Biography
I was raised in upstate NY. My major interest through high school was music, and I played flute, piccolo and piano until I left for college. I attended the University of Rochester, in part because one could sign up for music lessons at Eastman without additional tuition. I took flute lessons at Eastman for two years. Thanks to required distributions, I took a chemistry class in my freshman year and realized that, much to my surprise, I did like science after all. It took me a while to figure out what I wanted as a major and, after a disastrous semester as a nursing student, I became a biology major. It was an exciting time to be in biology with all the new insights into DNA, genetic regulation, protein structure and function. Because I particularly liked microbiology (to be honest, I thought I would be able to get a job in a hospital), I went to Case Western Reserve University for graduate work in that field. Although I knew I was interested in viruses, the one virologist at CWRU moved to Kentucky just as I arrived, so I ended up working on Salmonella. I then took postdoctoral work in virology, first at CWRU and then at Stony Brook. This was also an exciting time because the DNA tumor virus we studied became a major model for cancer biology. It has been truly interesting to watch the fields of cancer virology, cancer genetics and oncogenesis merge in so many ways. Genes that are mutated in human cancer are also the targets of the cancer-causing viruses. These genes involve growth control, DNA repair, cell cycle regulation and many others pathways. Although there are still few cures for cancer, understanding the things that go wrong has led to significant therapeutic approaches that are beginning to have some success. A research career is alternately frustrating and rewarding, but some of the dry spells are made tolerable by one’s colleagues and students. I enjoyed teaching graduate classes and also the one-on-one teaching that we do in a laboratory. I spent a significant amount of time in program development and student advising and I was an associate dean in the Graduate School for six years. I am very proud of the technicians, students and postdoctoral fellows who came through my laboratory over the years and it has been a pleasure to follow their career paths. Now I have turned full circle, and I spend most of my time in music again. I’m in three bands, two orchestras and three music clubs. One thing remains a common denominator – I head a committee that gives five $1000 scholarships to music students in the nearby Chicago/Evanston universities and many of our very successful awardees are Northwestern students. There is an unbelievable talent pool in our area.