Rose Leke
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University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Université de Montréal
Rose Leke | |
|---|---|
| Born | Rose Cameroon |
| Citizenship | Cameroonian |
| Education | Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Université de Montréal |
| Occupation(s) | Professor, Researcher |
| Employer | University of Yaounde |
| Known for | Research in malaria |
| Title | Prof |
| Awards | L'Oréal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science |
Rose Gana Fomban Leke is a Cameroonian malariologist and Emeritus Professor of Immunology and Parasitology at the University of Yaounde I. She was awarded the L'Oréal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science in 2024.
When Leke was growing up she suffered from malaria multiple times, it was a normal part of life.[1] She was first interested in medicine due to treatment she received for lung abscess in Limbe when she was six years old.[2][3] Her mother never went to school, however her father was a school teacher, and both encouraged her to pursue educational opportunities.[2][3] She went to Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College, Indiana, US in 1966 for her undergraduate studies, and then University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for her master's degree in the lab of David Silverman. Leke pursued her PhD, titled Murine plasmodia: chronic, virulent and self-limiting infections, at the Université de Montréal, Canada in 1975.[4][5][6]
Research
Professor Leke's research has focussed on pregnancy-associated malaria, in which even women who have developed immunity to the severest forms of malaria can be stricken by a life-threatening form of the disease, with implications on the health of the baby.[7] She established a long-time collaboration with Diana Taylor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa to investigate this condition.[2][7] Together they published a study in 2018 that indicated that increased numbers of parasites during pregnancy-associated malaria actually conferred better protection in the baby to future malaria infections, and suggested that a less-severe pregnancy-associated infection may predispose the child towards greater incidence of disease.[8]
