ABOVE: David Gate studies links between the immune system and Alzheimer's, a disease characterized by amyloid-β plaques in the brain, seen in this micrograph as lightly-colored circles.
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For David Gate, one of the first real litmus tests of whether a research career was for him came while dissecting retinas as a premed student studying psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Working in the eye biology lab didn’t really capture his imagination, and parts of the work were tedious, but Gate says that despite that, he loved the process—the basic work of doing experiments. “I quickly became a lab rat all day and night,” and was soon dissecting retinas better than anyone in the lab, Gate tells The Scientist.
After graduating in 2007, Gate went on to work as a lab technician with immunologist and Alzheimer’s disease researcher Terrence Town at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. The ...
