Early Indication: I was fascinated by life sciences in high school. Medical school failed to provide me with sufficient background knowledge in the natural sciences to successfully pursue a career as a scientist, so I engaged in all sorts of extracurricular activities in laboratories while I was a medical student.
How I Got Here: My medical background proved very useful for research activity in the neurosciences, which has become my mission in the last 15 years. When I started out, I did not spend much time thinking about my career. I was simply fascinated by the possibility of modeling human diseases in transgenic mice.
Pivotal Paper: The first molecular paper for which I can claim full intellectual fathership was the description of a new tumor entity in transgenic mice expressing a viral oncogene (K. Khazaie et al., "EGF promotes in vivo tumorigenic growth of primary chicken-embryo fibroblasts expressing v-myc and ...
