ABOVE: © MAGGIE MCLANDSBOROUGH
Prachee Avasthi took a winding path to specializing in studying cilia—the hairlike appendages that enable cells to move about and sense their environments. During her undergraduate days at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she did lab work ranging from classifying insects collected from a local pond to probing synaptic plasticity in mice. “Pretty much no matter what type of research I was doing, I really enjoyed it.”
Still, of all the areas she explored as an undergrad, Avasthi, now a cell biologist at the University of Kansas (KU), says she found the brain to be “particularly interesting because it’s so unknowable.” She chose to study neuroscience in graduate school at the University of Utah, and her research focused on specific cilia that help the eye’s photoreceptors detect light. “All of these proteins and the membranes get sort of eaten up by adjacent cells in the ...
