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Discovering the Universe Under a Microscope
Dr. Liz Ballou ’00 makes breakthroughs in mycology while running her own lab in England.
Dr. Liz Ballou ’00, a cellular biologist and fungal geneticist, was not in the room when her first scientific breakthrough occurred. She was in a meeting when her undergraduate lab assistant emailed her a photograph, alarmed by what he was seeing under the microscope.
“I opened the picture, and literally it was this transformative thing that has changed what the research community can do,” Dr. Ballou said. “It meant something practically impossible to study is now very easy for anybody to study.”
The breakthrough, a new approach to studying the behavior of fungal pathogens, is a milestone in Dr. Ballou’s career, but the collaborative nature through which it came about perfectly encapsulates why she is a scientist.
“There’s this idea that science progresses because of the discoveries of individuals – Albert Einstein or Jonas Salk – but what we actually know is that teams do things that save the world,” she said. “The accumulation of knowledge is how we advance as a society, and that’s what motivates me all the time, being a part of that.”
Since that discovery in 2017, Dr. Ballou has realized her dream as a scientist – heading up her own laboratory, where she and her team of undergraduate, master’s, and postdoctoral students seek to understand how the human body interacts with fungi, how genes enable these interactions to happen, and what changes occur when drugs are introduced. Until mid-April of 2021, Dr. Ballou’s lab was based out of the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom; it is now at University of Exeter.
She was drawn to this work after learning about the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in South Africa; doctors were alerted to a possible outbreak of HIV when they started seeing patients suffering from very rare and random diseases they hadn’t heard of. Hearing these stories years later, Dr. Ballou was alarmed that this scientific mystery remained unsolved, and has since been able to investigate the role fungal pathogens may have played during the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
“You hear this story from your parents’ generation, and you think, ‘No one has solved this? No one is working on this, still?’” she said. “Mycology is a really an underserved area, and it’s where people at the beginning of their careers can really push knowledge forward.”
Dr. Ballou’s area of interest is how fungal pathogens cause disease in people who are already sick, focusing on Cryptococcus neoformans, a microorganism that can be found in soil and plants and can cause infections when inhaled. While most people in urban areas can be exposed to Cryptococcus without falling ill, it is the main pathogen causing meningitis in patients living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa.
She was not always drawn to biology, however. It was chemistry – specifically, what she learned in Irene Walsh’s class – that sparked her interest in science.
“She was such an amazing instructor. She gave me such a solid grounding in logical thinking, in careful teaching, and just the level of insight she conveyed about the concepts she was teaching, made me think, ‘This is what I want to do: understand how the universe works.’”
She went on to study chemistry at Mount Holyoke College, went overseas to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine for her master’s in molecular biology, and returned to the United States for her Ph.D. in genetics at Duke University, where she first started working with Cryptococcus.
After four years with the Aberdeen Fungal Group studying medical mycology, two of them as a postdoctoral researcher, she earned a fellowship for her own research project – the one that led to her breakthrough in 2017.
Dr. Ballou is acutely aware of how few women are in her position – not just as a woman in science, but also as a woman in charge of her own lab. Reflecting on her experience being only one of a handful of girls in a class, she encourages students who are in the minority to practice at school what she finds herself doing today – speaking up and advocating for herself.
“It’s something that’s become just more and more important to me over the past couple years,” she said. “(Being a woman in science) is definitely a process of becoming more isolated, but I also think there is a lot of potential to improve on it.”
Dr. Ballou said the way she was challenged and supported at St. Andrew’s guides how she runs her lab today, especially as she empowers her undergraduate lab assistants to be the ones witnessing moments of scientific breakthrough in her place.
“I am constantly reminded that one of the things I learned at St. Andrew’s that was so important was the learning process and how important the learning process is. It’s not just about rote memorization but learning to think and learning to be independent, and that’s something that’s served me really well and that I try to teach my students,” she said. “They’re capable of it, and once you show them that they can achieve it, they do things that are amazing.”
St. Andrew’s Episcopal School is a private, coeducational college preparatory day school for students in preschool (Age 2) through grade 12, located in Potomac, Maryland.