It was a stint in a rural area of her native South Africa that ignited Marlize Coleman’s passion for defeating malaria. Since then her career in public health has taken her all over the world, collaborating with experts in other countries to find and fund insecticides that work on resistant mosquitoes. Now based at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, she has developed a game that asks students and health workers to choose between insecticides to find the one that kills the villain.

Photograph: Courtesy of Marlize Coleman