Soo-Kyung Lee rushes into her cramped lab at Baylor College of Medicine, apologizing for her lateness?all of two minutes. She opens the door of a spartan office, large enough for a wrap- around desk and a small conference table. The room had been carved out of her lab space she explains later: "I wanted to have my office inside of the lab to have more interaction."
The decision is typical, according to colleagues. "She is a true lab rat," says Samuel Pfaff, her postdoctoral advisor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. "She really loves being at the bench." And that's clear when the 30-year-old assistant professor leaps to the white board to illustrate an unfamiliar concept.
Lee joined Pfaff's lab in 2001 after completing a PhD from Chonnam National University in Korea. This meant adjusting not only to a new country but also an entirely new experimental approach?moving from ...
