© PETER BARTA/ST. JUDE CHILDREN'S RESEARCH HOSPITALThirumala-Devi Kanneganti became fascinated by disease when she was a high school student in India. “I always used to think, ‘Why do some people get diseases?’” she says. “In tropical countries, we are exposed to all of these bacterial and viral infections. Seeing these infectious diseases spreading, it was always: ‘Why some, and why not all?’”
As an undergraduate at Kakatiya University in Warangal, Kanneganti triple-majored in zoology, botany, and chemistry, seeking answers. She went on to earn her master’s and PhD in microbiology and immunology from Osmania University in Hyderabad, but the pace of research in India frustrated her. “I used to wait for antibodies for two months,” she remembers. “I couldn’t stand that.”
Kanneganti seized the opportunity for a postdoc position in fungal genetics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2001, and brought her husband and daughter to the United States. “It was my dream to do good science,” she says. “That’s the only reason we came.”
In 2007, after she’d completed two more postdocs, a listing in Science for a position at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in ...
