“The parts I love about science are the opportunities to discover and mentor. The biggest highlight for a scientist is when we can combine the two—working with trainees who make discoveries,” explains Sarah Ross as she reflects on her accomplishments as a pain researcher. Ross…

How do pain mechanisms produce our sense of pain, and how do they differ in children, teenagers, and adults? In his lab in the Department of Anesthesia at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Professor Michael Jankowski investigates the pain mechanisms at work over the course of our lives. “We’re…

When Reza Sharif-Naeini was in high school, his dad had an inexplicable pain in his heel. Many doctors tried and failed to identify the cause of the pain. Frustrated, his dad visited a woman who prayed over the foot by candlelight. “Do you really believe in this?” Sharif couldn’t help…

The moment Elena Gracheva stepped into the lab of Nobel Laureate David Julius, she knew she was in for a ride. “When David saw me, he told me I would be a good candidate to work with snakes,” she says. Having no previous experience with snakes, she was intrigued. “I…

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.

“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.”