Jared Bullard [B.Sc.(Med.)/04, MD/04] can’t imagine just conducting research or just working as a physician.
For him, the two roles complement each other.
“To be an effective researcher, it helps if you do clinical work. I don’t think you can guide research the same way if you don’t understand what’s on the ground,” says Bullard, a professor of pediatrics and child health who is cross-appointed in medical microbiology and infectious diseases.
Bullard, a UM faculty member since 2010, is a pediatric infectious disease specialist and medical microbiologist. What motivates him, he says, is answering research questions that arise through his work with patients at the Children’s Hospital.
Very early in the COVID-19 pandemic, Bullard wanted to know how long people stayed infectious with the virus. At the time, he was associate medical director of Manitoba’s Cadham Provincial Laboratory. He assembled a research team and discovered that people with COVID were contagious for seven or eight days.
Bullard’s team was one of the first in the world to report this finding. His results were published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases and used to inform self-isolation guidelines by the Public Health Agency of Canada, the United States’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and public health agencies in the United Kingdom.
Bullard also published research in the Canadian Medical Association Journal showing that children were less infectious than adults. “Our lab findings correlated well with what we were observing clinically,” the scientist says.
Congenital syphilis, which occurs when syphilis passes to a baby during pregnancy, is another area of expertise for Bullard. He leads a national surveillance study that has confirmed a known high rate of the disease in Manitoba. Provinces such as British Columbia and Ontario are now seeing increasing rates, he says.
“I can help those provinces by suggesting actions they can take to get on top of the disease while the case numbers are still small.”
Bullard, who is also affiliated with the Children’s Hospital Research Institute of Manitoba, is currently working on a project about vaccine-preventable diseases and hopes to join a study focused on measles.
“Seeing kids suffering in hospital with diseases that are preventable through vaccines, including measles, really motivates me to understand these infections – and just as importantly, the thought process for why caregivers would opt not to provide vaccines.”
Bullard was born in Nassau, Bahamas and moved to Winnipeg with his family at age three. His mother, who is from Winnipeg, and his father, from the Bahamas, met while attending UM.
Bullard, who held his leadership role at the Cadham lab for 12 years and also served as director general of medical and scientific affairs at the National Microbiology Laboratory, says he has a long list of UM professors who guided and influenced him.
One of those mentors was Dr. Joanne Embree, a professor of pediatrics and child health who told Bullard that he didn’t have to enter internal medicine to pursue a sub-specialty in infectious diseases, but could do it through pediatrics. That changed the course of his career.
As a pediatrician, Bullard gets to see firsthand the impact his research has on children.
“I know that what I’m doing benefits them. That’s the main part of what drives my research.”
BY MATTHEW KRUCHAK