 DR. LINDA LAATSCH, associate
professor of clinical laboratory science and lover of puzzles
Dr. Linda Laatsch bucked the trend in medicine when she focused her career in clinical laboratory science on microbiology. Most experts then considered microbiology a dying field; surely the wonderful antibiotics available to medicine would knock out just about any infection. “Then in the early 1980s things exploded with the AIDS epidemic, and ever since there’s been constant discovery of new infectious agents and micro-organisms that we never even dreamed of before.
“Today microbiology is absolutely crucial in clinical laboratory science. It is estimated that about 75 percent of all medical diagnoses rely on lab tests; you can’t do modern medicine without the laboratory. Any time someone has a disease and the doctor needs to know what’s causing it, a sample will be taken and sent to the lab. It will be analyzed to figure out what’s causing the problem and how it can be treated. What we do is kind of like solving mysteries. You have to love the problem-solving that it takes to help patients.
“We constantly re-evaluate our curriculum to keep up
with changes in what’s out there. Today we think about
microorganisms in our food supply, bioterrorism, even infections we thought were conquered, like TB and small pox. That’s why at Marquette our main focus with students continues to be on the science and on their development of critical-thinking skills. They graduate knowing not just how to do the test but also how to correlate test results with other data and how all of what they discover relates to the disease process.
“We think this produces graduates who are really valuable to any employer. To be able to help educate young laboratory scientists, knowing that they are going out to work in health care and help people get well, that’s just an enormous privilege.”
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