EVACUATION ORDER |
Dr Sue VandeWoude, 2020 Fulbright Future Scholar
I had been in Hobart, Tasmania, off Australia’s southern coast, for nearly two months on my first, and almost certainly my last, sabbatical. I had seen wombats, echidna, kookaburra, regularly heard the calls of forest ravens and cockatoos, and had visited a handful of local brewing establishments. And, yes, I had also been at work. This included taking baby steps in learning statistical computing and graphics (R programming) and a set of mathematical modeling principles (structural equation modeling). Along the way I had become a fan of Sewall Wright, a population geneticist who had famously studied guinea pigs, and I had created a twocolor correlation graph with actual data that I had proudly shared with my adult children. The goal of my sabbatical was to use these tools to understand a novel process by which a cat’s immune system could resist infection with feline immunodeficiency virus, or FIV. I hoped my findings would not only lead to new treatment options for cats with this disease, but, by analogy, guide novel ways to modify infections caused by the human disease correlate, HIV. This One Health project – linking animal disease to its human analogue – could push my laboratory studies in a new direction.
But on March 12, I received an unexpected notification from the U.S. Department of State advising “all current U.S. Fulbright participants to make arrangements to depart their country of assignment as soon as possible.” Despite the growing pandemic pandemonium I had watched unfolding in news reports, it had not dawned on me that I might need to truncate my visit to the University of Tasmania, Australia, more than a month early. At that point, the small island state had very few confirmed cases of COVID-19 compared to countries coping with mounting catastrophe.
22
Sue VandeWoude learned about Tasmanian ecology and history. Scenes included, clockwise from top left: Churchill Avenue Overpass, University of Tasmania; Mersey River, near the town of Mole Creek, on ancestral lands of the Aboriginal people; Forester kangaroos on Maria Island; the mouth of River Derwent near Taroona; a mother wombat and joey on Maria Island; sea eagles at Arthur River; and Point Puer, site of a former British boys prison at Port Arthur. At right, VandeWoude is pictured near the campus of Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado. Photo by Mary Neiberg
