Peter Reddien delights in reviving what he calls “one of the grand problems of biology.” He applies modern molecular tools to study regeneration in planarian flatworms—a phenomenon first documented by scientists as early as 1766. These freshwater creatures, which are a few millimeters long, can replace a severed…

Johanna Joyce’s first task as a research scientist was to clone a chicken gene. This was in the 1990s, when she was an undergraduate at Trinity College Dublin. At the time, she says, “cloning a gene was a big deal—it seems trivial now.” Johanna Joyce(Photo: Brian…

Adrian Salic spent many hours of his childhood tinkering with a microscope alongside his grandfather, a retired physician. He recalls sifting through a collection of old histology slides, gazing at the varied structures of healthy and diseased human tissues. Adrian Salic(Photo: Courtesy of Adrian Salic) He…

From his earliest days in the laboratory, Joel Pomerantz got caught up in “the thrill that you can actually discover new things with your own hands, with your own mind.” As an undergraduate at Brandeis University, he spent a summer learning how to detect biochemical changes that enable…

Joshua Mendell launched his research career with a junior high science fair project on DNA mutation rates in bacteria. A graduate student who worked with his father, Jerry Mendell, a neurologist at The Ohio State University, assisted him with his project and taught him the basics of molecular…

Growing up in Corpus Christi, Texas, Elsa Flores was encouraged to follow her unflagging “curiosity about how things work.” Inspired by her father, an educator who studied biology and chemistry, Flores had always envisioned a career in science. But she felt uncertain about where to attend college—whether to…