After Kate Fitzgerald submitted her thesis on adhesion molecules at Trinity College, Dublin, she was ready for a change of scenery. So when her graduate advisor, Luke O'Neill, set out for a sabbatical at Millennium Pharmaceuticals, the young immunologist jumped at the chance to join him. Her summer spent studying a cytokine receptor in Boston "cemented in my mind that I wanted to live here," she says. The city offered the thriving research community she craved.
With a job offer from Millennium, Fitzgerald returned to Ireland to defend her thesis, but a company acquisition soon put a freeze on new hires. While waiting for things to thaw, she finished an absent postdoc's research on Toll-like receptor (TLR) signaling, a field that had always interested her. "There was a Nature paper every week describing Toll receptors and their role in immune response," she says. "I was jealous."
Millennium's delay was her ...
