Dr. Sydney Stanley, 23 years, researching infectious diseases to improve the health of the world’s most vulnerable people
May 18, 2023 – Sidney Stanley’s path to a PhD began at home reading a biography of Marie Curie.
“I was homeschooled for part of elementary school and middle school. My mother loves reading, so most of my time was spent reading random books. I happened to come across a biography of Marie Curie, and she I thought he was the coolest person in the world,” Stanley said. “She won two Nobel Prizes and was clearly a brilliant scientist. But she also cared deeply about the impact of her work, both good and bad. Her humanity and her dedication and obsession with what she was working on inspired me. She had separated radium and polonium from pitchblende and this very He had a poisonous substance in his pocket.”
When Stanley, who was in third grade at the time, realized that Curie had a doctorate, he decided to pursue one himself.
Meanwhile, once she enrolled in public schools in her hometown of Greensboro, North Carolina, her scientific interests focused on infectious diseases. Although her strep throat and her frequent bouts of MRSA caused her to frequently be sick at home and spend days away from her classroom, she still continued to pursue her studies. I kept going.
“I had nothing to do but look into things, trying to understand why I kept getting sick. It was my first time working like a scientific detective,” Stanley said. Ta. “I learned a lot of basic bacteriology and immunology, but eventually became interested in how humanity has been deeply shaped by single-celled organisms.”
That interest led her to attend Duke University, where she studied biology and global health, where she learned to look at infectious diseases in an unbiased light. She then took this new perspective to Harvard University’s Biological Sciences in Public Health (BPH) program, which is rooted in her TH Chan School of Public Health and part of Harvard’s Kenneth C. Griffin School of Arts and Sciences. It was introduced in This month, she graduates with her Ph.D. Her lifelong dream has been achieved.
“I’ve wanted to do a benign prostatic hyperplasia program since I was in middle school. The moment I learned about it, I knew it was the perfect program for me. I knew I wanted to do basic science research, but… I wanted to work with other people who are interested in global health impacts and the importance of doing science to benefit vulnerable populations,” Stanley said. . “It’s very rare to have a basic science department within a school of public health, and it’s a truly transformative environment to train in.”
focus on the most vulnerable
Stanley said it was research on global health that first got her thinking about health equity, but the seeds for connecting science and social justice were planted long ago.
“When I was homeschooled, my mother required me to memorize and recite some of Martin Luther King Jr.’s most influential speeches and letters. His famous words: , “Injustice everywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” motivated me to study infectious diseases on two levels,” Stanley said. “One, by definition, infectious diseases are transmitted from person to person, and in the event of a global infectious disease outbreak, we literally share our fate in that regard. Second, It is fundamentally wrong that millions of people die each year from preventable infections, yet we have done little here in the United States to address a disease that remains a problem in other countries.”
Stanley collaborates with Sarah Fortune and John LaPorte, professor of immunology and infectious diseases and chair of the department of immunology and infectious diseases, to study tuberculosis (TB), a disease that has been nearly eradicated in the United States. , I decided to tackle these ideas first. In states and other wealthy countries, he is responsible for 1.5 million deaths worldwide each year, most of which occur in low-income countries. For many years, the number of deaths caused by infectious diseases was among the highest in the world, but only recently has the new coronavirus surpassed that number.
Fortune’s lab is a bacterial genetics lab, focused on trying to understand the various characteristics of bacteria. Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb)The bacteria that cause tuberculosis are resistant to antibiotics, which determines the severity of tuberculosis. In his doctoral research, Stanley primarily studied tuberculosis in Vietnam, one of his 30 countries with the highest incidence of tuberculosis in the world. She tested 158 strains of Mtb isolated from patients in Ho Chi Minh City.
“The scale of this research project was unparalleled, so I was intimidated,” Stanley said. “But Sarah believed in me and let me put my own spin on the project. I had a lot of freedom when it came to creativity and the questions I wanted to ask.”
Fortune magazine praised Stanley for her “astounding scientific productivity and willingness to consistently serve the world’s most vulnerable people and take on the most difficult projects.” After all, her service is exactly what her doctoral dissertation (which won the school’s Edgar Harbor Award for her outstanding work in the biological sciences) accomplished.
“We were able to learn more about the Mtb strains for which Vietnam has unique challenges. A subgroup of these strains are essentially susceptible to a new tuberculosis antibiotic called bedaquiline, which can lead to severe tuberculosis. “Our findings that disease is associated with specific groups of individuals could help design better diagnostics and create opportunities for precision medicine to tailor treatments to optimize health outcomes.” said Stanley. “Good news.”
close-knit community
Stanley credits the mentorship from Fortune and the lab’s postdoctoral fellows Qingyun Liu and Xin Wang as critical to her growth as a scientist during her five years at the Harvard Chan School. And she said the relationships and sense of belonging she found at Fortune Institute, the Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia Program, and the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases were “amazing.”
“The community was the most rewarding part. Having really supportive mentors who are experts at their work and advocates for students, in a friendly environment with true camaraderie between trainees and professors. That shaped what I was able to accomplish,” Stanley said.
Midway through school, when the COVID-19 pandemic began and the killing of George Floyd sparked a new wave of Black Lives Matter protests across the United States, the community felt It turned out to be equally important. Months off for an opportunity to research COVID-19 at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston and find out whether rapid antigen tests can differentially detect variants of SARS-CoV-2 Mr. Fortune was cooperative when I took the pictures. Meanwhile, as a founding member of the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases’ Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging Committee, we created a series of monthly newsletters aimed at fostering conversations about movements for racial justice and other social issues. , co-managed.
“We wanted to do something disruptive,” Stanley said. “I think sometimes as scientists, we feel like we should just focus on the science, or that we can get away from these problems, as if they don’t matter in our community. But because I am an African American woman, a group that is underrepresented in the sciences, racial and social justice is something I think about a lot, and the training of other minorities. That’s why we’re creating these images, starting with images from Black Lives Matter protests, to spark conversation and force people to think about these issues and share some of the burden. newsletter for about a year.”
Stanley hopes to one day provide mentorship and foster a similar community within his lab, focusing on research that helps improve diagnosis and treatment of global health threats posed by bacteria. Tuberculosis remains of special interest. “I like studying tuberculosis because it’s such a big problem and there are so many different ways to tackle it, but we don’t have enough people,” Stanley said. “The tuberculosis research community has a family feel. It’s small and supportive.”
She also hopes to remain in the classroom after serving as a teaching assistant for two semesters in an introductory global health course taught by Sue Goldie, the Roger Irving Lee Professor of Public Health.
“Global health is not a traditional field that you are exposed to, so it was really great to expose them to new concepts and see their enthusiasm and passion for the subject grow. “Teaching was one of the most rewarding things I did in graduate school,” Stanley said.
However, his first research was as a postdoctoral fellow at Boston Children’s Hospital. Streptococcus pneumoniaeThe bacterium causes pneumonia, has killed more than 300,000 children under the age of 5 worldwide, and continues to evade vaccines.
“There are obviously many steps between what we do in the lab and actually benefiting people,” Stanley says. “So while science is incremental in nature, I am still excited to study infectious diseases and play a small role towards the ultimate goal of reducing global health disparities.”
—maya brownstein
Photo: Kent Dayton