“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 music?’ I think that was the event that triggered my interest in understanding how the human body works,“ recalls E. Alfonso Romero-Sandoval. “After that, he was instrumental in helping me to obtain a scholarship to start my Ph.D. in Spain. My mentor in Spain, Juan Herrero, did the rest; and he showed me how to record and visualize action potentials to study pain.” Romero-Sandoval, now an associate professor of anesthesiology at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, began his journey into pain research with sparks from these mentors, in medical school at Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala (Guatemala) and in graduate school at Universidad de Alcalà (Spain). As a graduate student studying the biology of pain, Romero-Sandoval learned how the nociceptive system works—which is responsible for processing noxious stimuli, like injury and extreme heat or cold. “I was learning how to record neuronal activity, the electrical activity that travels from the toes to the brain to generate what we perceive as pain. I knew what this electrical activity meant and how this activity is generated at the molecular level. I had actually seen the shape of an action potential recording in my textbooks—however, when I saw a neuron's live electrical activity, that was almost magical! Seeing the electrical activity in real-time was my very first impactful research experience,” explains Romero-Sandoval.

“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 between his STEM classes—chemistry, biology, and math; specifically—and his interest in problem solving and logic puzzles as foundational aspects of research. Kohli explains, “It was just about how to ask and answer questions and find a logical way to construct an argument. That aspect of chemistry and biochemistry was appealing to me, with the added benefit that I could see the translational impacts of what research could be.”

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 a strong aptitude for chemistry thanks to a high school teacher who introduced him to the scientific method and experimentation. Zheng recalls, “I was just fascinated with all these different elements. That they can attract each other, and when you put them in liquids together, a reaction occurs—a precipitation forms, or bubbles, or the color changes. I always was fascinated by this, and that’s probably the first time I really wanted to actually do some kind of research.”

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 human diseases such as Parkinson's—and to take risks in pursuit of discovery.

“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 encounter with a friend in his dorm. “One of my dormmates was really into research, and he convinced me to go find a lab for the summer. His dad is a genetics professor at the University of California, San Diego—I guess that sort of ran in the family there. He was the one who inspired me to give research a try, and then I just loved it! I was hooked from that point on.”

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 their new home. However, there was something that remained as a constant for him amongst these changes. "I have been captivated by science and science fiction for as long as I remember. My father was an engineer and my mother a teacher. They always took extra time to teach us and to provide rationales for their answers,” he remembers.