MATTHEW PLEXMAN PHOTOGRAPHY, MATTHEW LITEPLO
Growing up outside of Montreal, Daniel Durocher was enthralled by the stars. And though he aspired to be a physicist or an astronomer, “my encounters with math were not so successful,” he says with a laugh. Still, science called to him, and when undergraduate work at The University of Montreal introduced Durocher to the world of gene transcription, he assumed he’d found a field he would stick with.
In 1997, as a graduate student at McGill University, he found that two proteins important in cardiogenesis—the GATA-4 transcription factor and the Nkx2-5 homeodomain protein—are actually cofactors, providing the framework for the convergence of two pathways vital to heart cell development.1 For his postdoc, Durocher wanted to move from studying cardiac cells to probing transcription at a ...
