Irène Landau

Irène Landau is a French parasitologist and professor emeritus at the National Museum of Natural History, France (MNHN) and Centre national de la recherche scientifique.[1]

Landau initially studied medicine, obtaining her medical qualifications in Paris in 1958 and a certificate in tropical medicine in 1963.[2] She changed to focus on parasitology research, joining the lab of Lucien Brumpt in 1964 as a research assistant, and a year later relocating to Alain Chabaud's group at the MNHN.[3][2] She was promoted in 1966 to senior lecturer and made group head of studying the Plasmodium genus.[2][4] She briefly worked in London in the 1960s in the group of Cyril Garnham at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, where she met and begun collaborating with Wallace Peters and Robert Killick-Kendrick.[3][5] During a research trip to the Central African Republic in 1964/5 Landau isolated and described the rodent malaria parasite Plasmodium chabaudi (naming it after her supervisor) from local Thamnomys rutilans thicket rats.[6][7][8] She brought these samples with her to London, and together with Killick-Kendrich they isolated and identified another new rodent malaria species.[9] The species was similar to Plasmodium berghei, and it was named Plasmodium yoelii in homage to the malarial researcher Meir Yoeli.[10] To this day both species are used extensively in malaria research.[11][4][12][13] Peters, Landau and Killick-Kendrick styled themselves as the 'plasmodiacs'.[3]

When visiting Elizabeth U Canning at Silwood Park in the 1970s she snuck a royal python over to England on her flight. The snake was reportedly kept as a pet in the department for many years.[14] Also in the 1970s, Landau visited the Wellcome Parasitology Institute in Belém to study the recently discovered Saurocytozoons with Ralph Lainson.[15] It was after the respected British parasitologist that Landau later named the Lankesterellidae genus Lainsonia.[15]

She submitted her PhD thesis in 1972, entitled 'La diversité des mecanismes assurant la perennite de l'infection chez les sporozoaires coccidiomorphes [The variety of mechanisms that ensure the persistence of infection in coccidiomorphic sporozoites]'.[2] She advanced to co-director of the lab in 1987 before becoming full director of the lab of protozoology and comparative parasitology in 1989.[2] In 1994 she was promoted to a full professor.[2] Her and Chabaud were awarded the 1999 Émile Brumpt prize for their contributions to parasitology.[2]

Landau has continued to work on Apicomplexa parasites into the present day.[16] She recently published (in collaboration with Francisco J. Ayala, Gregory Karadjian and Linda Duval) a description of the jumbled mitochondrial genomes of Nycteria parasites (which infect Nycteridae bats), explaining why cytochrome b sequencing of the parasites has been unsuccessful.[17]