CAROL CARTER
Professor, Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology
Adjunct Professor, Department of Physiology &
Biophysics
Stony Brook University
Stony Brook, New York COURTESY OF CAROL CARTER/STONY BROOKCarol Carter entered City College of New York wanting to major in biology and chemistry. But her freshman-year courses left her cold. “The classes were dull and uninspiring, and I was very discouraged,” she recalls. Carter went to the professor who served as her freshman advisor and told him how much she hated the intro biology class. “The advisor leaned back in his chair with no change in facial expression and said, ‘Wow, you’re lucky.’ This caught me completely off guard,” she says. She remembers the advisor telling her, “You are lucky because you know what you want to do, so nothing is going to discourage you.” Carter left the office even more perplexed than when she had entered, but after mulling over the encounter, finally understood the advisor’s indirect message: a single experience or data point should not discourage someone with conviction.
Carter persevered in her study of biology. She was encouraged to apply to graduate school by her undergraduate work-study employer, an ecology professor who became her mentor. “City College was and remains a strong teaching institution, and it prepared me well for graduate school.”
As a graduate student at Yale University, Carter became fascinated with viruses. “Animal viruses were the new guys on the scene in the 1960s. Bacteria, phage, fungi, and parasites had held court in microbiology for a long time. It was a new field that attracted many young scientists.” To Carter, animal virology was not only very exciting but provided opportunities to impact health and disease. She worked on measles virus and on reovirus, a related but low-virulence model for rotaviruses that ...
