Carolina Barillas-Mury
Microbiologist
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Early life and education
Barillas-Mury was born in 1961 in Guatemala. She learned English when she attended high school run by American nuns.
Barillas-Mury graduated from the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala in 1981 with a B.S. in biology. She received her M.D. from Universidad Francisco Marroquín de Guatemala in 1985. There were no graduate programs in Guatemala, so in 1987, she moved to the United States to do a PhD at the University of Arizona in the lab of Michael Wells, where she studied the process of enzymatic blood digestion by Aedes aegypti. She graduated in 1992 and stayed until 1993 to do postdoctoral research. In 1994, she joined the lab of Fotis Kafatos at Harvard University. She then moved to Germany to do research at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory.
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Career
Barillas-Mury was hired as an assistant professor at Colorado State University’s department of microbiology, immunology, and pathology in 1998. There, she began working to develop a model of cellular invasion of parasites. She moved to the National Institutes of Health in 2003. In 2010, she was promoted to senior investigator, and by 2016 she was named an NIH Distinguished Investigator.
She is the head of the Mosquito Immunity and Vector Competence Section at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. There, she studies how Plasmodium parasites interact with the mosquito immune system, and how this affects the transmission of malaria.
She is an editor of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.