SUMMER 2018
5
FACULTY
Dr. Malene Hansen is unearthing new links between cellular recycling and a long-lived life A few months ago, Malene Hansen, Ph.D., was going through some old childhood papers when she came across an essay she’d written back in eighth grade. The topic? Her desire to become a scientist. That dream came true—but the picture the young Hansen had drawn with the assignment was not quite so prophetic. “It was an older man with a bald head in a lab coat, poking a mouse with one hand and holding a beaker with some chemicals bubbling in the other,” she says, laughing. “That was my own bias as to what a scientist would look like.” It would have been more accurate, of course, to draw a woman at a microscope, blonde highlights in her short hair, a volleyball in one hand and a tiny worm in the other. After work, Hansen pursues beach volleyball; however, the worm takes center stage daily in her lab at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute (SBP), where she’s a professor in the Development, Aging and Regeneration Program and associate dean of Student Affairs. Called C. elegans, the worm lives just two weeks. But Hansen is using it to study a fundamental cellular process that may hold the key to a long and healthy life for all organisms— including humans.
Hansen’s eighthgrade essay on biochemistry