Lindsay Bellani

Presented by Leslie B. Vosshall

B.S., The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Why Mosquitoes Bite Some People More than Others: Metabolic Correlates of Human Attraction in Aedes aegypti

Why do mosquitoes bite some people more than others? This question has puzzled picnickers and hikers since humans first congregated outdoors where mosquitoes waited to drink their blood. But there has been little meaningful scientific investigation into the question. Lindsay Bellani took on this important problem in her graduate work. Serving as principal investigator on two human subject protocols, Lindsay asked more than one million mosquitoes their opinion of the attractiveness of 150 volunteers. These were complicated experiments. She and her team required anaphylaxis training in case a subject suffered an allergic reaction, and spent one year sitting in a tropical room, not unlike Miami in August, chatting with volunteers whose arms served as mosquito bait. Blood was collected from each subject, with the aim of asking whether a metabolite in blood could signal quality to marauding mosquitoes. In fact, Lindsay was the first to ask this question, and has identified key biomarkers that predict how attractive a human will be to a mosquito.

This work is important because the mosquitoes we study spread yellow fever, dengue fever, and chikungunya virus to hundreds of millions of people worldwide each year. And they ruin our picnics, barbecues, and vacations. The dataset that Lindsay collected during her Ph.D. was enormously complex, comprising many hundreds of variables to be correlated with mosquito attraction.

Over the last year, Lindsay has taken her already intuitive sense of how to grapple with data and turned herself into a sophisticated data scientist. This has been an impressive transformation to watch. Inspired by her passion for big data and her great skills in analyzing it, Lindsay applied for and was accepted into a highly competitive data incubator program. This seven-week boot camp takes smart people and readies them to take on the biggest problems in data mining in the private sector. It is inspiring to see a very smart and very nice female scientist make a move into the tech sector, where I know she will again do the impossible. And leave the boys in the dust.