Bouncing along impossible roads through the mangrove swamps of Guinea-Bissau is not how Aleksandra “Aleks” Leligdowicz pictured her studies when she took her Rhodes scholarship at Oxford. Nor did she see herself in the jungle, fixing a truck’s steering mechanism with rope, by the light of a cell phone. And eating pig heart out of respect for the spiritual traditions of her West African hosts, despite her solid vegetarian beliefs? Nope, didn’t anticipate that one either.

But does she regret any of it? Not on your life.

“The world needs to be seen for pleasure, yes, but travel also shows you things you weren’t expecting to see. It helps you approach problems in a different way.”

It was Aleks’s choice of medical specialization – immunology – that led her to these horizon-broadening adventures. Working in an empty U.N. distribution storefront, a reminder of Guinea-Bissau’s recent civil war, Aleks set up a lab in the village of Caio to study an isolated and unusual strain of HIV 2. In addition to learning to collaborate with “countless mentors from West Africa and Europe, from all walks of life,” Aleks says the team’s crucial finding was that, “the epidemic is different everywhere in the world…HIV isn’t one virus in one population. It’s really multiple, different viruses in multiple, different populations.”

The current McGill med student and 2004 McGill Rowing MVP first became interested in immunology because, as she explains a few hours before heading out for a night shift at Montreal’s Royal Victoria Hospital, “you’re studying cells that are circulating throughout your body and they’re affected by everything else that’s happening inside us.” In that way, she says, “it’s the study of a complete human being.”

Fitting, then, that through her studies she’s had experiences that have made her just that – a more complete human being. In addition to the episodes mentioned above, she has found herself in the audience at various animal sacrifices. Following one, she spent the night next to a recently severed cow’s head to protect it from nocturnal hyenas, so it could serve its intended purpose as a container for ceremonial soup.

But these are not merely exotic anecdotes. The more time she spent with the people, the more impressed she became with the sense of peace and deep human connection that was at the core of this village. “Between all my scientific duties, I learned a lot about the human side of Africa,” she says.

When she wasn’t in Guinea-Bissau, she took those scientific duties a step further by presenting results from her research at conferences around the world. In the last four years Aleks has been to Moscow, Rio de Janeiro, Victoria Falls, Dakar, and cities across the U.S. and Canada.

It’s been a whirlwind of travel and learning, and Aleks intends to do more. But for now, she says she’s just looking forward to consolidating what she’s learned, and finally getting some personal time for “walking on the McGill campus, amidst the old buildings suggestive of ageless wisdom.”