Early influences draw Nora Tramm to science career
Newswise — As a child, Nora Tramm, a graduate student in physics, imagined herself becoming a paleontologist and digging up dinosaurs. She is instead conducting neurological research on the nematode C. elegans, a type of worm, at an astonishingly fast pace. At the beginning of last summer, Assistant Professor in Physics David Biron had devised a 10-week research rotation in his laboratory for Tramm. Her agenda: to learn some basic scientific procedures for conducting research on the worm C. elegans, conduct a simple experiment and mentor a high-school student who would help with the project. “I thought that only a very good and strongly motivated student would be able to complete the work that Nora and I planned for the summer,” Biron said. But Tramm, a 2010 National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow, completed the work in six weeks. “We thus had to extend our original plan for Nora’s rotation.”After receiving bachelor’s degrees in physics and biology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Tramm chose UChicago for graduate study.
During her first year at Chicago, she worked with Margaret Gardel, Assistant Professor in Physics, conducting research in cell physiology and experimental biophysics. “I like the attitude toward science in general and especially biophysics,” Tramm said of UChicago. “It’s very basic research-oriented, very much asking and answering questions as opposed to some of the other important areas of science, like technique development. “I’m working on a technique, but ultimately here the attitude is much more like, ‘What do you find out with that technique?’ I like that very much.” Her technique is bioluminescent calcium imaging. Scientists have successfully applied the technique to a variety of organisms, but it’s new to the C. elegans worms she works with.
Worms aglow She inserts a special protein into the worms that glows in the presence of calcium, signaling neuron activity. “We should be able to correlate the activity of a neuron to the actual behavior of the worm in a very non-intrusive way,” Tramm said. “The ultimate goal would be to reverse-engineer what the nervous system is doing to produce the behavior.” What C. elegans lacks in glamour it makes up in simplicity—a boon when it come to understanding something as fiendishly complex as neuroscience. “C. elegans worms are actually a good model organism for neuroscience because they’re so simple,” Tramm said. They have only 302 neurons, as opposed to the approximately 100 billion found in the human brain. Biron seeks to understand the neuronal circuitry associated with sleeplike behavior in C. elegans. “It’s coupled to their development,” Tramm said. “They go through several larval phases before they become adults, and there’s a sleeplike behavior that the worms display between larval stages.” If it turns out that C. elegans sleep is comparable to human sleep, they will become an attractive target for drug-discovery testing. “There remains work to be done in the molecular arena to establish that more thoroughly,” she said. The remaining work also could reveal more fundamental truths about sleep. “Why do we sleep? This is an enormously inefficient behavior. You spend a third of your day unconscious,” Tramm said. “Not just physically, but mentally we seem to need it.” Tramm, who has been interested in science for as long as she can remember, must have absorbed some of it from her parents. Her mother, Jeanne, is an anesthesiologist, and her father, Capper, teaches biology at Asheville Buncombe Technical Community College in North Carolina. “And then I had a really phenomenal physics teacher in high school,” Tramm said. The teacher, Bobby Mercer of Asheville High School, “was a big influence toward me wanting to go into physics in college.”
What career path she will chose after graduate school remains a question, but academic research definitely appeals to her. “I like the process of asking and answering questions and all of the things that go along with that,” she said.
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