Steffanie Strathdee
Who is she?
Steffanie Strathdee is the associate dean of global health sciences at UC San Diego School of Medicine. An epidemiologist, Dr. Strathdee is also UCSD’s co-director of the Center for Innovative Phage Applications and Therapeutics, “the first center of its kind in North America,” she points out.
Why did we pick her?
Dr. Strathdee was named one of TIME magazine’s “50 Most Influential People in Health Care” for 2018 thanks to her research on phage therapy. In 2017, her husband, Tom Patterson, got sick with a multidrug-resistant bacterial infection. In a last-ditch effort to help him recover, Strathdee, along with a team of doctors, treated him with bacteriophages: viruses that target specific strains of bacteria. Strathdee’s efforts brought new light to a therapy that had been discarded in the 20th century with the advent of antibiotics.
In her own words:
“While I was in graduate school, my best friend and my Ph.D. advisor died of AIDS within a year. It was then that I pledged my career to trying to stop the spread of infectious diseases, which are largely preventable.”
What’s next?
Dr. Strathdee plans to keep raising awareness about the superbug crisis and how phage therapy can help fight it. She and her husband wrote a book, The Perfect Predator: A Scientist’s Race to Save Her Husband from a Deadly Superbug, that will be published by Hachette next spring.
PHAGElogist 