ABOVE: © Christopher Beauchamp
As a Harvard undergraduate, Daniel Colón-Ramos explored the forests of Panama and Honduras, listening closely as indigenous people described how they use medicinal plants to treat ill individuals. The interactions, he says, left him with many more questions than answers. “The questions that kept coming to my mind were molecular questions about what the bioactive agents were and how they worked,” he says. Sitting there in the forest, he realized he wanted to contribute knowledge to science, instead of just learning facts.
After earning his bachelor’s degree in biology in 1998, he moved to Duke University, where he began a post-baccalaureate program that gave him his first experiences at the lab bench. “That was transformative in my ability to imagine myself as a scientist,” he says. He then applied to and was accepted as a PhD student at Duke, where he joined the lab of Sally ...
