ABOVE: © Natalia Weedy Photography
It’s safe to say that most chemistry majors don’t envision becoming experts in dissecting mosquito throats, but that’s the position Emily Derbyshire found herself in when her postdoc project at Harvard Medical School took an unexpected turn. Derbyshire originally planned to study the biochemistry of malaria infection—research that was in line with her experience as an undergrad and graduate student. But by the time she started working in the lab of chemical biologist Jon Clardy, he had won a grant for a more biologically-oriented malaria study, and Derbyshire agreed to change course. “She said that [the project] would be great to work on, and she did a fabulous job,” he recalls.
Derbyshire, now a chemical biologist at Duke University, grew up in upstate New York and was the first person in her family to graduate from university, at Trinity College in Connecticut. Although she’d been ...
