© REBECCA STUMPFAfter a childhood spent moving about the U.S., Gia Voeltz left her teenage home of Binghamton, New York, for the West Coast to start her undergraduate studies. Three years later, as a senior at the University of California (UC), Santa Cruz in 1993, she discovered her passion for lab research while studying RNA splicing under Manuel Ares.
In 1995, Voeltz moved to Yale University for a PhD in Joan Steitz’s lab. Using Xenopus egg extracts, she was able to show that posttranslational RNA decay was turned on in sequential steps during early frog development. Voeltz also discovered a new poly(A) binding protein, called ePAB, which regulates translation.1
As a PhD student, Voeltz attended a talk at Yale by cell biologist Tom Rapoport of Harvard University. At the end of the talk, Rapoport mentioned a new project to study how organelles form. “How can a protein even know how to wrap up the membrane bilayer into a structure that’s really defined and that only does its given set of functions?” Voeltz says. “I didn’t even know it was a question.”
Rapoport took her ...
