Mariame Sylla

Mariame was born in 1993 in Guinea, a small country in West Africa. She lived there until the age of 10, when she moved to the United States to join her mother who had migrated a few years earlier to seek medical help. She dreamed of becoming a doctor ever since she was little, and the positive impact that physicians had on her mother’s life fortified her decision to become a physician. Mariame graduated at the top of her class at Paint Branch High School in Maryland and then continued her studies as part of the Honors’ Scholars Program at Montgomery Community College (MC).  Afterward, she was awarded a full scholarship to attend Amherst College in Massachusetts. There, she worked as a research assistant for two years and explored the role of a two-component system in biofilm formation and on the virulence of V. cholerae. As a senior, she wrote an honors thesis on her investigation into the role of carbon catabolite repression on acetate consumption on the virulence of V. cholerae in Drosophila. Her Thesis was awarded a Summa Cum Laude honor. She also received the James Olds Memorial Neuroscience Award for writing the best thesis in the department. After Amherst, Mariame was given a two-year position at NIAID, where she studied ion trafficking at the plasma membrane of Plasmodium falciparum. She presented her findings at the Molecular Parasitology Meeting in 2017. She is currently a fourth-year medical student at Harvard Medical School and anticipates studying meningitis and encephalitis in Guinea.