During her M.D.-Ph.D. program, when Sydney Ramirez decided to focus on coronaviruses — this was well before the pandemic — some of her colleagues were skeptical. Didn’t she want to study viruses with more relevance, like HIV or influenza?
“It was a super, super small field at the time,” she said.
For her postdoc, Ramirez wanted to shift from studying viruses to unpacking the body’s response to infection, so she joined Shane Crotty’s lab at La Jolla Institute for Immunology. It was March 2020, and within days, California had a stay-at-home order in place.
Ramirez, who is also an infectious diseases physician, began rounding up samples from Covid patients so she and her research colleagues could explore what she and fellow hospital clinicians were seeing — the vast array of responses a person could have to being infected with the same virus, from an asymptomatic case to a fatal one.
“This is the thing that drives me in terms of research — what is going on, and how much of it is our immune system, versus the pathogen we’re trying to fight off?” she said.
Ramirez, who has a teenage daughter, is now spending most of her working time on research, exploring the immune responses that people generate in their upper airways. But she plans to keep making time for clinical work. After all, she decided to pursue a joint degree program so she could investigate what she was seeing in patients.
“There are these people who understand the clinical problems, but also have the toolbox that allows them to solve the problems,” she said.
— Andrew Joseph
