When Christopher Plowe traveled to Mali in western Africa to test a technique for detecting drug-resistant malaria, he was struck by the intelligence and skill of a local pharmacist who had volunteered to help. It didn’t take long before that volunteer, Abdoulaye Djimdé, “rose to the top,” Plowe recalls, and was offered a lab stint at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). Later on, Djimdé would become Plowe’s first Ph.D. student.

That African encounter in 1993 led to a thriving collaboration and friendship between the two researchers—an M.D. from South Dakota and a pharmacist from malaria-ravaged Mali.

Malaria infects hundreds of millions of people worldwide and kills an estimated 900,000 a year, taking an especially high toll on children in sub-Saharan Africa. Despite more than a half century of research, no effective malaria vaccine has been approved, and the resilient parasite that causes the disease has developed resistance to numerous drugs.

Photos: Plowe: Kaye Evans, Lutterodt / PR Newswire ©HHMI, Djimde: David Rolls