Brilliant 10: Raul Rabadan, the Outbreak Sleuth
Raul Rabadan Benoit MarcotteHis skills as a string theorist helped him trace swine flu back to swine and revealed the source of a mysterious salmon plague Raul Rabadan hunts deadly viruses, but he has no need for biohazard suits. His work does not bring him to far-flung jungles. He's neither medical doctor nor epidemiologist. He's a theoretical physicist with expertise in string theory and black holes, and he cracks microbial mysteries in much the same way he once tried to decode the secrets of the universe: He follows the numbers. Take swine flu. When the frightening influenza strain H1N1 began sweeping the nation last year, Rabadan and his team at Columbia University's Center for Computational Biology designed algorithms to search massive data sets for clues as to its origin. Whereas most other flu experts limited their search for genetic mutations to the past few months, Rabadan compared H1N1 with the DNA...