When Nguyen Thi Ngoc Lan finished her medical education at the Medical Faculty of Tashkent, Uzbekistan in 1981, she had to consider some difficult choices -- on her return to Viet Nam, should she become a surgeon with a distinguished position? Should she consider, like many of her peers at home, a lucrative career as a doctor with a private office?

"I started thinking about the worst problems my country faced in public health. One of them was TB, and there was also a shortage of health professionals willing to tackle it," she says. "Some stayed away because they were afraid. Others did not see it as a priority."

There was an especially acute shortage of microbiologists, and Lan decided to do her part to relieve it . She entered a second degree programme and completed her PhD in microbiology in 1997. Since 1990 she has been the head of the TB reference laboratory and of the Microbiology Department of the Pham Ngoc Thach Hospital for TB and Lung Disease in Ho Chi Minh City. In that role she has organized a network of TB diagnostic labs serving all of southern Viet Nam.

In 2006 her lab entered into a collaborative research project with the Foundation for Innovative Diagnostics (FIND). "Many companies are making new tests for TB--we help advance their development by evaluating them," she explains. So far they have looked at the effectiveness of the GenoTypeŽ MTBDRplus assay for diagnosing MDR-TB; TB LAMP; LED-based Fluorescence Microscopy; and MODS.

Lan, who has published more than 50 papers on TB, sees high stakes in the development of better TB diagnostic methods. "The sensitivity of the method we currently use -- smear microscopy -- is not high enough," she says. "We need to find a new method that is simple to do, rapid and sensitive. This is a very important quest and I am so glad to be part of it."