Amon Lab: The protein phosphatase Cdc14 helps regulate the timing of cell division in budding yeast. Cdc14 is shown in green, microtubules in red, and DNA in blue.

“Some people work on a problem, but Angelika attacks it,” says Gerald R. Fink, a geneticist at the Whitehead Institute and MIT and an HHMI medical advisory board member. He mentored Amon as a fellow. “She goes right to the core of what’s important in a problem and solves it. She took a rather unconnected series of events in mitosis and built them into a simple model.”

Amon's first paper, in Nature, showed that a signal previously thought to be the universal trigger for entry into mitosis—the stage when chromosomes of a dividing cell prepare to separate—was not in fact necessary for yeast cells to start mitosis.

And while Amon’s studies of the yeast cell cycle have created a nearly seamless story, there was one hiccup in her career. As a postdoc, Amon followed an adviser’s suggestion that she work in a different field, germ cell development, and with a different system—fruit flies. “Flies weren’t for me,” she remembers, making a face. “I never got the hang of it.” Fortunately, her adviser and other mentors at Whitehead were extremely understanding, encouraging her to apply for a fellowship so that she might return to her favorite questions in yeast, where “the only rate-limiting factor is my brain.”

Amon is a strong proponent of basic research. “Like Faust, I want to know because I want to know,” she says. Amon also takes her responsibility to educate young scientists seriously. “What I’m most proud of,” she says, leaning forward for emphasis, “is that all of my students are doing well.”

Her students return the admiration. “She’s the only scientist I’ve met who is that smart and that warm,” says Rami Rahal, a third-year graduate student.

When she’s not working, Amon spends time with her husband, Johannes Weis, a computer scientist, and daughters, Theresa, 6, and Clara, born April 12 this year. She is obviously proud of Theresa’s contributions to the lab’s decor—stick-figure portraits adorn a whiteboard.

Kim Nasmyth, her former graduate adviser at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna, Austria, says Amon learned an important lesson early, that “science is an impersonal thing done by personable people.” When he was new to Vienna, she helped him learn German and the Viennese waltz. But in her experiments, he says, she always did what had to be done, and she was always completely fearless.

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