Bruce D. Walker

Before that, I was thinking I would go to medical school or, or something else.

Um, and the outreach event I went to was at HHMI, um, and they had one of their investigators, Bruce Walker, talking about his research on HIV, and he, um, is an immunologist and also a clinician, and he talked about, um, having identified these people called HIV elite controllers, who get infected with the virus but never progress to AIDS in the absence of any antiretroviral therapy.

And his lab was trying to, um, understand the immune system of these HIV elite controllers to figure out how they might develop a vaccine.

And so, um, the idea that you could, uh, make a discovery that would sort of allow you to rewrite how we understand biology and then also help people was just so compelling to me, and I was really captivated by the idea of host defense against pathogens.