In high school, I imagined a future of days spent as a medical doctor.  This changed when, during college, I did an internship working in the cardiology ward of Duke University Medical Center.  By the end of the first day, I had discovered I couldn’t stand being around sick people.  I was prepared to embark on a career in arms dealing to furtive South American dictators, but I had already taken too much organic chemistry to pursue a nonscientific career.  I decided to give research a try and I absolutely loved it.  My first job was a research technician in a lab at Duke that studied the effect of diet on Alzheimer’s disease (Did you know that Americans account for half the worldwide cases of Alzheimer’s?  Think that’s a coincidence?).  I graduated, worked another year as a technician, and began a PhD program at the University of Florida.  I studied stem cells in the brain, and made a couple of interesting discoveries.  One was recreating in a dish the way stem cells generate new neurons in the brain.  This allowed us to better see what actually happens in the brain, aiding in the identification of other important elements that control how the brain functions.  I also found a way to expand human adult neural tissue so that a single brain cell could be expanded to form enough brain cells to give everyone in France a new brain (no, seriously).  Along the way, these cells occasionally started acting like bona fide stem cells, and might represent a neat way to get tissue to repair or replace damaged or malfunctioning central nervous system.  I graduated in 2006, and, with PhD in hand, moved to the University of Chicago, where I worked in the department of human genetics and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, studying the genetic regulation of differentiating stem cells.  After a few years of this, I’ve sold out and moved into the biotech sector, where I’m working on designing the next generation of medical technology and therapeutics.