Growing up in Burundi, a country of 13 million people in East Africa, Mireille Kamariza was familiar with the devastating effects of tuberculosis (c). “It’s a long and torturous disease,” she says. “You have relatives and loved ones that are sick, and you see them suffer through it. It’s not a quick death.”

When she moved to the United States at 17, she was struck by how different the situation was there. “The question that I had when I arrived here was, how come this is not a problem here?” That question led Kamariza, now a chemical biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, on a quest to find ways to eradicate the disease in areas where it is widespread. A key challenge is determining who is infected, so that they can be treated and the disease stopped from spreading. But current diagnostic methods are slow, often expensive, sometimes difficult to administer and not easily accessible in the low-income regions where TB is most prevalent.