Contributors

Growing up on a farm in northern Alberta, Kathy D. McCoy always loved science, she says. Nevertheless, she found it difficult to get inspired when she went to study chemistry at a community college near home for a couple years. So in the mid-1980s she left school, became a medical tech, and traveled the world. Eventually, she decided to go back to university, enrolling at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, where she’d recently settled, and followed that up with a PhD in immunology from the Malaghan Institute of Medical Research and Otago University. McCoy then changed continents for a postdoc at the Institute of Experimental Immunology in Zürich, Switzerland, where she found her research passion: the intersection of the microbiome and immunology. Her research revealed that IgE, the antibody that is induced during an allergic reaction, is heavily regulated by the microbiome. “That discovery for me was a ...