Rita Jaafar

About Rita Jaafar

Background

Rita has bachelor’s degree in general biology from the Lebanese university, in Beirut, Lebanon. She then moved to France to complete her education and obtained master’s degree in Infectious diseases (2019) and a PhD degree in Microbiology (2022), both from Aix-Marseille University in Marseille, France.

Research

Rita Jaafar’s main research focus is on viral infections and the means of its prevention.  During her master’s studies, Rita developed interest in virology field. In her Master internship, Rita worked on Giant viruses of Amoeba through the characterization of new virophage.

Then, in her PhD, she focused more on human viruses through her investigation of recent measles outbreaks in France, specifically the 2017-2019 measles epidemic in Marseille. Also during her PhD, she established various studies on SARS CoV-2, responsible for COVID-19 pandemic which gave her more expertise in RNA viruses.

Currently, as postdoctoral researcher in Magnus Johansson research team at Örebro University, Rita is working on two projects belonging to two different work packages (WP4 and WP5) in the developvaccines@oru group. The first project, in WP4, is to develop new live attenuated vaccine for Tick-born Encephalitis caused by the Tick-born encephalitis virus (TBEV) using Langat virus as vaccine candidate. In this project, Rita is performing mainly molecular biology techniques, beside virus culture in BSL-2 lab, ELISA, Western blot, and T-cell assay. The second project, belonging to WP5, focus mainly on developing new vaccine for hepatitis virus using DNA launched suicidal Flaviviruses as vaccine candidate.