Faith Osier Quotes

As a woman who wants to have a rounded life, you will want children at some point. You have to accept that you enjoy all that comes with having children which will have a cost on how far your career can go.

When you come into a place, it is really important to see people who are achieving things,” Professor Osier said. “If you come into a place where people are dead wood, however brilliant you may be, you are going to become dead wood yourself.

The closest comparison I can give is with COVID-19. When it hit Western countries, we all felt it: the pain of lockdown; of losing someone; of being ill ourselves. We felt that urgency, that we needed a vaccine and we needed it yesterday, so we said, ‘let's do it, let's do everything that we can’. For diseases that are far off, that sense of urgency is lost.

As you move up it becomes harder because you’ll be distracted by dramas and sideshows, but remember that they’re not the main story.

whatever you have in your hand to do, if you give it your whole heart and all your energy, it will give you a lot of dividends.

I am a reluctant clinician.

I try to understand how adults in Africa learn to live in harmony with the parasite responsible for malaria, such that infections do not make them ill. This knowledge could help us design vaccines that would protect children, who can die as a result of a malaria infection.

The Wellcome Trust has been instrumental to getting me established as a credible African research scientist. I competed and won a training fellowship that supported my PhD studies. My current work is supported by an intermediate fellowship, and this has enabled me to compete successfully for an MRC/DFID African Research Leader award.

If you go to a region with a lot of malaria, you find that only the children get seriously sick and the adults are basically immune. I wanted to understand the process that makes adults immune to malaria.

The journey towards the development of a malaria vaccine is bumpy. It involves understanding highly evolved parasites that can replicate while hidden within the cells of their hosts.

I had three late miscarriages and one early and that took a long while to recover from. Some women have children with serious disabilities.

Malaria still claims the lives of hundreds of thousands of children each year and has a major economic impact on the lives of many in sub-Saharan Africa. Children that survive severe malaria can be left with permanent physical disability that takes many forms.

When will we have a malaria vaccine

My average day has evolved over the years as I have graduated from being a junior to a more senior researcher. Earlier on, I’d spend a lot of time in the laboratory generating data and less time in the office reading scientific literature, analysing data and writing up my work.

It makes me appreciate the community that transformed a little girl growing up in Kenya into an international award-winning scientist.