Rhea N. Coler, PhD

Vice President, Preclinical Biology

Rhea Coler was born in Trinidad, West Indies. She received her BSc from McGill University and her MSc in the field of Medical Parasitology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. After doing field work on malaria control in Tanzania, she returned to Trinidad where she worked in the Department of Parasitology and Entomology at the Caribbean Epidemiology Center (CAREC), funded in part by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO). In 1998, she obtained her PhD from the School of Public Health and Community Medicine (SPHCM) at the University of Washington. Her thesis work, which was carried out in collaboration with various scientists at Corixa Corporation and IDRI, involved the "Identification and Characterization of Novel Antigen Genes of Mycobacterium tuberculosis."

Dr. Coler is the Vice President of Preclinical Biology at IDRI and is working on the characterization of candidate vaccines for tuberculosis, leishmaniasis, pneumococcus, malaria and chlamydia. She currently serves on the boards of the SPHCM and Bertschi School. She has been the recipient of several fellowships and grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH)/NIAID, the Medical Research Council (MRC), PATH Vaccine Solutions. She has several patents and has co-authored more than 20 original articles.