ANA MARIA CUERVO
Robert and Renee Belfer Chair for the Study
of Neurodegenerative Diseases
Professor of Developmental and Molecular Biology Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Bronx, New YorkCOURTESY OF ALBERT EINSTEIN COLLEGE OF MEDICINEAs a medical student, Ana María Cuervo assumed that students in her class who got top scores on the second-year exam would get their pick of research opportunities, so she studied hard, aced the test, and identified a biochemistry laboratory she wanted to join. Only then did she find out her assumption was wrong: lower-scoring students had a choice; top exam scorers were assigned to labs.
It was 1986 at the University of Valencia in Spain, and Cuervo was placed in a lab studying nerve conduction. “Nobody wanted to go into that lab,” says Cuervo. “I thought, ‘Oh my god, I’m going to be putting electrodes into the tails of rats. How uncool is that?’”
But today, Cuervo looks back on that moment as a positive turning point in her career. The head of the lab, Joaquín Romá, became Cuervo’s first mentor and fueled her devotion to research. “He taught us to formulate a question and test it, but the answer wasn’t the important part,” she says. Since Cuervo was addicted to Diet Coke, for example, Romá had her perform a study on the effect of caffeine on nerve conduction. Cuervo ...
