Stoking intellectual passions
V
ictoria Prince also helps UChicago students embrace their own intellectual passions — in academia and beyond. As Associate Dean and Director of the Biological Sciences Division’s Office of Graduate Affairs, she has been instrumental in creating more opportunities for young researchers to explore a range of professions. “It’s important that we recognize not all our trainees go on to academic careers,” said Prince, who has served as associate dean since June 2010. Acknowledging a tight academic job market and ongoing reductions in federal research funding, she noted, “We want to give our students the resources they need to learn about other career opportunities.” Those efforts include bringing back BSD alumni working in different fields to share their experiences and to network with prospective and current students. This past fall, for example, the division hosted a consulting panel featuring Michael Silverman, MD’73, head of Mas-
When Wanner cut those trailing axons from the pioneer, she saw that the follower neurons lost their way. “There’s no real precedent we can find in the vertebrate system for a pioneer neuron leading other neurons, so we’re excited to have found this,” Prince said. “Now we’d like to know, ‘What’s special about that neuron?’” To find out, they need to look inside the pioneer cell to determine its gene expression and compare that mix to the follower cells. Doing that, said Prince, “is really pushing the limits of technology.” Their approach will be a technique called RNA-seq, generally used to identify genes within an entire tissue. In this case, however, they’ll be targeting only a single cell, thus ramping up the task’s complexity. To aid these efforts, Prince and her team will collaborate with the University’s Functional Genomics Facility, an advanced sequencing center led in part by its faculty director, Associate uchospitals.edu/midway
“Your opinion is valued here.” Victoria Prince, PhD
sachusetts-based BioStrategics Consulting Ltd.; Carol Ann Olson, PhD’82, MD’86; and cancer biologist Robert Schickel, PhD’09, an independent consultant based in San Diego. And in March, Cell scientific editor Fabiola Rivas, PhD’03, and National Institutes of Health program officer Yolanda Vallejo, PhD’02, returned to campus to speak with minority graduate student applicants as well as current students. “These alumni have a major influence on science in the broad sense,” Prince said. “It’s great for students to hear their career trajectories.” It’s an especially important dialogue to have as the number of prospective graduate students continues to rise. This year, the BSD saw a 15 percent leap in graduate applications — 1,076 total — a trend on par with peer institutions, and will welcome 77 new doctoral candidates this fall.
Professor of Human Genetics Yoav Gilad, PhD, with Kevin White, PhD, director of the University’s Institute for Genomics and Systems Biology.
Following your curiosity Originally trained as a biochemist at North London’s National Institute for Medical Research, Prince found her way into developmental biology studying Hox genes, cells that help establish the identity of specific regions along the body axis. Her subjects were developing chicks until 1994, when she took a two-week embryology course at Germany’s Max Planck Institute with soon-to-be Nobelists Eric F. Wieschaus and Christiane NüssleinVolhard. At the time, Nüsslein-Volhard had just started working with zebrafish. Prince was hooked. “We did this technique called cell transplantation where you basically take cells out of one embryo and put them into another embryo with
“The quality is as good as ever,” added Prince, who sees students coming to UChicago for the same reasons she did. “We still have a small campus where the clinical and basic science departments are genuinely interactive.” In her own research, she has worked closely with endocrinologists including Louis Philipson, MD, PhD, director of the University of Chicago Medicine’s Kovler Diabetes Center. “As soon as I came here,” Prince recalled, “Lou sought me out and said, ‘Oh! We should be looking at the pancreas of the zebrafish.’” Such collaborations go hand in hand with the (infamous) UChicago ethos. “We genuinely have a scholarly attitude here — and people joke a little about that,” Prince said. “But people like sitting around and exploring big problems in a way I haven’t seen elsewhere. There’s the desire to take an intellectual approach, to make the problem the first and foremost issue. It doesn’t matter if you’re a starting graduate student or an emeritus faculty,” she said. “Your opinion is valued here.”
another genotype,” she recalled. The process allows researchers to observe whether the newly transplanted cells react to their new environment or behave autonomously. “It’s one of those really tricky techniques that’s really fun when it works,” explained Prince. “That was the thing that made me think, ‘I have to work on this.’” As a Princeton postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Robert Ho, now chair of the University of Chicago’s Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy, she became part of a small, but growing cadre of scientists working with the zebrafish system. Today, thousands of researchers use the fish to study vertebrate development, thanks to its unique combination of optical clarity, genetics and accessibility. When she started out, use of the zebrafish system for research “was still new enough that it wasn’t clear whether it would become respectable,” Prince said with a laugh. “Luckily, it did.” MEDICINE ON THE MIDWAY
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