• Question: How did you get to know these type of areas in the study of diseases existed?

    Asked by anon-170091 on 17 Jun 2020.
    • Photo: Alena Pance

      Alena Pance answered on 17 Jun 2020:

      Hi Paulina, do you mean, how did I find out about the diseases I have worked on? Well, I grew up in Venezuela, a tropical country in South America and as such, it is riddled with tropical diseases that are a huge public health problem. So when I started studying biology and it came to choosing a subject, it seemed a no brainer to learn skills that will be useful to help people and alleviate the public health burden. So I worked on the main tropical diseases that are trypanosomiasis, leishmaniasis and malaria.

    • Photo: Rachel Tanner

      Rachel Tanner answered on 23 Jun 2020:

      Hi Paulina, Sometimes it seems like people have jobs in a really specific area, and you wonder how on earth they thought ‘One day, I want to work on epidemiology of Melioidosis’! But if you follow your interests, sometimes they lead to unexpected places. For example, I liked biology at school, but it wasn’t until university that I realised diseases was the most interesting part of the course and chose that as an optional paper. Then, when I started studying diseases more, I got interested in HIV so after university I looked for internship positions to do with HIV. One popped up in HIV vaccines and I went for it, and since then I’ve been passionate about vaccines! So I didn’t necessarily plan to go into vaccine research – sometimes you find out more and narrow down your focus as you go along.

Comments