Alimonti’s fingerprints are all over a vaccine that has been called one of Canada’s greatest public health achievements. As part of a team that worked on creating the vaccine that has saved lives in West Africa, Alimonti played a key role in its development. Yet few Canadians have ever heard of her.

The daughter of a truck driver and store clerk, Alimonti took an indirect route to her career in immunology.

First she became a massage therapist, opening a clinic in Kelowna with her husband Alan Giesbrecht, whom she met at massage therapy school in Ontario. While working as a massage therapist, she decided to take a few science courses, and was hooked. She enrolled full-time in university as a mature student, eventually earning a Bachelor of Science-Microbiology at the University of British Columbia in 1991 and, eventually, a PhD in immunology at the University of Manitoba.

She took to her research immediately, said Giesbrecht. Alimonti’s PhD thesis became the basis for an article published in the prestigious journal Nature Biotechnology in 2000, which is now part of the research being used by a startup company working on a breast cancer vaccine, said Giesbrecht.

While at Public Health Agency of Canada — a job she started in 2005 — Alimonti took on the role of project lead for the Ebola vaccine, between 2010 and 2015. She was instrumental in its development, said former co-worker Lisa Fernando, and involved in every decision.

Much of her work was focused on insuring the vaccine was of high enough quality, or GMP (for good manufacturing processes), that it could be used if needed. If not for Alimonti, said Fernando, “we would not have had a GMP-grade vaccine.”

Its high quality was one reason the World Health Organization chose the vaccine — VSV-EBOV — for a historic clinical trial near the end of the West Africa outbreak, which lasted from 2013 to 2016. That trial, which proved the vaccine worked, set the stage for it to be used earlier this year during another outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Influenced by the premature death of her mother from cancer, Alimonti wanted to do something that would make a difference to peoples’ lives.

Ebola vaccine fit the bill, although Fernando said they had no idea the vaccine they were working on would one day be urgently shipped to West Africa.

“I don’t think many of us ever expected to see the end use of the product. This was really good for all of us to see the impact that we had.”

Alimonti didn’t look for recognition, said Giesbrecht, who described his wife as “a quiet, unassuming woman who did the right thing for people.” She understood how important it was to work on the vaccine that became the first weapon against the deadly disease

In 2015, after she had left Public Health and moved to the National Research Council in Ottawa, Giesbrecht showed Alimonti a newspaper article about the deadly West African Ebola outbreak. In it, a man who had received the experimental vaccine thanked Canada for saving his life.

“I know what I did helped this guy,” Giesbrecht recalled her saying. “That is who I did this for, people like this. I don’t care about the rewards and recognition. This is why I did it.”

But Giesbrecht, for whom Alimonti’s death is still very raw, believes his late wife deserved more credit for the work she did.

“My wife put her heart and soul into this and worked day and night to the highest global standards.” He added: “She could have used more support.”

During the decade Alimonti spent with the public health agency, much of it working on the Ebola vaccine, she never had a permanent job, but worked contract to contract, Giesbrecht noted. Alimonti was eventually offered a full-time job, which she turned down, said Giesbrecht, because it was not consistent with the level of work she had been doing.

She left the public health agency in 2015. She was disappointed, but didn’t dwell on it, said Giesbrecht. Alimonti soon got a job with the National Research Council in Ottawa, where she worked on a vaccine against the Zika virus.

She was always positive and excited about the projects she was working on, said Giesbrecht.

She had often, in her life, been underestimated, he added. At high school, she became a top athlete and keen jazz musician, an interest she kept up throughout her life. Later, she returned to school and became an internationally recognized scientist

“She was a very humble person. She never thought of herself as some raging genius going to save the world. She just thought of herself as an ordinary scientist dedicated to doing her job — starting something to see where it goes, which is a very Canadian attitude.”

Alimonti was at work on a potential vaccine against the Zika virus when she was diagnosed with advanced cancer. She died last December in Ottawa.