Researcher Abir Monastiri, awarded by the Arab Women Organization in the fight against coronavirus
The researcher Abrir Monastiri, from the Department of Evolutionary Biology, Ecology and Environmental Sciences of the Faculty of Biology, has been awarded by the Arab Women Organization in the category of Women at the Front Line on the Defence Against Coronavirus, as part of an international initiative that has awarded a total of seventeen scientists from Arabian countries.
The researcher Abrir Monastiri, from the Department of Evolutionary Biology, Ecology and Environmental Sciences of the Faculty of Biology, has been awarded by the Arab Women Organization in the category of Women at the Front Line on the Defence Against Coronavirus, as part of an international initiative that has awarded a total of seventeen scientists from Arabian countries.
Monastiri has received this prize on behalf of Tunis, together with the expert Nisaf ben Alaya, director of the National Observatory of New and Emerging Diseases of the mentioned Arabian country.
Abir Monastiri, collaborator in the Biodiversity Research Institute (IRBio) of the UB, is an expert on the field of virology and ecoepidemiology. She got her doctorate in 2018 in the Higher Institute of Biotechnology in the University of Monastir (Tunis), with a project focused on the genetics and epidemiology of the West Nile Virus, a pathogen commonly spread by the mosquito bites, which caused several epidemic outbreaks in different countries.
Since 2013, Abir Monastiri is a member of the team led by the lecturer Jordi Serra-Cobo (UB-IRBio), distinguished expert in ecoepidemiologic studies -mostly in the research on bats as natural reservoirs of infectious agents such as coronaviruses-, and member of the CONVAT project, promoted by the European Union for the rapid detection of coronavirus through nanodevices. In the field of scientific publications, she is the co-authors of several articles on the Nile Virus, the Toscana Virus and other pathogens that represent a threat for the global health.