Ugandan Monique Wasunna has dedicated her career to finding better treatments for neglected tropical diseases. She is the only African researcher on the Working Group on Medicines for Neglected Diseases.
She spearheaded the creation of the Leishmaniasis East Africa Platform (LEAP) in Khartoum in 2003. In March 2010, the World Health Organization recommended it as a first-level treatment in East Africa. She says: “When I told them that I was the doctor, they were stunned.” “For patients, any man in a white coat was a doctor and all women were nurses,” she says. “After studying for five years in college and enduring sleepless nights of internships rotating through different specialties, they kept telling me: 'Sister, please get me a doctor'” “I went in the mid-eighties with my young children and my husband, who also got a neonatal medicine fellowship at a hospital, so I was a mother, a wife and a student,’ she adds.