David Roberts

Biography

 Reason for Being a Scientist: I have always had a fascination with the unknown, so it is exciting to me to go into an area that no one has explored before or knows what the end point is. A lot about science is doing detective work and filtering through the unknown to get to an answer. To appease my interests, I got into science so I can do experiments to tease out the answers to the unknown. Reason for Choosing IDRI: I enjoy living in Seattle, so when I was finishing my post-doc here, I was focused on working somewhere in Seattle. It just so happened that Tanya Parish, who I am working for now, was doing a sabbatical where I was working on my post-doc. One day we went out for coffee, and the next thing I knew I was Tanya’s first hire at IDRI. I had also talked to people at IDRI, other than Tania, to get a feel for what IDRI does. From those interviews, I knew that I could work here because of my support of the mission and the enjoyment of the people I spoke with. It all fell into place. Career Goal: In the big picture, I want to tease out the unknowns of tuberculosis. If we can find out the pathways it uses to survive in people and how to block it, then we will have helped about a third of the world’s population with a terrible disease. My career goals are to do something about TB — that could be facilitating discoveries about new drugs or new vaccines. Working with the team at IDRI, I think we stand a good chance of knocking down TB in our lifetime. Hobbies: I am pretty athletic, play in a softball league, and usually play on IDRI’s Frisbee team as well. I am a huge fan of Virginia Tech football; I will usually plan a vacation every fall to Virginia so I can catch a few football games. My hobbies center around sports and outdoors, but I also play bass guitar and, for a while, was a member of a band here in Seattle.

Research Interest

 RESEARCH