Spotlight: Agnes Day

Microbiologist
Howard University

Agnes A. Day grew up in Florida, the youngest of 13 children in a poor family. Day’s third-grade teacher recognized her intelligence and invited young Agnes to come live with her, where she encouraged her curiosity and put her “on the path of achieving.”

Day received her BS in biology from Bethune-Cookman College in Florida in 1974 and her PhD in microbiology from Howard University in 1984. Day then spent several years in the National Institute of Dental Research, after which she returned to Howard University, where she is currently an associate professor and chairman of the Department of Microbiology in the College of Medicine. Her research interests are drug resistance in fungi, bone and connective tissue diseases, animal models of breast cancer, and the genetics of breast cancer in African American women.

She was awarded the Outstanding Research Award and the Kaiser-Permanente Outstanding Teaching Award by the Howard University College of Medicine. She has served on the Committee on Diversity of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and as a consultant for the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Black Churches-Black Colleges Program and the Minority Science Network (MiSciNet) database initiative.