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FOCUS In Sound #35: Michael Ferdig

FOCUS In Sound #35: Michael Ferdig

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 FOCUS In Sound #35: Michael Ferdig Welcome to FOCUS In Sound, the podcast series from the FOCUS newsletter published by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. I’m your host, science writer Ernie Hood. In this edition of FOCUS In Sound, we welcome a biomedical scientist who in 2022 was the Burroughs Wellcome Fund’s first Resident Faculty Scholar. Michael Ferdig is a Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Notre Dame, where he has been on the faculty since 2001. He specializes in the genetics and genomics of drug resistance and virulence in the malaria parasite. Malaria is a parasitic infection transmitted by the Anopheles mosquito. Malaria drug resistance is an ongoing topic of major importance in global public health, where the disease is still a significant worldwide contributor to mortality, with nearly a half-million deaths annually. Mike received his BS and MS degrees from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, his PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also served a postdoctoral fellowship. He also did a postdoc at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1997 to 2001. Michael Ferdig, welcome to FOCUS In Sound! MIKE: Oh it’s a pleasure to be here, nice to meet you, Ernie. ERNIE: Mike, there is so much for us to talk about, but I’d like to start with what brought you to the Burroughs Wellcome Fund to be its first Resident Faculty Scholar… MIKE: Well, I love the question, because it makes me smile. I was sitting up there in South Bend, Indiana with the fall season approaching, and going into another teaching semester, and putting in another load of grants, trying to get them renewed. And I was in this mental place of, you know, getting to this place in my career where I’ve had plenty of success and things are going well, and I just felt like I was turning the crank and perpetuating myself, and looking around and realizing, in my business, in the business of academic research science, it tends to be what we do. We get to a career place where we almost are content to settle into this safe bubble of self-perpetuation. And I had almost a little bit of a panic about, oh no, is this it? And it happened to be at the same time I was noticing that—I was familiar with the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, just like we are out there as scientists—had just announced this Resident Faculty Scholar. And I thought, this is what I need to do. I need to step away. I had been 20 years at Notre Dame with no request for leave or what they call sabbatical sometimes, and I thought, I need a place where I’m not just going to go make more versions of me, I’m going to go try to find the next version of me, and sort of move into this later phase of my career, and hopefully do things a little more useful and interesting. So it was just kind of magic how it all fell together, I reached out. I had known Victoria McGovern at the Fund for years. She had long been an advocate for infectious disease research, and she said, “Oh yeah, by the way, we do have this fellowship, why don’t you look into it and see if it might fit?” So I applied, and a summertime later, there I was. ERNIE: I know Mike it’s been quite a formative experience for you. Can you tell us a little bit more about some of your activities during the scholarship? Did you have a specific project that you worked on during the sabbatical? MIKE: I did. As imagined in the first place, I do need to strengthen my program, basically I wanted to expand and extend my lab science. We’ve always been what they call bench scientists, experimentalists in the lab. But I work on malaria, which is an organism that infects people around the world and has caused devastating disease for millennia, and I really feel the need to move my work towards the field. So that kind of relevance and extending. But I’d also really noticed, I do a lot of teaching, a lot of moving toward more administrative roles, and I just noticed that this problem of needing to bust out of our bubble, out of our cocoon, was really pervasive across all the things I was working on. So I set up some aims. Aim One of my project was just very literally to take what we do in the lab and move it into a more field and clinical relevant place. Which is a pretty big, it’s a very different way of doing our workaday. And I knew down here in the Triangle, there are some really good researchers who do more clinical work in the malaria world, so I thought, a-ha, this would be a great chance to pull some of those people together, bring in some outside experts, the people I admire and respect, and sort of bring everybody together, and it just has been amazing how things fell into place. And then I had a little more aspirational goals, and one was getting more out of my immediate research focus into where is the field going, what is malaria, [what does] the future of malaria research look like? And these are more community oriented, open science...
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