Title: Associate professor, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Education: Ph.D., biochemistry, cellular and molecular biology, Johns Hopkins University; B.S., physics, University of California at Santa Barbara

Age: 38

Career mentors: Susan Forsburg, University of Southern California; Thomas Pollard, Yale University; and Ralph Quatrano, Washington University-St. Louis

Words of wisdom/advice for new faculty members: “You will be successful if you follow your passion, and you will know you have chosen the right path if you look forward to going to work every day.”

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.

Today, the 38-year-old biologist spends countless hours in her own lab studying the cell biology of plant cells. Her research seeks to answer a basic biological question: How do cells grow?

“We don’t know a lot about how cells become the shape that they are. This is a particularly relevant question for plants,” says Bezanilla. “What the ultimate shape of a leaf looks like depends on the shape of the individual cells that make up that leaf. My lab is interested in understanding how molecules inside the cell help to shape the cell and give the cell its final form.”