Contributors

Nora Wolcott says she’s been interested in the natural world since she was a child, when she’d traipse through her Buffalo, New York, backyard with her nature journal filled with local animal sightings. As she got older, she thought maybe she’d study marine biology or evolutionary biology, but a developmental biology class at the George Washington University hooked her on genetics—specifically, “the genetic pathways that pattern our bodies and our lives.” Wolcott spent four years in a lab using CRISPR to interrogate genetic control of butterfly wing patterns, and she got her first taste of neuroscience research during a study abroad at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, where she studied the genetic basis of Huntington’s disease. She graduated in 2019 with a double major in molecular biology and music performance. Now a PhD student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Wolcott uses mice to investigate the neural ...