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Meisha Bynoe
Meisha Bynoe, 21, fell in love with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from afar. It was at age 14, in the picturesque Caribbean country of St. Vincent and the Grenadines where she grew up, that Bynoe heard an undergraduate from MIT talk about his adventures there. This, she knew immediately, was the place for her.
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Meisha Bynoe
Yale University
New Haven, Connecticut
Research Field: Microbiology
Photo: Kathleen Dooher
A high-resolution photograph is available on request.
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With encouragement from her parents and teachers, Bynoe studied hard. Her effort paid off. In June 2005, Bynoe will graduate from MIT with dual degrees in biology and music — and a perfect grade point average. Now she’s the one talking about her undergraduate adventures, from lab work on the development of mutations in DNA, to meetings of the Global Young Leaders Summit, and playing percussion with the MIT Wind Ensemble.
During the summer of 2004, just before her senior year at MIT, Bynoe participated in HHMI’s Exceptional Research Opportunities Program (EXROP), which provides disadvantaged students, including underrepresented minorities, the opportunity to do summer research in the labs of HHMI investigators or HHMI professors. She conducted her EXROP research in the lab of HHMI investigator Richard Locksley at the University of California, San Francisco. Over the summer, Bynoe worked to help develop lab assays to identify certain macrophages, immune cells that ingest bacteria during infection, in the tissues of parasite-infected mice.
That experience helped Bynoe realize she’d like to focus more broadly on the scientific problem of infectious disease. She’s particularly interested in tropical diseases. “Most of my inspiration comes from having lived in a developing country and seeing people affected by diseases that the developed world does not encounter,” she explains.
This fall, Bynoe will begin a Ph.D. program in microbiology at Yale University . She chose Yale for its multidisciplinary training, ranging from genetics to microbial ecology. Bynoe hopes eventually to head an academic lab in the United States. “I’d like to study not just pathogens themselves, but also the mechanisms of the immune response to these pathogens, ” she adds.
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