As a biology major undergrad at the University of Denver, Troy Randall took an immunology course that he found “incredibly interesting.” Now, as an immunology researcher at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), Randall realizes that he “probably understood nothing about it.” His interest in immunology drove him to study the subject as a doctoral student at Duke University, where he met his wife, Frances Lund, with whom he now runs his lab at UAB. One aspect of his current research involves understanding belly fat’s role in generating an immune response, and how that function gets disrupted by ovarian cancer.
As a nine-year-old, Selene Meza-Perez grew interested in science while watching Carl Sagan’s television show Cosmos with her father. “Instead of looking at the sky” Meza-Perez swapped her telescope for a microscope, she says, to study biology. She wound up completing her doctoral studies at the National Polytechnic Institute ...