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Who is Caroline Sussman? From Dancing to Research
Dancing Turns Into Biology
She decided to study biology because she was amazed at how plants and animals do what they do and really wanted to understand how they work. Caroline remembers looking at many different kinds of small animals (like worms, crayfish, sea stars, clams) and being amazed at just how complex even these small, simple animals were. He favorite class was Cell Physiology. The teacher who taught it did a great job of making a cell come alive. You could just picture all those busy little molecules racing around inside the cell doing their jobs that keep an animal or plant alive. She thought it was really amazing because you would never know about all that activity unless you looked for it with a microscope. It is like magic, you can’t see it (with just your eyes, anyway), yet it is always there and without it there is no life. he got her degree in 1988. She then went to the University of Connecticut to study more and got her doctorate degree in Physiology in 1997. Doing ResearchAfter getting her Ph.D. degree, Dr. Sussman got a job doing research because of the research she did while in school. She is called a Research Associate. She wanted to do research because she gets so excited when she discovers new things about how animals work. She is really interested in how animals are put together while they are being formed before birth and how things like skin cells “know” to be different from muscle or bone cells. She finds it really fun to be the first person ever to know something. Dr. Sussman hopes her research will be used to treat disease and help people. For her job, she plans and does experiments, she writes grants asking for money to do more research, she writes papers telling people about the experiments she’s done and why they are important, and she gives talks about her research at the university where she works and all over the US as well.
How Does the Brain Know to Become the Brain and Not a Big Toe?
When she is not at work, Dr. Sussman spends time with friends and family. She is married to another scientist (see Dr. Michael Romero) and has 3 small children who take up most of her free time right now. They have fun mostly doing things the family can do together, like going to the beach, zoo, playground, or museum. She also likes to read and play the guitar. As soon as the kids get big enough, she wants to do things with them that she’s done in the past, like riding horses, hiking, camping, bicycle riding, and taking dance classes.
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