Finding Her Way

In the Washington Post, Claire Fraser-Liggett says that she went through the ordeal of applying to medical school, but then decided that research was for her. "In my senior year of college, I did research with a doctor that got me excited about what a career in medical research was all about," she says. That started her on the path to graduate work in pharmacology and then to work at NIH's Neurology Institute, focusing on G-protein-coupled receptors, and the Institute for Genomic Research. "This new opportunity allowed me to enter into genomics at a time when it hadn't really become a field. One of the things that attracted me was thinking about how to apply large-scale DNA sequencing and analysis to the receptors that I was working on," she says.