Malaria.com brings together researchers, field practitioners, travelers, journalists and the public to create a comprehensive and dynamic source of malaria information. By connecting groups of people in different countries with varied backgrounds, but joined by a common interest in malaria, Malaria.com provides a network, driven by its members, which can be used to tackle the problem of malaria infection throughout the world.
Malaria.com provides malaria information, research and news, a personalized Q&A, as well as community tools to facilitate networking and the sharing of malaria related information.
Edited by Dr. Claire Standley, Malaria.com is guided by an international board of advisers from the worlds of media, epidemiology and technology.
Malaria.com is produced by Epicenter Communications.
Managing Editor
Dr. Claire Standley
Dr. Claire Standley is an Assistant Professor at the Center for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown University. She also holds a faculty appointment in the Department of International Health. Prior to this, she was a Senior Research Scientist at the George Washington University, in the Milken Institute School of Public Health, and also previously served as a AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow at the U.S. Department of State. Before moving to Washington DC, Standley was a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University, where she studied the ecology and control of parasitic diseases, including malaria, in Tanzania and Costa Rica. Her interests have always revolved around the interface between diseases, biodiversity and human public health, starting with a bachelor degree in Zoology from the University of Cambridge and followed by an MSc in Biodiversity and Conservation from the University of Oxford. For her doctoral research at the Natural History Museum in London, she focused on the epidemiology and transmission of intestinal helminths in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania, from the perspective of vector biology as well as implementing control programs to improve the health of local communities. Part of this research involved looking at malaria diagnostics and co-infection of malaria with other parasitic diseases, within the context of developing effective and efficient integrated control strategies.
Executive Team
Matthew Naythons MD
Dr. Naythons is a physician, journalist, NGO founder and early Internet health entrepreneur.
After covering the exodus of Cambodian refugees into Thailand for TIME Magazine, he formed and led International Medical Teams (IMT), a mobile relief organization that provided medical care to Cambodian refugees and displaced Thai villagers from 1979–1982.
In 1991, Naythons founded Epicenter Communications, which in 1995 published the first guide to online health: The Internet Health, Fitness, and Medicine Yellow Pages. Later that year, Epicenter formed two Internet health divisions: NetMed and NetHealth and created some of the first disease-specific health sites on the Internet. NetHealth/Epicenter websites included Diabetes.com, Depression.com, and Alzheimers.com, among others.
In January 1999, NetHealth was purchased by PlanetRx.com and Naythons became Vice President and Publisher of the online pharmacy. Following PlanetRx, Epicenter Communications resumed building health websites including Mednews.com, Heal.com, and Malaria.com.
Peter Goggin
Peter Goggin has been a leader in online health since 1995. As vice-president and co-founder of NetHealth, a division of Epicenter Communications, Inc., Goggin led the development of some of the first vertical health communities online, including Diabetes.com, Alzheimers.com, Depression.com, Obesity.com and others. In January, 1999, he joined online pharmacy PlanetRx as Director of Project Management, and then became PlanetRx’s Vice-President of Design and Production. Later, he joined ISL Consulting, a San Francisco Internet consulting firm specializing in strategic consulting and the development of open-source web applications. He is currently Vice-President of Epicenter Communications, Inc., a Partner at Argonaut Ventures, LLC, and co-founder of Malaria.com.
Board of Advisers
Malaria.com is guided by an international advisory board from the worlds of media, epidemiology and technology.
Board Members
Michael Castleman
Michael Castleman has been called “one of the nation’s top health writers” (Library Journal). He is the author of 13 consumer medical guides, among them: Nature’s Cures, The Healing Herbs, and Before You Call the Doctor. Castleman has also written more than 1,500 articles for magazines and the Web. As a longtime scuba diver, Castleman has traveled to many locales where malaria is a major health problem. Personal use of malaria prophylaxis piqued his interest in the disease—and a commitment to help control it.
Mary Ellen Guroy MD
Mary Ellen Guroy, M.D., is a diplomat of the American Board of Internal Medicine in Infectious Diseases and certified in travel and tropical medicine. She is in private practice in Sausalito, California in infectious diseases, serves as a consultant to the Marin County Department of Health and Human Services, and is an associate of the Northern California Travel Clinic.
Judith Standley
Judith Standley is a certified nurse midwife (CNM) with a Masters degree in Public Health (MPH). She has spent over 25 years living and working in developing countries for both international bilateral and non-governmental organizations in the field of maternal, newborn, and child health including the impact of infectious and vector borne diseases on mothers and children. Judith has worked at global and national level to assist governments in improving health services as well as with communities, to empower women and families with information and skills.
Judith Thurman
Judith Thurman, a Staff Writer at the New Yorker, spent considerable time in East Africa researching Isak Dinesen; The Life of a Storyteller, a biography that won a National Book Award for Non-fiction, and served as the basis for Sydney Pollack’s Oscar-winning film, Out of Africa, on which Thurman was the Associate Producer. She is the author of Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette, winner of the Los Angeles Times and Salon book awards for biography; and, most recently, a collection of her New Yorker essays, “Cleopatra’s Nose.”
Alain-jacques Valleron, Dr Sc
Alain-jacques Valleron has pioneered real time electronic surveillance of infectious diseases by developing in 1984, before the popularization of the Internet, the French Communicable Diseases Network, which collects, analyzes, and redistributes in real time information provided online by sentinel GPs. His research group is a World Health Organization (WHO) collaborating center for electronic surveillance of diseases. He has broad experience in the modeling and epidemiology of major infectious diseases (AIDS, Viral Hepatitis C, Influenza, and a variant of the Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease).
Valleron graduated in mathematics from the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, and presented a PhD thesis on the modeling of cell cycle and tumor growth. He is currently professor of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the University Pierre et Marie Curie and is the director of the Paris Doctoral School of Public Health. He chairs the board of the French National Institute for Blood Transfusion, and is a member of the French Academy of Sciences.