LINDA NORDLINGMalaria has been part of Gordon Awandare’s life for as long as he remembers. Growing up in Kandiga, a small village in northeastern Ghana, he used to get the disease at least twice a year. Treatment was scarce. His grandmother would lay him on a mat in the cool shade of a tree and give him acetaminophen—if there was any. “You just toughed it out,” he recalls grimly.
These days, Awandare is in the vanguard of a fight against the parasitic disease that infects more than 7 million Ghanaians each year and kills more than 2,000—most of them young children. He is the founding director of the West African Center for Cell Biology of Infectious Pathogens (WACCBIP) at the University of Ghana, a center that in just a few years has grown into a thriving research hub studying malaria and other scourges such as Buruli ulcer, HIV, and tuberculosis.
Awandare’s young age, 42, is remarkable in a country where academic seniority usually comes with the passing of decades rather than merit. But then, nothing about Awandare is ordinary. Seven years ago, he left a promising career in the United States to return home ...
