Dr. Cassandra Quave

When Dr. Cassandra Quave walks through a forest, she’s not just seeing trees and plants – she’s spotting potential medicines that might help fight infections our current antibiotics can’t touch. At Emory University, she combines old plant wisdom from traditional healers with modern lab techniques to find new ways to tackle disease. After losing part of her leg as a child, she developed a determination that now drives her search for plant compounds that work differently than regular antibiotics.

Instead of looking for plants that kill bacteria outright, Dr. Quave searches for ones that disable bacteria’s weapons or stop them from communicating with each other. This different approach led her to discover that compounds from European chestnut can disarm dangerous MRSA bacteria without killing them – meaning they can’t develop resistance as easily. She travels around the world collecting plants and talking with healers who’ve used these remedies for generations, bringing their knowledge back to her lab to test against modern superbugs.

Dr. Quave loves sharing what she learns with everyone, not just other scientists. She created a free online course about medicinal plants that anyone can take, and wrote “The Plant Hunter,” a book about her adventures searching for new medicines. Through her stories and research, she shows us that plants many people walk past every day might hold answers to some of our biggest health problems – we just need to remember how to look at them the way our ancestors did.