PHOTO: Elizabeth Lowry Maitreya Dunham gained research experience in many different fields as a student, from genetics to immunology to cancer, but one mighty model organism stuck with her as she set up her own lab to study experimental evolution and genetics: Saccharomyces cerevisiae. “That was one thing about…

“One night, Jorge Lopez, my mentor in Guatemala during medical school, was playing the piano at a social gathering. While playing, he turned to me and said, ‘Can you imagine how many action potentials are triggered from my fingers and how many in your brain to interpret all this as…

“When I was a kid, it was math that always really fascinated me—I loved logic games. Sitting around doing puzzles with my dad or math questions, that got me going in that direction of problem solving,” remembers Rahul Kohli. As a high school student, Kohli began to see connections…

2010 Rita Allen Scholar Ye Zheng’s career in immunology was sparked by action and reaction. During his childhood in China, he was encouraged to explore science by his parents who were both engineers—his father an electronic engineer, and his mother an automation engineer. He followed their advice and discovered…

Samara Reck-Peterson’s research focuses on molecular machines—the macromolecules that transport intercellular compartments. Her work reveals how these life-essential mechanisms operate at molecular, cellular, and organismal scales. As a 2009 Rita Allen Scholar, she found the freedom to be creative in her research—exploring connections between “the cellular interstate system” and…

“I didn’t really know what a lab was or what research was until I got into college,” says Jeremy Dittman. As he approached the end of his freshman year at Stanford University, Dittman wasn’t sure of his career plans or even his summer plans until he had a lucky…

Sohail Tavazoie grew up in Utah after his family immigrated to the United States from Iran, escaping the Iran-Iraq war. As his parents created a new life for their family, working at a computer disk manufacturing start-up, Tavazoie and his siblings attended the local school system and adjusted to…

Seena Ajit had reached a crossroads in her career. She was working at the pharmaceutical company Wyeth, but what really excited her was the microRNA research she had been pursuing on the side. At an inflection point, she attended a meeting of the Keystone Symposia on molecular and cellular…

Ben Black attributes his early fascination with science to his fifth-grade teacher, a former industrial chemist, who lost a finger in a lab explosion. Black explains, “I can probably credit my teacher at the time, Al Nubling. He was just an incredible teacher—the best teacher I had in the…

Aaron Gitler began his scientific career as an undergraduate at Pennsylvania State University, where he volunteered in a lab washing dishes. Despite the less-than-glamorous work, he loved being there. Eventually, he realized that if he finished his dishwashing early enough, he could observe students and postdocs doing their research…