Rita Colwell

Rita Rossi Colwell (born November 23, 1934) is an American environmental microbiologist and scientific administrator. Colwell holds degrees in bacteriology, genetics, and oceanography and studies infectious diseases. Colwell is the founder and Chair of CosmosID, a bioinformatics company. From 1998 to 2004, she was the 11th Director of the National Science Foundation.

Rita Colwell was born on November 23, 1934, in Beverly, Massachusetts. Her parents, Louis and Louise Rossi, had eight children, Rita being the seventh child born into the Rossi household. Neither her mother nor her father were from scientific backgrounds. In 1956, Rita obtained a B.S. in bacteriology from Purdue University. She also received her M.S in genetics from Purdue. Colwell's Ph.D. is from the University of Washington in the field of oceanography. She participated in a post-doctoral fellowship at the National Research Council of Canada in Ottawa.

Colwell is recognized for her study of global infectious diseases through water sources and its impacts on global health. Through this research, she has developed an international network that has brought attention to the emergence of new infectious diseases in drinking/bathing water, pertaining mostly to its role on the developing world.

During early research and study of cholera, Colwell discovered that cholera can lay dormant in unfavorable conditions and then resume normal functions when conditions are favorable again.

Many of her research papers have been published focusing on abating the spread of cholera in the developing world by developing ways to track its spread and researching inexpensive methods for filtrating out the infections agents of cholera in water systems. Some of these tracking methods include observing weather patterns, surface water temperatures, chlorophyll concentrations, and rainfall patterns. Colwell's findings of correlations between these phenomena showed that the infection rate of cholera is connected to water temperatures. This rising temperature causes algae blooms that host cholera bacteria, and rainfall and extreme weather patterns aid in spreading infectious hosts of cholera among water systems. Colwell also concluded that climate change will have a profound impact on the spread of cholera.