ABOVE: © Colin Lenton
In 2005, Colombia native Jorge Henao-Mejia left what might have been a promising career in medicine to come to the US to explore the fundamental biology of the immune system. “Very few people get a chance to come to work every day just to pursue your own curiosity,” says Henao-Mejia, who now spends his days at the University of Pennsylvania dissecting the roles of long, noncoding RNA and gut microbiota in driving inflammation and disease.
His interest in basic science started as a medical student at the University of Antioquia in Medellín, where he had done some research on HIV. But resources were limited in the basic biology labs at the university, so Henao-Mejia looked for researchers to work with in the US. He ended up in the lab of Johnny He at Indiana University School of Medicine, where he studied the immune response to viruses, ...
