As a small child, Dorothy was always curious about the world, and as she says now, “always asking too many questions”. Her most formative experience came at age 6, the year she lived with her grandmother in Haiti and caught an intestinal parasite that made her terribly sick. She became immediately curious about the biology of an organism living off the body of its host, and also angry about Haitians’ vulnerability to parasite attacks. Years later she is researching the way that bats are hosts for numerous deadly viruses like COVID, SARS and rabies. Her aim is to understand how bats transmit these diseases without getting sick themselves: Dorothy’s ultimate goal is to reduce disease transmission into human populations by learning the adaptation and virus responses of bats.