 My research is about studying human genetic factors and how they can influence malaria pathology, meaning how they can protect against malaria with the hope of understanding the mechanism by which these protections are conferred and whether these can be used for drug targets. There is this new gene that has been associated to protection against malaria so I'm trying to study the mechanism by which it can protect, to understand how it protects against malaria. So interestingly, I found that this gene, these polymorphisms on this gene, meaning mutations on this gene, they seem to be under selection in malaria endemic regions and it's found in very high frequency in Gambia and especially in the village where I am doing my study. It's a new topic, so there's not much work done on it and the experiments are quite sophisticated for my field setting, so I spent a lot of time trying to develop experiments. I will call it a challenge, but it's helping to build my problem-solving capacity and as a result, I'm developing a skill out of it. What motivated me to do research in malaria is because it's one of the leading causes of death in children under five in Gambia where I am from and from an early age of three years, I have suffered greatly from severe malaria that my life was threatened, that my family thought I was going to die. So anytime that this story is explained to me, it makes me want to solve the problem kind of so that another family does not have to go through that. The results were quite exciting because they supported my hypothesis and then I saw that these mutations that I'm studying could have an impact on protection against malaria and there's a gleam of hope for new directions towards malaria intervention.