Jeffrey D. Dvorin obtained his MD and PhD degrees from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. For his thesis work, Dr. Dvorin investigated the molecular mechanism for nuclear localization of the HIV-1 pre-integration complex. He completed residency in Pediatrics at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and a fellowship in Pediatric Infectious Diseases at Boston Children's Hospital. After his clinical training, Dr. Dvorin shifted his research focus to Plasmodium falciparum, the protozoan parasite that causes the most severe form of human malaria. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health, he published the first inducible knockdown of an essential gene during the clinically important blood stage of the parasite. Building on these genetic tools, he established his independent laboratory at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in 2011. Dr. Dvorin's group has utilized genetics and microscopy to elucidate the process of cell division in P. falciparum. During the blood stage of malaria infection, the parasites divide via schizogony, a divergent process wherein components for several daughter cells are produced within a common cytoplasm and then segmentation, a synchronized cytokinesis, produces individual invasive daughters. Dr. Dvorin and his team have investigated the molecular mechanisms of segmentation and have discovered multiple essential components of the molecular machinery that governs it. Through the identification of critical components within two cellular structures that are required for segmentation, the inner membrane complex and the basal complex, Dr. Dvorin's team has discovered novel aspects of P. falciparum cell division.