Dr. Susan Monarez

Uh, you know, at some point, you know, his dairy cows, um, because he, he tried to keep everything as natural as possible.

They got,

quite sick and he had to sell off.

And, you know, we faced some really challenging financial times and he became a police officer to make ends meet.

And I, you know, my mom was a librarian and worked in other factory jobs or whatnot.

But what that does is it grounds you in a way where, you know, you learn to appreciate things besides material expectations.

And

And I, you know, like I said, at the time, you know, it was difficult, but now it grounds me.

It keeps me humble in a place where I don't need to have materialism or financial gain.

What I need to have is a positive contribution to others.

And that is my core principle.

It has been such a privilege to serve the American people at all of those institutions.

So I...

was at Stanford, and I was working on something that was, it was on the NIH pay line.

It was deemed interesting but too innovative because there was no other, no one else working in phosphoproteomics or differential diagnostics at the time.

So I had this idea that if you could look at the differential phosphorylation patterns between, you know, four categories of pathogens, bacteria, virus, fungus, and parasitic pathogens, you could actually have the right intervention.

which helps in low and middle income countries when you're trying to make sure, do you give them an antibiotic or do something else?

And I had seen the path, I'd seen all of this happen in the scientific, you know, sort of at the lab bench, but there was no way to take that, you know, basic evidence and get it into

you know, an R01 or anything like that.

So I sort of had to make, this is one of my, this is probably the biggest first choice that I had to take is do I change essentially my approach to science and immunology and this, you know, sort of moonshot approach that I was, was trying to, to, you know, go down or do I do something different?