African Sleeping Sickness gets its name from the sleep disturbances it causes. Awake in the night and asleep in the day. A bite from a tsetse fly can transmit Trypanosoma brucei, the parasite that causes African Sleeping Sickness. First come the fevers, headaches, and joint pain. Then weeks to months after the bite, the sleep disturbances set in. African Sleeping Sickness is in a category of diseases known as the neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). Like many NTDs, African Sleeping Sickness mainly affects underdeveloped populations in tropical regions. Unfortunately, this means that pharmaceutical companies don’t see reason to pursue research in these diseases. Hence the name “neglected tropical diseases.” (more…)
Category: Meet a Microbiologist
Meet a Microbiologist: Erica Hartmann
Erica’s foray into science didn’t specifically begin with microbiology. Her father worked at NASA and while accompanying him to work on “Take Your Daughter to Work Day” every year, she’s tried all sorts of things, even astronaut ice cream. She’s read a lot about science and her interest grew. “The Hot Zone especially scared the bejeezus out of me but was also fascinating,” she recalls. She grew up near Reston, Virginia, where Reston Virus (causes Ebola symptoms in non-human primates) was discovered. While she was in high school, she closely followed the race to sequence the human genome. “It felt hugely important and revolutionary, and I wanted to be a part of it,” Erica says. (more…)
Meet a microbiologist: Stéphane Benoit
Many graduate students call the lab their second home. I was fortunate enough to have a second “lab home”. Today, we meet Stéphane Benoit, a microbiologist from my second “lab home” who has taught me much of what I know about working with the stomach bacterium Helicobacter pylori.
Growing up in the French village of Saint Pierre La Palud near Lyon, Stéphane has spent countless hours observing the social behavior of ants in the woods. He has always been interested in the sciences, especially biology. After obtaining his Ph.D. from the National Institute of Applied Sciences of Lyon, Stéphane came to the United States for what he thought was a two-year postdoc to study metal utilization in spirochetes at the University of Georgia. (more…)
Meet a microbiologist: Naomi Boxall
Naomi Boxall is not afraid to point out that the pictures of people in white lab coats with colorful vials of liquids do not show how real science is done. She’s had to take one of those pictures herself. Her time in science has led her to sample soil and water in the Western Australian Wheatbelt, participate in committees and workshops for postdocs and early career scientists, as well as organize morning teas and social events for her department.
A “typical day” does not exist for Naomi. She could be working in the lab one day to writing and supervising students the next day or even building bioreactors another day. She participates in science cafes and volunteers with an all girls science club. The only constant from day to day however, is coffee, food and a lunchtime walk. Naomi states, “what is good is that no day is the same as the one before and I enjoy that everything is varied and challenging.” (more…)
Meet a microbiologist: Eva Garmendia
Eva Garmendia has always been interested in the small and invisible since she can remember. According to Eva, she was “[amazed] that there is a universe we couldn’t see and yet, we could study and understand it.” As an undergraduate at the University of Granada, she found genetics calling her name and spent her time outside of class in a genetics lab. During that time, she became interested in evolution. While studying abroad at Uppsala University in Sweden, she began her research in microbiology and was hooked. Eva noted that her interest was sparked by “the fact that microbes were alone ruling the earth for so long before multicellularity developed.” She completed a six-month project on the role of RNases in Salmonella Typhimurium. Eva saw how microbiology could help her study evolution citing “their power of rapid replication.” (more…)