Montreal-raised researcher wins $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship

Montreal-raised biomedical researcher Elodie Ghedin is one of 22 high achievers ranging from a poet to a neuropathologist to win a 2011 MacArthur Fellowship – a coveted $500,000 grant to spend over five years with no strings attached.

As a master's student from the University of Quebec at Montreal doing field work in West Africa in the early 1990s, Prof. Ghedin found a passion for studying parasites causing serious or fatal diseases such as sleeping sickness and river blindness in millions of people across the developing world.

Now aged 44 and an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh, she leads collaborative projects to map the genes in those parasites – as well as more common sickness-causing viruses like influenza – to learn how they adapt and evolve so they can be targeted by new vaccines and drugs.

You call many of the pathogens you study "neglected." Why?

They're categorized as neglected tropical diseases and that's because they affect mostly people in developing countries. … The worm I work on, the Brugia Malayi [which can cause elephantiasis] is really not something that's funded regularly. But it affects a huge number of people in the world, mainly in Africa and southeast Asia.

How could your work help fight disease?

We try to use genomic information to develop functional assays that would allow us to better understand how the parasite functions. When you think about it, parasites are incredible machines because they've learned to adapt to their host, and they're able to secrete things into their environment to modulate and change the immune system of their host. So one aspect I'd like to really look at is what do parasites put out in their environment that is controlling the immune system? When you look at the genome of any of these parasites we've ever decoded, you can see about 20 to 40 per cent of the genes are complete unknowns, and we call them "orphans." They don't match anything we've found before, we don't know what they do, so there's a huge potential of discovery.

What plans do you have for the money?

The timing was unbelievable because funding was becoming very difficult in the U.S., and I think everywhere else. The research I do – working on neglected parasitic diseases – is of course not very high up on the priority list of what gets funded. I have a grant ending on this parasite I work on, the Brugia Malayi, and no follow-up funding, and I thought I'm going to have to just stop this kind of research. This really allows me to continue and even go into riskier research because nowadays you really have to have a sure thing when you submit grant proposals – money is so tight reviewers want to make sure you won't be wasting the money that you'll be given. I think that really feeds into the MacArthur, because they want you to be creative. … I think I'll use it very well. I'm not going to buy a boat with it (laughs).

The MacArthur Foundation is famously secretive about its fellowships. How did you learn you'd won one?

I was at a seminar and I got this cryptic e-mail that had a subject line "Confidential" and then it simply said: "Dear Dr. Ghedin, I would appreciate if you would call me back at work or at home" – signed Bob Gallucci. All week, I had been getting these weird Nigerian-type e-mails saying they had millions of dollars they would give me, so I was really annoyed. And I turned to my colleague and I said [sarcastically] "Unless this guy is giving me a boatload of money, I'm not calling back." But I Googled Bob Gallucci and I said, "Wait a minute, it's the MacArthur Foundation's president. They probably want to talk to me about somebody they want to give the award to. There's no way they would call me." So I reached the president, and he says, "Are you alone?" I thought I was going to faint.

This interview has been condensed and edited.