For Dalhousie's Dr. Alyson Kelvin and her father Dr. David Kelvin, a passion for understanding, treating and preventing pandemics has put them at the forefront of international research on COVID-19 vaccines and bio-markers.

On the night of December 30, 2019, Alyson Kelvin was at home in Halifax, on the other side of the world from Wuhan, China. She was just about to put down her book, shut out the light and bring a fulfilling day of Christmas vacation to an end.

Until she checked her email one last time and found an alert from the ProMED infectious disease listserv detailing a mysterious new disease outbreak. “2019-12-30, 23:59:000. Re: Undiagnosed pneumonia—Chine (HU): Request for Information. Some medical institutions in Wuhan have successively appeared patients with pneumonia of unknown cause…” Suddenly, sleep moved far down her priority list.

“I’m not an alarmist, so I didn’t jump on it and wave my arms like, ‘The next deadly pandemic is coming,’” she says, thinking back to her first read of that email alert. “But I knew we had to be working on this. Pneumonia, something hitting our respiratory track, is very concerning—that’s how we breathe, and also how viruses are easily spread,” she says.

The full article highlighting the important work of Dr. Alyson Kelvin and Dr. David Kelvin was published in the October 2020 DAL Magazine. To keep reading, click here...