ABOVE: © STUART ROBINSON
Asked what initially drew her to science, Izzy Jayasinghe has a modest answer. “I wasn’t very good at very many other things in school,” she says. “And I had, I guess, a general curiosity.” While in high school in New Zealand, Jayasinghe built a viscoelastic damper, a type of shock absorber used in cars and in buildings in earthquake-prone areas, and tested how various design parameters affected its performance.
The project won an award at a science fair for the city of Auckland, with a prize of a small scholarship to the University of Auckland, where she studied biomedicine beginning in 2003. During her senior year, Jayasinghe worked in the lab of biophysicist Christian Soeller, using a confocal microscope to examine the positions of proteins known as sodium-calcium exchangers in heart cells. Previous research had produced conflicting results on whether these exchangers colocalized with another type ...
