Story
Growing up as a kid in Guatemala, I dreamt of becoming a scientist. Although my journey has not been typical for a PhD candidate, I have always found myself wearing gloves and pipetting away at the lab bench. After working in various research fields and completing my master's degree in Brazil, I stumbled upon the medical entomology field almost by chance. I began working as a research assistant at my home university in Guatemala. Since then, I have focused on insecticide resistance in major disease vectors of Latin America, studied vector-borne viruses in Minnesota, and am currently engaged in a project centred on xenosurveillance in collaboration with the BioNanoTechnology group at WUR.
I am passionate about improving the life quality of low-resource communities and empowering them through science, which I believe the PhD project could be able to achieve that by developing, low-cost, easy to use and field deployable technologies to surveillance diseases in the global south. When I am not talking about mosquitoes, I enjoy cooking, watching films and TV shows, and exploring new places and foods.
David Castañeda, MSc