What happens when your hypothesis is wrong?
Joseph Baluku recently had to grapple with this question, finding out his presumptions about tuberculosis’ effect on cardiovascular health didn’t pan out. But the Ugandan physician wasn’t discouraged by the findings — instead, they piqued his interest even more.
“I must say that I’m excited,” said Baluku. “If I found nothing, that would be disappointing. But this is a starting point.”
Baluku was a Fogarty Fellow who completed the program in July. His research during the fellowship year set out to find whether people living with HIV who recovered from tuberculosis were at a higher risk of cardiovascular disease.
What he found showed the opposite: The people he studied had healthier cardiovascular metabolic profiles than those who never had tuberculosis, save for elevated blood glucose.
But, he said, those findings only serve as motivation to do more research on tuberculosis in Uganda.
The Fogarty Global Health Fellowship, known formally as the Fogarty LAUNCH Research Training Program, is a prestigious training program funded by the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Fogarty International Center that offers a year of mentored research training to postdoctoral trainees and doctoral students.
The Center for Global Health and Social Responsibility is part of the Northern/Pacific Global Health Research Fellows Training Consortium, which operationalizes the fellowship program.
