Vishwa Deep Dixit doesn’t want anyone to think that’s he cured HIV, or found a way to reduce disease-related inflammation, or that he’s found a way to prevent the immune system from deteriorating. But it’s hard to keep from being excited by what his research might do in the future. It’s like watching all of the puzzle pieces come together—slowly, but surely.
Dixit didn’t start out as a researcher. He was a veterinarian in India. But the frustration with illnesses he couldn’t cure drove him to a life of research similar to his parents. “I really wanted to do research because I wanted to do something where I could find new things,” he says.
After a fellowship for his Ph.D. at the University of Hanover in Germany and his post-doctoral work at the National Institutes of Health, he has settled in at Pennington Biomedical Research Center. His energetic staff works to explain why the immune system ceases to produce cells that fight off infections as the human body ages. The side effects of that research could impact the body’s ability to fight cancer and type 2 diabetes.
And while Dixit is conducting research and writing about developments in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, he’s also mentoring a generation of young, ambitious researchers. Dixit says he actually gets more out of the relationship than they do. “It’s a two-way street, because when you’re interacting with young trainees, you learn so many new things,” he says.
But for all he might learn from them, he’s also coaching young researchers on what the field is like, that it isn’t as easy as discovering something new. “If everything would have worked, we would have cured cancer by now,” Dixit says. “They need to know they’re not the only ones struggling.”
Age: 38
How do you make yourself heard in the discussion on how to move Baton Rouge forward? “The first thing we have to do from our side is do our work; the more we do, the more we find these things. Visibility comes from that work to our institution, to our city, to our state and to our country. So I think that is what we’re interested in.”
Click here for the complete list of 2009’s Forty Under 40 winners.
