In this edition of FOCUS In Sound, we focus on a dynamic scientist from UCLA who has been recognized in the past by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, and we’ll see how that recognition has had a profound effect on her work, her career, and her scientific contributions.

This special edition of FOCUS In Sound is a panel discussion on career development from the Fund's headquarters in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina on October 10, 2018, during the Networking Meeting for New Awardees.

Program Officer Alfred Mays Provides Insight into the Career Awards for Science and Mathematics Teachers

In this edition of FOCUS In Sound, we focus on an outstanding teacher, Andi Webb, who has been recognized in the past by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, and we’ll see what impact that recognition has had on her career, her teaching, and her life.

In this edition of FOCUS In Sound, we check in with Dr. John Burris, President of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, for an annual report in sound for the Fund for 2017. It was quite a significant year in many ways for the Fund, where John has been president since 2008.

In this edition of FOCUS In Sound, we check in with Dr. John Burris, President of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, for an annual report in sound for the Fund for 2016. It was a momentous year in so many ways, including for the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, where John has been president since 2008.

In this edition of FOCUS in Sound, we meet Dr. Todd Boyette, who is the director of the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. More importantly for our purposes on this program, he is also one of the co-founders of the North Carolina Science Festival, an annual event strongly supported for many years by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund.

In 2009, Claudia received a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award for Science and Mathematics Teachers, a $175,000 grant over the course of five years designed to give outstanding North Carolina classroom teachers resources to enhance professional development and collaboration with other teachers. With that five years wrapping up in 2014, we thought it would be a good time to check in and take stock with Claudia, and recognize her noteworthy achievements in mathematics education.

In this edition of FOCUS In Sound, we meet Dr. Pardis Sabeti, a geneticist who won a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award in the Biomedical Sciences in 2005, and has gone on to enjoy a very distinguished career, culminating this year in being named one of the 100 Most Influential People in America by TIME Magazine. That recognition follows her inclusion as one of TIME’s Persons of the Year in 2014, celebrating her role as an Ebola fighter. Although Pardis has a long list of accomplishments in her years of research on the genetics of infectious diseases, for this edition of Focus In Sound we want to concentrate on the incredible story of her work on Ebola. I’m sure everyone will recall how Ebola nearly spun out of control in 2014, threatening a worldwide epidemic. That didn’t happen, fortunately, but the deadly disease claimed more than ten thousand lives in Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia before it was finally reined in by the heroic efforts of thousands of dedicated workers. By rapidly sequencing the genomes of the Ebola Virus Disease particles present in the blood of dozens of West African victims, Pardis and her colleagues at the Broad Institute in Massachusetts played a central role in determining where the outbreak came from, how it was evolving, where it was likely to go, and how to bring it under control.

In this edition of FOCUS In Sound, we meet a quantitative biologist who studies the structure and dynamics of complex biological systems. Most recently, he organized and chaired a two-day, so-called “rapid response” workshop called Modeling the Spread and Control of Ebola in West Africa. The meeting, which drew 180 participants from all over the world, was held in January, 2015 at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, where Joshua Weitz is a tenured associate professor of biology.