About author

Alex Richter-Boix

Alex Richter-Boix is a Postdoc and scientist communication technician at the University Pompeu Fabra (UPF, Barcelona) participating in the Human-Mosquito Interaction Project (H-MIP) funded by the European Research Council. The group is investigating host-vector networks, and the socio-ecological context of mosquito borne disease, with an interdisciplinary approach combining new genetic techniques with citizen science, sociology and modelling. His main contribution is in the citizen science approach, helping in the design of the new version of the Mosquito Alert app and the digital platform of the project that allows everyone to report where they find mosquitoes and where they get bitten. He is also responsible for the communication strategy to promote the use of the app by citizens.

He is a biologist, specialist in evolutionary ecology and science communication. His doctoral thesis at the University of Barcelona (UB) focused on the phenotypic plasticity and ecology of amphibian larvae phase, while during his first postdoc position at the Uppsala University (UU, Sweden) focused in understand the mechanisms of ecological adaptation of animal populations, analyzing the link between spatial variation in ecological conditions and differentiation, including anthropogenic alterations like Global Warming, landscape alteration and invasive species. He has developed his scientific activity at the UB and UPF (Barcelona, Spain), at EBD-CSIC (Seville, Spain), and at EBC-UU (Uppsala, Sweden), doing fieldwork in Spain, Sweden, Germany, Norway, Iceland and Argentina. Lastly he studied a master’s degree on science communication at the UPF Barcelona School of Management.


Author's posts

Reconstructing human-mosquito interactions at the Marimurtra Botanical Garden

On Saturday June 12, the Mosquito Alert team carried out an activity in the idyllic Marimurtra Botanical Garden in Blanes. Throughout the day, a pilot test was developed within the framework of the Human-Mosquito Interaction Project granted by the European Research Council (ERC), which aims to study the network of interactions between the tiger mosquito and people.

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The complex interaction between humans and mosquitoes

Despite the great scientific and clinical advances of the last decades, diseases transmitted by vectors such as mosquitoes continue to be one of the main threats to global public health. Diseases like dengue are a risk for hundreds of millions of people each year, while malaria still causes more than 400,000 deaths a year. These diseases have been compounded in recent years by outbreaks of Zika, chikungunya and West Nile fever. To the infections transmitted by mosquitoes must be added those of other arthropods, such as black flies, sandflies, chiches, ticks or tsetse flies, which together cause more than 26 million cases annually.

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