ATLANTA — Dr. Sherif Zaki has striking eyes — wide as a young child’s and the palest of greens.

They are also singularly skilled. They have found Zika virus in the brains of Brazilian babies who died after birth. They have spotted anthrax in skin tissue after the substance was found in envelopes after the Sept. 11 attacks. And they have identified a bacterial disease, leptospirosis, in Nicaragua when no one else could.

Zaki is the chief pathologist for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where he and his team scour human tissues for clues to diseases.

Among high-consequence pathogens specialists, the 60-year-old Zaki is revered.

“I think he’s a national treasure; he’s absolutely the best of his kind,’’ said Fred Murphy, a former boss at the CDC.

Zaki is a native of Alexandria, Egypt, where medical school began straight out of high school. He finished second overall in his class of roughly 800 students, placing first in surgery. The expectation was that he’d become a surgeon. But his heart was in pathology, whose appeal might harken back to his early love of mystery — as a child, he devoured the novels of British author Enid Blyton. “We go into the basics of how a disease happens, the mechanism. Putting pieces together. Solving puzzles,’’ he explained.

But pathology wasn’t an easy field to pursue in Egypt: Autopsies are not conducted for religious reasons. After graduation, he went to Atlanta’s Emory University to do a residency in pathology and to study for a PhD. While there, he was recruited by the CDC — literally next door — to set up a molecular pathology laboratory.

James LeDuc, the director of the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch, was at the CDC from the early 1990s to 2006 and said that before Zaki arrived, the emerging infectious diseases program did not have the capacity to do pathology work. “He brought with him some unique skills, especially the ability to identify in tissues infectious organisms. And that skill hadn’t been at CDC in the past.’’

The CDC has long drawn the most interesting medical mysteries from across the globe. If scientists elsewhere are stumped by a troubling case, they often turn for help to the CDC.

But another former Zaki colleague said that if the center has built a certain reputation, Zaki deserves some credit.

Many of the most interesting cases often do filter to CDC, said Tom Ksiazek, who was at the CDC from 1991 to 2008 and is now at Galveston. “And that’s not simply because the institution of CDC exists but rather because of the reputation that’s been created by Sherif, personally and with his colleagues.’’

Zaki is good at making connections, both with others and with the evidence before him. It might explain how he cracked the mystery surrounding cases of a viral infection in four people who had received organ transplants.

Three of the four had died, and the state health departments in Rhode Island and Massachusetts couldn’t determine what had made them sick. Zaki and his team figured out it was lymphocytic choriomeningitis, a virus that is carried by rodents but that rarely causes serious illness in people in the United States.

The organ donor’s daughter had a hamster.

Helen Branswell can be reached at helen.branswell@statnews.com. Follow her on Twitter @Helen Branswell. Follow Stat on Twitter @statnews.