Mary Ann McDowell is an Associate Professor of Biological Sciences and faculty of the Eck Institute for Global Health at the University of Notre Dame. She obtained a BS and MS from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln studying Parasite Ecology and received her PhD degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Medical Microbiology and Immunology. Dr. McDowell completed two post-doctoral fellowships, one at UW-Madison investigating the cell biology of African Trypanosomes and one at the National Institutes of Health working on the immunobiology of Leishmania infections. Dr. McDowell's current research focuses on the biology of infectious diseases, with a focus on vector-borne pathogens. The conceptual framework of her research program integrates multiple layers of the disease process including immunology, host cell-biology, pathogen diversity, insect vector biology, and drug and insecticide discovery, using both laboratory models and field-based studies. Dr. McDowell is the Principal Investigator of VectorBase, the web-accessible Bioinformatics Resource Center that is the repository for the genomes of vectors of human disease and provides spatio-temporal visualizations of vector abundance data to the scientific community.