Steven Altschuler began his journey into mathematics and science at an early age. Growing up in a household enriched by discussions of discovery and art, he naturally was drawn into these deep subjects. “My father is an astronomer and I grew up in a house where I just assumed…
Mark Zylka discovered the excitement of pursuing a scientific question in high school. His high school science teacher, Robert Foor-Hogue, led a hands-on course in which Zylka and the other students designed research experiments to address their individual burning scientific questions. It was then that Zylka appreciated that the…
A series of bold experiments led Li-Huei Tsai to her career-defining turn toward neuroscience.
From his earliest experiments, Ron Vale has investigated the movements that make life possible: the productive growth of plants, the division of cells, and the transit of signals through the long axons of neurons. His work, both within the laboratory and beyond, is marked by a persistent…
A salute to the leadership, passion and discoveries of pioneering Rita Allen Foundation Scholars
Lloyd Trotman found his calling as an experimental scientist during a “very intense” organic chemistry course as an undergraduate at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. Lloyd Trotman (Photo: Constance Brukin/CSHL) “You had to do this combination of good hands-on execution of techniques and…
Tae Hoon Kim began his training in bioinformatics before the term even entered common usage. As a college intern in the early 1990s at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, he learned state-of-the-art computational methods for analyzing DNA sequences. His work contributed to a new understanding…
Peter Reddien delights in reviving what he calls “one of the grand problems of biology.” He applies modern molecular tools to study regeneration in planarian flatworms—a phenomenon first documented by scientists as early as 1766. These freshwater creatures, which are a few millimeters long, can replace a…
Johanna Joyce’s first task as a research scientist was to clone a chicken gene. This was in the 1990s, when she was an undergraduate at Trinity College Dublin. At the time, she says, “cloning a gene was a big deal—it seems trivial now.” Johanna Joyce(Photo:…
Adrian Salic spent many hours of his childhood tinkering with a microscope alongside his grandfather, a retired physician. He recalls sifting through a collection of old histology slides, gazing at the varied structures of healthy and diseased human tissues. Adrian Salic(Photo: Courtesy of Adrian Salic)…