The Career Path Series: An Interview with Heather Burns, National Institutes of Health (IU Biology BS ’96)

Introduction to the Career Path Series

While completing an undergraduate degree in the Department of Biology, many students focus solely on being accepted into medical school after graduation. However, there are many other career options available to a student with a background in biology. In each issue of BioSpeak, the Career Path Series will highlight a different career path you may take once you complete a degree in biology. For more information on careers available to biology graduates, attend the Futures in Biology lectures. For a schedule of upcoming Futures events, visit http://development.bio.indiana.edu/Futures/.

The first IU graduate interviewed for this series is Heather Burns, who received a Bachelor of Science in Biology (’96) from Indiana University-Bloomington and a Masters of Public Health (’01) from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Burns is currently a Program Officer and an International Project Coordinator in the Division of AIDS (DAIDS) for the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) with the National Institutes of Health (NIH).  

Present Day: A Career with the NIH

To describe her current position with her international project, Burns said, “I’m sure you’ve heard the story about teaching a man to fish versus giving the hungry man a fish to eat.” The ultimate goal of this work is to help Nigerians learn skills which will give them an independent future in science; in other words, the NIAID is teaching Nigerians "to fish." Explained Burns, “I work on a collaborative project between three institutes: two that are in Nigeria and my institute here in the US. Together, we are building an infrastructure in the resource-poor environment of Nigeria – poor in funding, in educated human capital, and in modern functional laboratory space and equipment – to support a drug-discovery program that will train Ph.D. students in plant chemistry in a new laboratory.”

When a person is sick in Nigeria, they visit an herbalist or traditional healer instead of seeing a Western medicine doctor. With such a high incidence of tuberculosis in this country, herbalists treat a lot of ‘bloody cough,’ very often with good results. Burns described her work with the drug-discovery program: “The group we are working with in Nigeria has gone into a number of villages and cities to collect samples of mixtures used by herbalists in treating patients’ bloody cough. In their chemistry lab in Abuja and in ours here at the NIH, the extracts from these mixtures are being analyzed for activity against TB.” The hope is that some of the active chemicals from the local treatments can be discovered and eventually synthesized in Nigeria, leading to a TB drug manufactured for Nigeria and Western Africa.

To make the program sustainable, Nigerian students are also being trained for a Ph.D. in chemistry with a focus on drug discovery. The students spend an orientation period at the NIH, after which they return to Nigeria to complete the bulk of their research. The overarching aim of this program, Burns said, is to “build up the platform of knowledgeable experts in their own country.”

How Education and Experience can impact a Career Path

Not every step of the way is clear or even planned. Burns explained, “My career path has been an interesting journey for me, and I seem to have landed a bit away from the original target of where I thought I would be at this point in my life. Regardless, I am happy to be where I am and hope to continue my work in science and international collaborations throughout my life, in whatever shape or form that may take.”

Burns is grateful to have had the support of a number of mentors in her life, including IU faculty members Drs. Michael Tansey, Carl Bauer, and Milton Taylor. Dr. Tansey provided Burns with guidance and encouragement to explore different opportunities. While Burns attended IU, she worked in both Dr. Bauer's and Dr. Taylor's labs conducting bacterial and viral research as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute undergraduate science fellow. As Burns explained, “I was always interested in pursuing a career that involved science and thought I would apply to a virology Ph.D. program after graduation.”

However, before that could happen, she decided to take a laboratory job at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In her first position there, she worked on a global polio virus project and interacted with scientists from around the world. She moved on to become a manager in a TB lab that analyzed different multi-drug resistant strains among HIV-positive and HIV-negative patients. During her time at the CDC, Burns saw a different side to research and discovered more about her desired career path: “I realized during this time that I wanted to combine the international aspect of science and really enjoyed seeking answers to the epidemiology studies with which I had been involved. I applied to Emory's School of Public Health and continued to work at the CDC while finishing my Masters of Public Health (MPH) in international epidemiology.”

As Burns finished up her final semester at Emory, she was accepted as a Presidential Management Fellow in the Federal Government and began work at the NIH. She explained, “That experience put me into a career that has allowed me to draw on my science background, my public health knowledge, and the cultural education I've gotten from working abroad. Last year, I was in South Africa for some work on a pediatric HIV clinical trial and got to see firsthand how the grants we fund through the NIH really work. These studies are providing answers to questions about prevention, care, and treatment that will be useful all over the world for mothers and children affected by this disease.” 

What the Future Holds

As you embark on your own career, several things might become evident to you as they have for Heather Burns: there is always a new position to work towards, work that is important and interesting to you, and additional skills and knowledge that can be gained by moving forward into different positions. While finding the next step in your career path can be both challenging and stressful, Burns’ philosophy is simply to make the most of each of these stepping stones by focusing on how each new position helps you to develop further - as a scientist and as an individual.