Photo: Courtesy Yuan-Xiang Tao How can we help the ones we love, when we see them suffering? Yuan-Xiang Tao was motivated to dedicate his career to chronic pain research and developing novel therapeutics early in his youth, after watching his father battle liver cancer. Tao’s father passed away in…
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but how do you create an image of real-time interactions inside the nervous system? “For the brain and spinal cord, that's a little challenging. Our goal is to shed light on this ‘black box.’ For a very long time, we simply…
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…
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…
"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.
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…
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.