Dr. Magdalena Bezanilla’s passion for science was cultivated in her father’s laboratory. Watching biophysicist Dr. Francisco Bezanilla study the squid’s giant axon, the largest known nerve cell in the animal kingdom, had a profound impact on Bezanilla’s professional future. To conduct his research, Bezanilla’s father moved the family from Los Angeles to a marine biological laboratory in Cape Cod, Mass., every summer.
“That’s where I got to see what was going on in my dad’s lab,” says Bezanilla, associate professor of biology at the
University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “My dad tried to keep me out of the lab as much as possible because I was a bit of a distraction to everybody.”
But Bezanilla’s affinity for science could not be stifled. She kept coming back.
