The Gates Foundation has recently granted 81 teams worldwide $100,000 each to research preventive solutions for infectious diseases such as malaria. The Foundation reports that Penn State professors Dr. Andrew Read (biology and entomology), Thomas Baker (entomology), and Matthew Thomas (entomology) will use their 100k to do the following:

“[Read, Baker, and Thomas] will examine the potential to infect malaria-carrying mosquitoes with a fungus that – like a head cold – suppresses their sense of smell and their ability to find human hosts.”

The Penn State team competed with more than 3,000 proposals submitted from “universities, research institutes, nonprofit organizations, and private companies in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, Latin America, and North America.”

Fungi for the win (and the glory of Old State)!

[Photo courtesy of Nuerophilosophy at scienceblogs.com]