Leslie Leinwand, a cell biologist at CU and a collaborator on the heart-valve project, says that what impresses her most “is Kristi’s incredible enthusiasm for what she does.” She has a particular affinity for interdisciplinary projects and bounces productively, for example, between polymer engineering and basic cell biology.

Anseth’s passion for science carries outside the lab, too. Committed to basic scientific education as well as research, Anseth teaches classes like freshman introductory chemistry each year.

Off campus, Anseth and her husband, Christopher Bowman, a chemical engineer at CU, visit the local dog trail, playing with their yellow Lab puppy, Elway. And she jogs the Boulder Creek path that winds from campus into the Rockies—it is, she says, a “fun place to think in the middle of the day.”

In her lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Angelika Amon also runs hard. On a given morning, she juggles meetings with undergraduates, calls (in German) from her husband, a side trip to do damage control on a leak in the microscope room, and a continuous stream of lab workers popping in with news. She refuels periodically from a stash of diet Coke in her office.

Amon began making headlines in the cell-cycle world as a graduate student when she published a discovery on mitosis, or cell division. Her first paper, in Nature, showed that a signal previously thought to be the universal trigger for entry into mitosis—the stage when the chromosomes of a dividing cell prepare to separate—was not in fact necessary for yeast cells to start mitosis. She has pursued questions about what regulates cell division ever since.

Amon won the Waterman award in 2003 for her work showing that a protein called Cdc14 was critical for making sure cells move forward through mitosis correctly. “Chromosome segregation is an irreversible event,” she explains. “Nothing in mitosis comes after it. And if something goes wrong, you can’t fix it later.” Improper chromosome segregation in particular can lead to cancer and birth defects.

The Cdc14 discovery had an interesting twist—the protein is active only when it is released from a subcompartment of the nucleus called the nucleolus, where its inhibitor resides. That observation led to the discovery that two distinct regulatory networks release and activate Cdc14 at different times during mitosis. One network, called the mitotic exit network (MEN), was known to stimulate a sustained release of Cdc14 at the very end of the cell-division process, but Amon’s group found another regulatory network that controls a very small release of Cdc14 much earlier in mitosis. The new network, fourteen early anaphase release, or FEAR (witty acronyms are a running lab joke), turns on Cdc14 as the last bits of chromosomes are separating.

“Why bother with two pathways? Cells are so clever, it’s really amazing,” Amon says. The small amount of FEAR-released Cdc14 stimulates MEN in a positive feedback system. “And it gives the cell a built-in delay to make sure that chromosome segregation and exit from mitosis are coupled.”

This work began when Amon was a fellow at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and continued when she moved into her new lab at MIT, literally across the street.

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