Stacy Alvares, Ph.D.

salvares@email.unc.edu

• Department of Biology

Education

• University of Washington Seattle
  Molecular and Cellular Biology
  

Mentors

• Shawn Ahmed, Ph.D.

Biography

Growing up in San Antonio, Texas with two parents in scientific research, I thought the last thing I wanted to be was a scientist. However, my AP high school biology teacher's way of teaching science made me realize how much I enjoyed learning about all the details that make a cell do its job. After graduating in 1995, I went to Pomona College- a small liberal arts college in Claremont, California. It was there that I got my first experiences with both teaching and research. I did my senior thesis in the laboratory of Dr. Clarissa Cheney where I set up a yeast two-hybrid system to look at protein-protein interactions with GDP Dissociation Inhibitor. In Dr. Cheney's lab I found that I enjoyed doing research and became quite fond of developmental biology. I also learned how much I valued her mentoring and decided that I wanted to become a college professor. I graduated from Pomona in 1999 and crossed the country for the first time to be a lab technician in Dr. Donald Morisato's laboratory at Harvard Medical School. There I continued to examine developmental biology in a project examining the role of Spatzle processing in establishing the dorsal-ventral gradient during early Drosophila development.

After spending two years in Boston, I crossed the country again to go to graduate school at the University of Washington. My graduate work was done in the laboratory of Dr. William Carter and focused on the contributions of membrane microdomains to outside-in signaling during epithelial wound repair. During graduate school I also got the opportunity to extend my teaching experience. One of the highlights was helping a small group of undergraduates conduct field research in Costa Rica! Upon graduating, I continued to build upon my teaching experiences and got the opportunity to be a biology instructor for the UW Summer Medical and Dental Education Program during the summer of 2007. Little did my students know that while I was helping them learn fundamental concepts of physiology, they were giving me valuable lessons on the challenges in designing a curriculum!

I have crossed the country for the third time to join the SPIRE program in the fall of 2008. I joined Shawn Ahmed's lab in the Biology Department where I will be working on a project that looks at various chromatin modifications in C.elegans mutants that become progressively sterile. This project will allow me to pursue my interest in the topic of epigenetic modifications important for cell immortality. Stem cell biology and cell immortality continue to be very important fields of study for their potential application in future medicine. I am excited about engaging students in the concepts and research of this topic through my fellowship!