Alumni Profile: Virology Today with Colin O'Leary

1/23/2021

Jill Perry Balzano

Twenty-nine-year-old Colin O’Leary ‘09 sits in a conference room adjacent to a Harvard research lab. Behind him the whiteboard is covered with messy equations and a long parabola with slash points along the arc. To the untrained eye, it looks like chaos, but O’Leary appears right at home, if a little tired, in his blue sweater fleece.

Over Zoom, he’s apologetic about being a few minutes late, having needed to stop for coffee after class. “It’s been a morning,” he says with a smile. It’s 10:20 a.m., and amidst a host of other coronavirus-related news, the nation was digesting the headline that President Trump has been hospitalized with COVID-19.

For O’Leary, a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard Medical School and research fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, this news hangs around a global pandemic that has reshaped his graduate research and moved him from the realm of an ordinary, “steady” graduate student to one who is positioned quite in the center of the scientific community’s response to the novel coronavirus outbreak.

“It’s been a surreal experience,” he admits. “I didn’t expect my Ph.D. to be exciting,” he says with a laugh, then shares that he now understands that when someone from the White House emails at 9:30 p.m. asking for clarification, “they expect an immediate response.”

O’Leary began his Ph.D. at Harvard in 2016, focusing his research on how cells protect themselves from viral infection, mainly focused on the flu, but in early 2020 he shifted his entire research program to coronavirus-related work.

In October, he and his colleagues were actively involved in developing a coronavirus vaccine, and by December, he was testing the effects of variant strains of the virus. “Viruses mutate; that’s what they do,” he notes. It’s the work of scientists to assess and model the risks of that constant evolution so public health can focus resources on both present and looming dangers.

Though the pressures of the moment are furrowing his brow, O’Leary is lucid about the context of his work; he is completely prepared to explain each aspect to a novice. “For a lot of people, this is their first time witnessing scientific research happen in real time; a lot of what we do is one step forward and two steps back.” And despite the incremental nature of the scientific process, research on the coronavirus continues to hurtle forward.

Foundations at Burr and Burton

O’Leary has pursued concurrent paths in politics and biology since his time at Burr and Burton. Politics were a natural inclination for O’Leary, who recounts his junior-year trip to South Africa for the Model UN Conference as a formative experience. The group from Manchester spent three weeks in South Africa and while there saw the impact of the HIV/AIDS crisis in South African orphanages. The following year, O’Leary went on a service learning trip to Haiti and witnessed the effects of endemic tuberculosis.

Reflecting, O’Leary is characteristically clear-eyed about the impact of these experiences: “Going to Haiti and South Africa provided a reference point for understanding that there are fundamental weaknesses in health systems globally that enable the spread of disease, and being able to bear witness to the effects that those shortcomings had on people in those countries.” He pauses. “When you see children orphaned by disease, that has a psychological impact.”

He goes on, “You see people who can’t access basic care for tuberculosis and people who are literally going blind because their infections have become so severe, and it provides a framework for thinking more broadly: What is global health? What is public health? And how does that relate to an interest in science and policy?”

He remembers that it was his time in AP Biology with Burr and Burton teacher Dave Curtis that inspired him to double major in politics and biology while an undergraduate at Bates College: “[Curtis] made science really interesting; he was passionate about the concepts and so excited to teach us.” O’Leary also did two semesters of independent study with English teacher Sunny Wright that enabled him to delve deeper into the questions he brought home from his trips to South Africa and Haiti.

On Public Health in the Age of Coronavirus

Thanks to his unique position straddling the forefront of both coronavirus research and policy, O’Leary has vital insight into the most crucial public health questions of the moment. While many of us were caught completely off guard by the scope and effects of the COVID-19 on our world, O’Leary is crystal clear that scientists have been watching for this: “If you ask the scientists, particularly ones who study infectious disease, you’d know that the system has been blinking red for years now.”

O’Leary recounts how the SARS outbreak in 2002 was a wake-up call that caused the international community to rewrite all the pandemic rules that the World Health Organization operates under. Then, in 2009, the H1N1 outbreak was a global pandemic, but proved to be far less deadly than COVID-19. Over the course of a year between April of 2009 and April of 2010, more than 60 million Americans likely had the H1N1 virus, but there were only 12,469 deaths.

O’Leary suggests that one factor contributing to the massive spread of the COVID-19 is that the United States was slow to respond. “If you look back at what the U.S. was doing in January and February—or the fact that we weren't doing anything—this shaped the ability of the virus to take hold.” O’Leary said that he and his colleagues understood in early February that based on the volume of international travel to and from areas where the virus was reported, “it was impossible that ongoing community transmission of the virus was not already happening in the United States.”

Compounded with the peculiar aspect of COVID-19 that many people can be infected but asymptomatic and that the incubation period can be up to 14 days, suddenly there’s a need for rigorous testing and testing infrastructure that’s unprecedented: “Testing is a paradigm that we hadn’t thought much about. I mean, if you have Ebola, you know you have Ebola.”

O’Leary notes that both the research community and the public health community were unprepared to implement testing on the scale required to contain COVID-19. Further, there is the problem of social support around the test. “It’s not just about the technology of the test, but about the person behind the test that takes it. You can test all you want, but if someone tests positive, and we don’t provide support services for the person—if the positive person still has to go to work or the grocery store so they can eat—then that’s a test that doesn’t actually mean much.”

For someone sitting in O’Leary’s position, all these factors and shortcomings lead to the landslide of a public health crisis that has been COVID-19.

The Future

In the near future, O’Leary does see signs for optimism. He is, to use his own word, ecstatic about the coronavirus vaccine and confident that it will eventually ease suffering. He is also encouraged by the leadership transition at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). “Rochelle Walensky has been a leading voice on infectious disease in the Harvard community for a very long time. She’s brilliant, she's competent; she’s the type of person who will elevate the voices of scientists who have worked their entire lives on respiratory viruses.”

Yet even these hopeful changes will be flanked by unprecedented illness and death in our country and around the world. When humanity does emerge from this crisis, O’Leary hopes there will be a window of opportunity for change. “How do we take the absolute catastrophe that has been the past year, look critically at what went wrong, and then try to build from there? I think it’s going to be a reckoning on the state and local level, the national level, and the international level.”

As for his own path, O’Leary will be finishing up his Ph.D. in Virology for the next year. In considering the future, he says, “I hope we see a creation moment for a more scientifically informed public health approach to life.” When we do, there is no doubt that O’Leary will be part of it.

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