Contributors

By the time Guillermina Girardi earned her PhD from the Universidad Nacional de Rosario in Argentina in 1994, she never got the opportunity to study abroad. So when the chance came up to do a two-year training program at the Hospital for Special Surgery, an affiliate of Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, in December of 2000, she jumped on it. She ultimately worked as an assistant professor of pharmacology and toxicology at Cornell studying pregnancy complications. "It was heartbreaking because there's nothing you can do for [women]." But as she discusses in Safeguarding the Foreigner Within, she has recently unearthed a possible solution: a drug previously marketed for cardiovascular disease. "These women deserve some hope."

Les Costello has spent most of his academic career at the University of Maryland. Now a professor of physiology and endocrinology at the Dental School in Baltimore, he has been conducting research on prostate metabolism for nearly 30 years. Throughout his career, Costello has published more than 125 research papers and brought in more than 30 research grants, totaling about $30 million. In NIH RO1s: No Longer the Best Science, Costello argues that the new guidelines instituted by the National Institutes of Health are "in stark opposition to their stated goal to fund 'the best science by the best scientists,''" and have instead transformed the agency into one that favors new and early-stage investigators.

Cassandra Willyard's interest in science started with camping trips with her parents and blossomed at the University of Wisconsin- Madison, where she studied conservation biology and environmental science. She attended the science writing program at the Johns Hopkins University, followed by internships with Nature Medicine and EARTH magazine in Alexandria, VA. She recently moved to New York to try her hand at freelancing. In Wild-type work, she describes her adventures with Manuel Elkin Patarroyo, a controversial malaria researcher who uses wild owl monkeys to test an experimental vaccine—and returns them to the jungle. "I think that this kind of story—the kind of story where you go somewhere that doesn't get much coverage—is really important."

Leah Fasten grew up with photography. "[I] used to dress my sister up and do these staged fashion shoots," she says. But she never seriously considered it as a possible career path until she began working as a financial advisor for an airline in Tempe, AZ. Taking advantage of the free travel, Fasten "flew all over the West," photographing her journeys. She eventually quit the airline to study photography full-time. She now lives in Boston and runs her own photography business. "I absolutely love my job," she says. "There's no other career where you get invited into people's lives for a while." In J. Christopher Love: The Nanoimmunologist, she steps in to the world of J. Christopher Love, a young nanoimmunologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is developing new techniques to study the immune system.