© JANE SHAUCK PHOTOGRAPHYValerie Horsley was surrounded by academics from a young age. Raised by a single mother who began her doctoral work in industrial engineering when Horsley was seven, she spent a lot of time with graduate students who served as her babysitters. When it came time for her to graduate from Furman University in South Carolina with a biology degree, Horsley knew she needed her own PhD to become a professor and stay in academia.
She opted for Emory University, where her lack of in-depth molecular biology background became apparent. Horsley’s undergraduate career had been wide-ranging but not marked by copious research experience. “I felt completely overwhelmed,” she says. “But I think it actually helped me, because I learned to think broadly before I started thinking about specifics.”
Horsley joined the lab of Grace Pavlath, where she explored the role of a transcription factor called NFATc2. Pavlath’s team had previously found that mice lacking NFATc2 had smaller muscles, but they didn’t know why. Horsley found that the protein was critical for cells called myoblasts to fuse and form mature, multinucleated muscle fiber cells.1 “It revealed a novel step in the myogenesis pathway,” says Horsley, who also showed that NFATc2 regulated ...
