Maybe Dr. Ian Lewis and his Calgary team aren’t going to save the world. But, then again, maybe they are.

The 37-year-old biochemist is the new Alberta Innovates Chair in Translational Heath — Metabolomics, and is leading a team tackling what he calls a global health crisis that sees one in every 25 hospitalized Canadians getting an infection (220,000 hospital infections per year, resulting in 8,000 deaths).

The Colorado-born scientist was recruited to Calgary from Princeton University to work in the field of metabolomics (the emerging science of measurement and analysis of metabolites) that will use radically different analytical tools to identify patients at risk of infection “to prevent them from dying.”