Jennifer Gardy

Jennifer Gardy is a Senior Scientist at the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control and holds a Canada Research Chair in Public Health Genomics. Born in 1979 in Vancouver, she was inspired early on by a book about Louis Pasteur and his search for the cause of disease. As a teenager, she set her sights on becoming a “disease detective” and never wavered. Gardy earned a Bachelor of Science in Cell Biology and Genetics from the University of British Columbia (UBC), followed by a Graduate Diploma in Biotechnology from McGill University, and a PhD in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry from Simon Fraser University. She spent three years as a post-doctoral fellow before joining the BC Centre for Disease Control in 2009. Gardy is also an Associate Professor at UBC’s School of Population and Public Health and has a cross-appointment with the Department of Microbiology and Immunology. An active science communicator, Gardy published It’s Catching: The Infectious World of Germs and Microbes in 2014 and is working on her second children’s book. She has also appeared as a host on CBC’s The Nature of Things.

“The notion that science is a very logic driven profession — that there’s no room for being creative, for including narrative, for thinking outside the box and doing your science in very different ways — is…phooey.”