Hannah Steinberg

Hannah is in the final year of her MD/PhD at the University Illinois at Chicago. Prior to pursuing her MD/PhD, Hannah obtained her BA from Sarah Lawrence College in New York and her MSPH from Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. While completing her MSPH, she worked with USAID and the Last Ten Kilometers Project in Ethiopia on a community health mapping project, and with Dr. Robert H. Gilman at JHSPH in Peru on a urine-based diagnostic device for neurological toxoplasmosis. In her PhD, Hannah continued her work on diagnostic assay development, nesting her dissertation in Dr. Gilman’s Neurological Syndromes of PLHIV project. Hannah defended her dissertation in 2022 and returned to her third year of medical school. She is currently in the process of applying to residency. Hannah also is a member of the ASTMH Board of Directors, representing students, trainees, residents and post-docs.

What does the Kean Fellowship mean to you?
It is an honor to receive the Kean Fellowship. This fellowship will support me in a new area of research. Allowing me to continue my interest in infectious disease, while learning about a new population and a new mechanism of transmission. As I look toward residency and consider what research questions I want to ask next in my career, I am intrigued by the many unanswered questions about vertical transmission of parasitic disease. I see this fellowship as an opportunity to begin to generate pilot data and assess feasibility of future work in this area.

What do you anticipate learning?
I hope to learn more about vertical transmission of congenital chagas disease and the factors that mediate the differential transmission from one mother baby pair to another. Moreover, I look forward to working with the local staff to build new relationships and hear their ideas about areas of inquiries related to this project. I also am excited to continue working on my Spanish proficiency.

What interests you about tropical medicine and what problems are you interested in solving?
I love molecular biology, specifically molecular parasitology—the elegance of every interaction and the chain of resulting events, the checks and balances of these mechanisms and, most of all, the cunning circumventions contrived by pathogens to deregulate the system. Basic science research does a striking job of studying pathogen interactions, and from this we have many chemical solutions to pathogen attack; unfortunately, medication alone does not solve the socioeconomic and infrastructure problems that allow curable diseases to persist. For this, translational research needs to be prioritized. 

I began collaborating with colleagues in Peru and Bolivia during my Master’s degree and have maintained these relationships. My PhD was nested in a study in Iquitos, Peru, and Santa Cruz, Bolivia. The SARS-COV-2 pandemic has greatly challenged global collaboration, but my team has been remarkable in their pivot to allow continued partnership and study progress. It is my intention to continue our work together indefinitely. I’ve had the privilege of working not just with some of Peru and Bolivia’s best scientists, but also some of their best up-and-coming scientists. I see these opportunities as an avenue to develop a research program in which we continue to develop our investigations through collaboration.