As a nationally ranked swimmer at Mission Viejo High School, Tanya found her interest in math and science turning to questions of biology: Why did she feel different if she took too many breaths during a race? How did changing the angle of her elbow help move her through the water more quickly?

She was planning to attend UCLA on a swim scholarship when a devastating car accident literally knocked her off her feet for the better part of a year. She was 16. "My entire life had been swimming," she says. "I took all that energy and threw it at my sciences." Her interest in UCLA turned from athletic programs to the curriculum. UCLA was a rare school that put biochemistry into the physical sciences rather than the life sciences, altering the tools that would be used to analyze problems. Tanya was sold.

Over the course of her undergraduate years, she decided to pursue a PhD, and in her first year of graduate work, she met Dr. Steven Clarke, who presented research as a multiple choice: Pick an organism, a protein, and a technique--as long as the research involved methylation, a process in which a protein attaches chemical groups to other molecules. It's a process with consequences that range from aging to cancer.

Tanya began with yeast, trying to figure out how it produced Vitamin E. That particular project was a dead end, but in the process, she began to identify all the proteins in yeast that were methyltransferases. Using computer science and mathematics as well as chemistry, she compared a snapshot of the proteins already linked to methylation with proteins of unknown purpose.

"Once I refined those techniques in yeast," she says, it seemed logical to use the same strategy on human proteins. "I came up with all the methyltransferases in humans and started to explain what they do" based on similarities to known substances. This meant annotating the functions of hundreds of proteins to come up with a "methyltransferasome"--the equivalent of a genome for methyltransferase proteins--that will be the subject of her dissertation. This information could play a crucial role in discovering the mechanisms underlying diseases and even normal aging.

Tanya is looking ahead to a career in applied science--perhaps in pharmaceuticals/biotechnology--and she plans to make communication part of her work. She believes scientists must "take the time to zoom out and put their research in the context of an overall goal"--to make science understandable by ordinary people. "The icons of the younger generation are not the people I would want my future son or daughter to look up to," she says. "It's important to start celebrating scientists."

Published in Fall 2010, Graduate Quarterly