Steffanie Strathdee

Dr. Steffanie Strathdee is a Canadian-American infectious disease epidemiologist who is Associate Dean of Global Health Sciences and Professor at the University of California San Diego. She is also an Adjunct Professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Simon Fraser Universities. She is renowned for her research on HIV/AIDS among highly marginalized populations, but was more recently credited with saving her husband's life from a deadly superbug infection using bacteriophages -viruses that attack bacteria. The case, which involved cooperation from three universities, the U.S. Navy and researchers across the globe, shows how phage therapy is a future weapon against multi-drug resistant bacterial infections which are expected to kill 10 million people per year by 2050. In 2019, she and her husband, Thomas Patterson, co-authored their memoir, The Perfect Predator: A Scientist's Race to Save Her Husband from a Deadly Superbug. The "Patterson case" has 'gone viral in a good way' and ushered in a new era of phage therapy in the West that has saved numerous lives. For her efforts, Strathdee was named one of TIME magazine's Most Influential People in Health Care in 2018. She co-directs the center for Innovative Phage Applications and Therapeutics, the first dedicated phage therapy program in North America which was founded in 2018.