ELAINE FUCHS
Professor, Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology Rockefeller University, New York City Howard Hughes Medical Institute InvestigatorMATTHEW SEPTIMUSIn 1978, Elaine Fuchs was just one year into a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT when her PhD advisor, Charles Gilvarg of Princeton University, called to tell her about an available academic position at the University of Chicago. “He remembered that my family was from Chicago and that I might want to go back,” says Fuchs, now a professor of molecular genetics and cell biology at Rockefeller University in New York City. “I told him that was fine but that I was still doing my postdoc, and he said that he would recommend me anyway. I could treat the interview as practice, he explained, to get a sense of what it was like, for when I was ready to get a job.” Fuchs was invited for the interview and the university’s biochemistry department took its time deciding, finally offering her an assistant professorship in the fall of 1979. “I was relaxed, as it never occurred to me that I would get a job offer,” she says. “Possibly, the department took their time because I had told them I hadn’t applied anywhere else.” Fuchs requested another year to finish her postdoc in Howard Green’s laboratory, where she was studying the biology of cultured human keratinocytes, the most abundant cell type found in the epidermis, the skin’s protective barrier at our body’s surface.
“I finished a full three years at MIT. What was nice in that last year was that I could plan out exactly what I wanted to do in my own lab. I wrote for and had my NIH grant before I arrived in Chicago. It was a really nice recipe to hit the ground running. Now, looking back, it was kind of a poised-to-succeed situation,” says Fuchs.
“We’re learning that it is the basic mechanisms that stem cells use to make and repair tissue that become hijacked in cancer.”
Since her time in the Green lab almost four decades ago, Fuchs has been hooked on decoding and unraveling the complicated biology of epidermal cells. In her own labs at the University of Chicago and now ...
