Kondwani Jambo was not a scientist when he walked into the Malawi-Liverpool-Wellcome Research Programme unannounced in 2003. Student strikes had shut down his college, the University of Malawi, again. Uninterested in biding his time at home, the third-year student volunteered to help the science institute with anything, even though his major in technical education focused on woodwork, not lab work.

Soon, Kondwani was in the lab analyzing lung samples covered in black matter - the product of smoking or exposure to household air pollution from unsafe cook stoves - to understand its impact on the immune response in the lung. He was hooked.

After graduation, he moved to the UK where he earned his master's degree in immunology and later his PhD at the University of Liverpool.

For his PhD, Kondwani studied whether the immune responses detected in the blood were different from the immune responses found in the lungs among people living with or without HIV. When determining a body's immune response to an infection, scientists typically infer what is happening at the site of infection based on what they see in blood samples. That's because it's easier to draw blood than to trim sections of a person's lung or gut.

Kondwani found that not only were the responses different, but that the immune responses were more concentrated in mucosal surfaces like the lungs compared to the blood. This meant that if scientists only studied the blood when testing a prospective vaccine, they would likely underestimate the body's actual immune response to it.

Today, Kondwani is working with others to develop a vaccine for HIV, which impacts the gut and the genital tract. But the old problem remains: it is too expensive, difficult, and invasive to gather enough of these organ samples for vaccine trials. (Gut samples require endoscopies.) Because Kondwani had already shown that testing blood isn't a reliable proxy to gauge the immune response happening elsewhere in the body he started looking for new one. He may have found it in the nose.

Kondwani is currently studying whether a swab of the nose, another mucosal surface, is a good predictor of the immune response happening in the gut or genital tract. The answer could help speed up vaccine development for HIV and other infections while reducing the risk of wasting large amounts of time and money spent on approaches that don't work at mucosal sites.

Given his unexpected career path, in 2018, Kondwani started an initiative called Science for All to encourage students in Malawi to pursue careers in science. His ambition is to create a research institute to provide more employment opportunities for young scientists, and a biotech company that can convert their research into commercial products.

"I never thought I would take this career," said Kondwani, who is now a professor at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine but based at the Malawi-Liverpool-Wellcome Research Programme under the Kamuzu University of Health Sciences, the institute where he got his serendipitous start in science. "If they don't have anyone else to tell them it's possible to be an immunologist, I'll be that person."