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 1989, and during the later stages of his illness, he experienced tremendous pain with opioids as the only available treatment. Due to complications with side effects, his father refused to continue the treatment altogether after only a few weeks. Tao remembers, “I wanted to be a teacher in medical school, after graduating from university, but my father’s illness changed my career path.”

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 didn't have the technology [to study this], and so, we've developed that technology to open that box to look inside and see, how exactly does it work,” explains 2011 Rita Allen Scholar Axel Nimmerjahn. Growing up in Germany, Nimmerjahn was exposed to medical science and technology at a very early age. His parents worked in a hospital and would share patient stories around the breakfast table and take him and his brother to conferences. “I think both of us liked this very much,” says Nimmerjahn. This science storytelling connected another passion, “one of the things that really inspired me as a teenager was a magazine called P.M. That magazine focused on communicating the latest findings in the natural sciences and technology to a broad audience. I really devoured those journals. They sparked my interest in the natural sciences and physics in particular.”

Elissa Hallem wasn’t always immersed in the world of parasitic roundworms. In fact, she spent much of her early research career studying Drosophila, the common fruit fly. Inspired to pursue research after participating in Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Talented Youth program, Hallem began volunteering in Larry Zipursky’s lab at the University of California, Los Angeles, while in high school. “Dr. Zipursky’s lab studies the visual system of Drosophila. This was the first time that I experienced a lab environment and what it was like to do research. It was an amazing experience that sparked my interest in a research career, and working with Drosophila was a lot of fun.”

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 the cancer world that was striking to me—how complicated things were—and there were so many aspects that remained unclear. So, when I learned about yeast, I thought, this is so teensy; six thousand genes, they must know the whole story by now, right? And that was manifestly not true!” As an undergrad, Dunham attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and worked in the lab of Bob Weinberg. She recalled that after reading an article about his research in telomerase, “I thought, wow, that sounds really exciting, and I talked to Weinberg to see if he had any positions open in his lab. I got to join his lab and had just a really great experience there, and also realized just how complicated cancer is.” After graduating from MIT, she went on to receive her doctorate in genetics from Stanford University. Now, as a professor of Genome Sciences with her own lab at the University of Washington, Dunham has developed a platform for high school students to set up their own yeast evolution experiments, which led to the publication of a paper using student data.

Carl F. Nathan, R.A. Rees Pritchett Professor and chairman of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Weill Cornell Medicine, has been elected to the Rita Allen Foundation Board of Directors. Nathan, whose term begins immediately, is one of the world’s premier researchers in immunology and microbiology. His research explores…