Dyann Wirth, Richard Pearson Strong Professor of Infectious Disease at the Harvard School of Public Health

HILS is delighted to announce the appointment of its new faculty Chair, Professor Dyann Wirth.  Wirth is the Richard Pearson Strong Professor of Infectious Disease at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), and Chair of the HSPH's Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases.  She succeeds Professor Christopher T. Walsh, Hamilton Kuhn Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, who served as HILS Chair for seven productive, energetic years before stepping down this past summer to pursue other projects.

As reported in the summer 2012 edition of Colloquy, the GSAS alumni magazine, Professor Wirth is a world-renowned infectious disease researcher whose lab is the epicenter of the global fight against malaria.  Wirth and her team of graduate students, postdocs, faculty, and clinicians conduct groundbreaking explorations of Plasmodium, the single celled parasite that causes malaria.  Wirth and her students stand out among their peers for having a strongly integrative understanding of the disease.   Their collaborators — from Harvard, the Broad Institute, and labs and treatment centers around the world — include molecular biologists, geneticists, computational biologists, chemists, statisticians, and epidemiologists.

As she told Colloquy, Wirth knows it’s not simply a parasite she and her colleagues must contend with. On the genetic side of things, there are human host, parasite, and mosquito vector genomes in play.  At the political level, there is a parasite that ignores country borders and demands cooperation among neighbors.  And then there are the technical, economic, and logistical concerns: how to get what is needed (bed nets, medications, vaccines) where it needs to be when it needs to be there.  “Realistically,” says Wirth, “this is a 50-year project.”  

The role of HILS Chair seems a natural progression for a woman who has a singular talent for bringing together people from all walks of science and life.  We're looking forward to Dyann Wirth's tenure!  Click here for more information about her lab and work.

Professor Wirth’s research is highlighted below in “Malaria: Natural Selection and New Medicine”, a short video produced by the American Museum of National History in Summer 2010 which features Wirth and her Senegalese collaborators.