Young investigator makes budding impression

In the 72 years before her death, G. Jeanette Thorbecke made a mark. At 35, Dawn Bowdish is following closely in her footsteps.

As a result, the assistant professor of Pathology and Molecular Medicine and member of the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research (IIDR) at McMaster was awarded the G. Jeanette Thorbecke Award from the Society for Leukocyte Biology (SLB). The award is given annually to a young female investigator who holds a faculty position fewer than five years working in the area of cellular and molecular mechanisms of host defence and inflammation. As part of the award, she will present at the 2011 SLB meeting in Kansas City in September.

“The SLB is the premiere society of innate immunity and host defence and many prestigious, early career scientists have received this award so I am honoured to be counted among them,” says Bowdish, whose research focuses on the role of monocyte/macrophage recognition and responses to commensal microflora and resident pathogens of the upper respiratory tract and how these responses change with age. She has begun to unravel how age-related changes in monocyte recruitment and macrophage function contribute to the increased susceptibility of the elderly to respiratory infections.

Bowdish received her doctoral training at the University of British Columbia working on aspects of mucosal immunity and the roles of anti-infective cationic peptides.  She followed this up with postdoctoral training at Oxford where she developed interests in macrophage biology and the role of cell surface receptors in pathogen recognition.

Bowdish also recently won a $100,000 Young Investigator Grant from Pfizer Canada. The grant supports a study of why the elderly are at increased risk of pneumonia and how a co-infection with the influenza virus is particularly dangerous for them. She was also awarded a Canadian Institutes of Health Research Catalyst Award in 2010 with colleague Jennie Johnstone, an IIDR investigator studying respiratory infections in the frail elderly.

“Dr. Bowdish is an incredibly talented young investigator recruited to McMaster in 2009 in the IIDR,” says IIDR scientific director Gerry Wright. “She is an enthusiastic proponent of outreach to the community and high schools to encourage young women in particular to consider careers in research.  She has volunteered her time and expertise with the local science fair and through tenacity and lobbying, secured funding for scholarships for deserving students.  I mention this as from what I have read of Dr. Thorbecke’s career, it seems to me that she would appreciate Dr. Bowdish’s instigative and commitment to training young women.”

G. Jeanette Thorbecke, an internationally recognized immunologist, died in 2001 at the age of 72 after being stung by a jellyfish while swimming in the Pacific Ocean in Maui, Hawaii. This ended a career marked by more than five decades of contributions and achievements in the biological sciences, including numerous and significant discoveries that had enormous impact on the understanding of immunological mechanisms.

Related links:

Dawn Bowdish's website: http://iidr.mcmaster.ca/investigators/bowdish_dawn.html

IIDR home page: http://iidr.mcmaster.ca/index.html

Society for Leukocyte Biology: http://www.leukocytebiology.org/