Background

Turchi was born in the state of Goiás in 1952 or 1953.

Education

Celina did her graduation in medicine at the Federal University of Goias and her master's degree in infectology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and her doctorate at the University of São Paulo.

Career

Never before had a mosquito bite been found to cause a birth defect, but after a string of troubling encounters with her patients, Dr. Celina Turchi knew something was wrong. An infectious-disease specialist in Recife, Brazil—which was the epicenter of the first major outbreak of Zika-associated microcephaly—Turchi worked around the clock, missing meals and sleep to figure out what was going on. She understood that this was a global crisis requiring global collaboration, so she reached out to experts from around the world, facilitated their work and collaboration in Brazil and openly shared what she and her colleagues were finding so that the world could learn about this unprecedented threat.

Turchi's studies were part of an emergency investigation that ultimately proved that Zika does indeed cause microcephaly—something many skeptics doubted. There is still much we don't know about Zika: why some exposed infants get microcephaly and others don't; what proportion of normal-appearing infected babies will have developmental problems; and, most important, how to prevent Zika-associated neurological damage. Her work and partnership with other scientists is bringing the world closer to answering those and other crucial questions.

Achievements

• 

  Celina Turchi first associated the link between zika virus and microcephaly in newborn babies during the 2015 disease outbreak in Brazil; she was listed by Nature magazine as one of the 10 most notable people in science in 2016, and by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of 2017.
  
  

Views

Quotations: Celina Turchi, a researcher at a Brazilian scientific institute, on birth defects that doctors came to realize were the first signs of an outbreak of Zika virus.

“Children with normal faces up to the eyebrows, and then you have no foreheads and very strange heads. The doctors were saying, ‘Well, I saw four today,’ and ‘Oh that’s strange, because I saw two."

Membership

She was elected to the Brazilian Academy of Sciences at the Ordinary General Meeting of December 6, 2017.

• 

  Brazilian Academy of Sciences

  December 6, 2017

References

• The Zika Prevention Handbook: Everything You Need To Know To Stay Safe
• Time Magazine (May 1, 2017/May 8, 2017) The 100 Most Influential People