Why did you choose Yale Department of Internal Medicine for your fellowship?
More so than anywhere else I interviewed, the ease of connecting with faculty members and trainees stood out. And beyond the training offered, I loved that Yale draws people from all over the world who have diverse interests and stories. Knowing there were multiple research opportunities and mentors here that would be a good fit for me—in particular related to my global health and tropical medicine interests—was also essential. I ended up coming to Yale for residency as part of the Internal Medicine Physician-Scientist Training Program and was happy to stay for the Infectious Diseases Fellowship Program here as well.
Your recent article “Growing Up COVID,” published in Clinical Infectious Diseases, tells the story of your “coming of age” as a physician during the pandemic. What will you remember most from that experience?
It feels surreal to stop and transport myself back to the very early days when we knew so little about COVID, everyone was scared (patients and providers alike), and we had few tools to help treat people. I will never forget how hard it was to take care of so many people who were dying and to navigate being responsible for talking to their families, who, early on, were mostly not allowed to come into the hospital. I will remember many people dying alone. It’s hard now to watch people be dismissive of infectious diseases experts, vaccines and other tools, and the need to devote better resources towards pandemic preparedness.
You recently received a Centennial Travel Award in Basic Science Tropical Disease Research. Tell us about the research you plan to conduct.
I am very grateful to have the opportunity to pursue a malaria-related field research project in Burkina Faso next year thanks to this award. Aside from having incredible support from my mentors here, Drs. Sunil Parikh and Amy Bei, I’m excited to work with an entomology team in Burkina Faso led by Dr. Roch Dabiré of the Institut de Recherche en Science de la Santé.
I am interested in the mosquito vector role in transmission of drug resistant malaria in sub-Saharan Africa. For this project, I will be investigating the impact of human antimalarials in the mosquito vector, both in terms of impact on the mosquito life cycle and on developing parasites within the mosquito. Interval deployment of long-acting antimalarials to either the whole population, or certain demographic groups, is increasingly being used as an important public health strategy to combat malaria in sub-Saharan Africa, where the deadliest species, Plasmodium falciparum, predominates.
Because of this strategy, most of a population is likely to have high levels of antimalarials circulating in their blood during the transmission season in many areas. While this protects the individual from malaria, the impact of these drugs on mosquitos feeding on individuals is largely unknown. There is the possibility that some of these drugs could impact parasite oocyst development in the mosquito, which could be concerning regarding downstream effects on transmission and drug resistance spread. While doing experiments in a controlled laboratory environment with lab-adapted mosquitos is useful, being able to pursue this research question in the field will provide significant real-world data.
What’s a fun fact about you?
I love to read, mostly fiction—I’ve learned to multitask such that I get a lot of my reading time in at the gym, including on the treadmill—at least that way I don’t fall asleep reading!