Christy Comeaux

Doctoral student, Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases

Christy Comeaux was something of an anomaly in her Texas high school. She knew she wanted to be a scientist and to see another part of the world. After reading a “cool” article about science at Johns Hopkins, she applied to and was accepted at Hopkins, where she majored in biomedical engineering: “I knew I wanted to go to medical school, and I chose biomedical engineering because it would give me a good quantitative basis. It was more of a thought-process degree.” A MD-PhD student, Christy arrived at Harvard Medical School in 2003. She did a couple of laboratory rotations to explore possible research directions, but the decisive experience was her summer as a volunteer teacher in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Touring pediatric wards there, she “saw firsthand what a huge problem malaria is. The vast majority of mortality from malaria is in children under the age of five and pregnant women.” Christy realized that she wanted to study malaria in a public health context, where she would be exposed to policy and epidemiology as well as basic science. Now working with Assistant Professor Manoj Duraisingh at HSPH, Christy plans to do a residency in pediatrics and then pursue more clinical-based research: “In my lifetime I feel confident that we can make great strides in malaria treatment. I can’t think of anything better than contributing to those efforts.”

Amy Bei

Doctoral student, Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases

“As a little girl, I used to collect microorganisms in the creek behind my house,” Amy Bei recounts. A native of Santa Rosa, California, and the first scientist in her family, Amy began her serious foray into the study of diseases during three summers at the University of California, San Francisco. Her experience there in a “very international” lab working on schistosomaisis and other parasites confirmed her interest in “research on diseases of the developing world, diseases that are often neglected.” As an undergraduate at Harvard, Amy was involved in malaria research at HSPH. Then she won a one-year Fulbright fellowship to work on malaria in Tanzania. Now back at HSPH as a doctoral student, Amy reports that she had three great lab rotations before joining her dissertation lab. (Students in her program can apply to work in any laboratory at Harvard.) She spent the fall of 2007 doing malaria research in Senegal and has learned basic Wolof, the Senegalese language—one of eight she has studied. Amy likes the school’s approach to international collaborations: “I admire the way HSPH feels a responsibility to train and build capacity within developing countries.” When she completes her PhD, Amy intends to go to medical school. She wants to provide immediate care to developing-world populations as well as work toward longer-term research-based solutions