After several rounds of antibiotics over the course of two years, Bonnie Hurwitz's then 2-year-old daughter was still suffering from chronic ear infections.

So, she swabbed her infected ear for a DNA sample and sent it to a lab for sequencing.

She immediately took her findings to the doctor and asked him to stop the antibiotics.

Had they kept giving her medicine, the ear infection would not have gone away.

"There was nothing we could do about that particular bug because there's no antibiotic," Hurwitz says. "So, no matter how many times we had given her antibiotics it would never resolve."

Now, the 42-year-old mother of two is an assistant professor of biosystems engineering at the UA. 

Her particular field combines genomics and computer programming to understand how systems connect together.