It was in high school that Steven Prescott first held a brain in his hands. It belonged to a fetal pig that he was dissecting in a biology course, and he remembers staring at it and marveling at how the human brain, though it functions similarly to a pig brain, is capable of so much more. As he continued his education, his fascination with the inner workings of the central nervous system only deepened.

"I remember realizing when I wanted to become a scientist, after watching Cosmos: A Personal Voyage,” says Ted Price, reflecting on his early-childhood watching of Carl Sagan’s award-winning PBS program. The show led Price to start reading popular-science books for kids and inspired his goal of becoming an astrophysicist. Although his parents were not scientists themselves, they supported his interests and were very engaged in his education during his childhood.

Emmanuelle Passegué had a rather unglamorous introduction to research as a young college student in France. Initially attracted to the field by fascinating papers filled with beautiful images of clean, unambiguous molecular mechanisms, the realities of working with fruit flies for biological research turned out to be quite different.