THE STUDENT

When a high school science teacher encouraged Kortany Baker to attend a science camp at Indiana University Bloomington, her first exposure to college-level experiments confirmed her goal to become a neurosurgeon. Toward that end, she initially chose majors in biology and psychology at her hometown university, IU Kokomo. After having two daughters in quick succession and then adjusting to life as a single mother, however, she changed her major to biochemistry, hoping to find work after graduation without additional degrees. While Baker assumed she would postpone graduate study, her professors had a different idea: “They said, ‘If you can get a bachelor’s degree with two kids, why can’t you get a graduate degree with two kids?’” She chose Biochemistry at Purdue but doubted her admission. “I had the grades, but I came from a small community college, and it’s Purdue,” she recalls. Her daughters were 6 and 7 when Baker received her acceptance letter — and cried. She began her doctoral program under Scott Briggs, associate professor of biochemistry, in fall 2016. “I picked this department because it reminded me of my small school where I had so much support from my professors,” she says. “My daughters brag to their friends that their mom’s a scientist. When they see me stay up all night to get everything done, I hope it teaches them they can do anything they set their minds to.”

THE RESEARCH

Baker studies the drug resistance of fungal pathogens, which have an especially high mortality rate in immunocompromised patients, she explains. Given the difficulty of developing new drugs, Baker’s work on why certain pathogens are resistant may lead to reversing that resistance to make them sensitive to current drugs. “I’ve always been fascinated by bacterial drug resistance,” she says. “But I never thought about fungal species until I ended up in the Briggs lab.”

OPPORTUNITIES AND FUTURE PLANS