem obtained her PhD at the

, followed by a fellowship in Clinical Microbiology at the

National Institutes of Health The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in 1887 and is part of the United States Department of Health and Human Service ...

. Her research focuses the detection of healthcare-and community-associated infections, emerging pathogens, and drug resistance determinants. During the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...

response, Jassem led research efforts on COVID-19 breakthrough infections from vaccinated individuals, SARS-CoV-2 population level seroprevalence, antibody response as well as collaborating on research on securing reagents for COVID-19 during world-wide shortages, and the role of ACEII.

References

Canadian microbiologists Academic staff of the University of British Columbia COVID-19 drug development Living people Year of birth missing (living people) Place of birth missing (living people) Canadian women biologists Women microbiologists University of British Columbia alumni Canadian medical researchers Women medical researchers 21st-century Canadian biologists 21st-century Canadian women scientists {{Canada-scientist-stub