ABOVE: CHRIS THEKKEDAM
For Angela Dulhunty, the main draw of studying cells’ electrical properties was the reward of instantaneous data. Rather than having to wait sometimes days to get the results of a biochemistry experiment, with electrophysiology “you see what is happening in an individual cell in the moment,” says the muscle biology researcher and now emeritus professor at Australian National University in Canberra.
Dulhunty was attracted to learning how muscle works as an undergraduate student studying physiology and biochemistry at the University of Sydney. “Biochemistry in those days was a lot of learning metabolic cycles, which was not as intuitive for me as understanding how the micro-components of tissues and organs inform their functions,” she says.
Dulhunty’s first real lab experience was during her final year as an undergraduate. She was completing her honors thesis, studying how hearing is registered by the ear and translated into electrical signals through ...
