Dr Kanny Diallo

I was born in Guinea and lived in different African countries and Haiti before moving to Canada where I obtained my BSc (2008) and MSc (2011) in Biochemistry from McGill University. During my master I studied macrophages innate immune response to bacterial infection, comparing their transcriptome following Salmonella typhimurium and Legionella pneumophila infections. Upon completion of my degree, I moved to Mali for an internship at the Malaria Research and Training Center (MRTC) in Bamako where I developed a great interest in the molecular approaches applicable for diagnosis of infectious diseases. In 2012, I started working for the Center for Vaccine Development in Mali (CVD-Mali) on the MenAfriCar consortium project, studying Neisseria carriage across the African meningitis belt (AMB) and the impact of the New Serogroup A conjugate vaccine (MenAfriVac) on carriage. It is during this project that I had my first interaction with the Maiden group as I spent a 1-year placement in Oxford to characterize the samples collected in the different sites by advance molecular techniques. I then received a Wellcome Trust Training Fellowship to start my DPhil with the group in 2014, in collaboration with CVD-Mali. During this time, I studied the “Molecular epidemiology and ecology of Neisseria species in the African meningitis belt”. My work helped characterized the different non-pathogenic Neisseria circulating in the AMB alongside Neisseria meningitidis; it also led to the discovery of novel Neisseria species. 

For my post-doctoral research, I have moved back to West Africa where I have decided to study the oropharyngeal microbiota and its links to health and diseases. My main research interests are focused on improving our understanding of the environmental and genetic factors that influence the onset of bacterial meningitis to better predict and eventually prevent epidemics. I am also interested in developing tools to improve infectious disease surveillance systems at the national and regional level and have been involved in the MeVacP project led by members of the group.

I have recently received the CRICK African Network- African Career Accelerator Award to conduct a study entitled “The oropharyngeal microbiome dynamics and invasive bacterial diseases”  which I am going to implement in Côte d’Ivoire (Abidjan and Korhogo) within a collaboration between the Centre Suisse de Recherche Scientifique en Côte d’Ivoire (CSRS), the West African Centre for Cell Biology and Infectious Pathogens (WACCBIP) in Ghana and the Francis Crick institute in the UK.  

Alternative Email: kanny.diallo@csrs.ci  

Research interest

Infectious Disease, Molecular Epidemiology, Genomics, Molecular Microbiology, Bacterial evolution, Disease Surveillance, Metagenomics.