As a jazz saxophone-playing undergraduate at Lawrence, associate professor of biology and Raymond H. Herzog Professor of Science Elizabeth De Stasio, ’83, was all but certain she was headed to medical school after graduation. But, that was before Professor Emeritus of Biology Michael LaMarca provided a “tough love” tutorial in a Youngchild Hall research lab her senior year. De Stasio became a belated convert, and, in the process, her medical career was derailed by the appeal of what she affectionately calls “puzzle solving.”
Lawrence’s unofficial “worm lady,” De Stasio was a small-college research pioneer of sorts when she joined the faculty in 1992, becoming just the second scientist in the country at a liberal arts institution to make extensive research use of C. elegans — tiny worms, only as long as a dime is thick, whose cost and life cycle make them ideal research subjects. As a molecular biologist immersed in the “omics” age of scientific research — having recently moved from the genomics era to the proteomics era — De Stasio deftly manipulates pieces of DNA in search of answers to questions concerning muscle function.
Her Science Hall laboratory is currently home to two ongoing research initiatives. With the help of Paul Schook, ‘04, De Stasio is working with the protein myosin, a “molecular motor,” to investigate how muscles are put together and how their activity is coordinated. A second project, with which Amy Briggs, ’04, is assisting, was started three years ago during a sabbatical supported by a National Science Foundation POWRE grant at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she collaborated with H. Robert Hurvitz, the 2002 Nobel Prize-winner in physiology and medicine. This study, which explores how nerves and muscles communicate with each other through a cellular potassium “channel,” has produced evidence of channel defects that result in male mating dysfunction.
In June, De Stasio presented the paper, “Using C. elegans in a molecular biology laboratory course,” during the 14th annual C. elegans Conference at UCLA. Her latest article, “Cloning,” was published in the encyclopedia Genetics.
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