Alumnae Profile
Clare Waterman-Storer ’89
A Biomedical Pioneer
For Clare Waterman-Storer ’89, science has been part of her life since childhood. “From as early as I can remember I was interested in how things work and taking them apart and putting them back together,” she says. Waterman-Storer is an associate professor of cell biology at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif. She is also a faculty member at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass. Her lifelong dedication to science has recently been recognized with one of the most prestigious awards in the field: the 2005 National Institutes of Health Director’s Pioneer Awards, which includes five years of funding at $500,000 a year. Waterman-Storer is one of 13 recipients of the Pioneer Award, given to scientists who undertake new approaches to major challenges in biomedical research.
With the award, Waterman-Storer, who received a Ph.D. in cell biology from the University of Pennsylvania, plans to undertake an ambitious project in the area of “cytomechanical systems integration.” She has been working on a system for quantitatively imaging the dynamics of molecules in cells during complex processes like cell migration and division. “What I want to try to do is use light microscopy to tag multiple components of individual cells simultaneously,” she explains. “This would mean putting a different color tag on lots of different sub-cellular machines, and make each part of the cell a different color so you could look at all of their dynamic activities.”
Waterman-Storer’s approach for studying sub-cellular properties is innovative. “The traditional approach, due to limits of technology, has been to look at one part and make conclusions from that,” she says. “But if you look at only one part, how do you know that some other part isn’t affecting the original one? I want to light it all up simultaneously and look at it all at once.”
Waterman-Storer’s work holds great potential for major scientific advancement: if scientists can understand the basic mechanisms of cell migration, they may use that knowledge to develop cures for diseases of the immune and vascular systems, as well as cancer metastasis. Waterman-Storer has also developed fluorescence imaging techniques and analytical methods to study dynamic processes in living cells.
For more information about Clare Waterman-Storer’s work, visit http://speckle.scripps.edu/
Photo credit: Courtesy of The Scripps Research Institute
