NIH/NIDCD As soon as she started her first real science class in seventh grade, Katie Kindt was hooked on genetics. “There was always something about genetics that made sense to me,” she recalls. “It linked the unknown in the world to something that we could follow.”
Kindt began doing research as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire in the late 1990s, earning her bachelor’s in molecular biology and biochemistry. In graduate school at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), she discovered a passion for neuroscience during her lab rotations. “I’ve actually never taken a neuroscience class,” Kindt says, but she completed her PhD studying mechanosensation in Caenorhabditis elegans under neuroscientist William Schafer.
In Schafer’s lab, Kindt combined genetics with microscopy to study neuron formation and function, observing neural migration in real time. She discovered that dopamine modulates the response to touch in C. elegans, and that when the worms lack a D1-like dopamine receptor, their mechanoreceptors are less sensitive.1 Kindt also demonstrated that TRPA-1, a member of the ...
