Rebecca Hartley

A Vaccine for Cancer?
 

I grew up in a small town in southern New Mexico. Well, sort of. My dad was military and stationed at Hollomon Air Force base, but was originally from a town of 300 in southern Indiana. My mom was one of six kids growing up in central New Mexico. She was born in Quemado, and they moved back and forth between Quemado, Datil, and finally Socorro so they could finish high school. Once married, my parents moved back to Indiana so my dad could apprentice with his uncle as a tool and dye maker. But small town southern prejudice against my mom led my dad to re-enlist. I was the youngest of four girls, born in Washington State, but we moved to Albuquerque when I was five and then to Tularosa upon my dad's retirement from the Air Force when I was nine.
 
I graduated from Tularosa High School. There was never any question that I would go to college, even though my parents hadn't gone and they couldn't afford to send either my sister (only 11 months older) or me. Scholarships, Pell grants, work-study jobs and whatever help our parents and an older sister in Albuquerque could scrape together got us both through UNM. I majored in biology and had the opportunity to work in a lab as an undergraduate. My undergraduate lab work and a teaching assistantship inspired me to apply to graduate school. After researching several programs at different universities, I realized that if I pursued a Ph.D., I could get paid to go to school and do research-how could it get better than that?
 
I left sunny New Mexico for rainy Seattle to complete my Ph.D. at the University of Washington. My degree is in Biological Structure (a fancy name for Anatomy). My graduate research focused on adult skeletal muscle stem cells, determining where and when they arose during embryonic development. This work led to my interest in answering the question, how does a single fertilized egg become a whole organism? After finishing my Ph.D., I went on to pursue this question while performing post-doctoral research in two different labs, one in Denver, Colorado, at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, and the second at the University of Rennes in western France.
 
My first faculty position was at the University of Iowa School of Medicine. Here, I began research in my own lab and began teaching Anatomy to medical students and Cell Biology to graduate students. My research now was centered on early embryonic cell division and its resemblance to the uncontrolled cell division that is seen in cancer. If we could understand how and why cells of the early embryo divide rapidly with few controls, we could gain insight into how normal cells lose control of their highly regulated cell division to become rapidly dividing cancer cells. This is the main question that I work on, studying frog embryos as a model to study embryonic cell division and human breast cancer cells.
 
After moving to Iowa, I married a man that I had met in France. The transition from Europe to rural Iowa was not an easy one, so we began discussing moving out west. Right about this time, while attending a scientific conference in Phoenix, I ran into someone I had gone to school with at UNM. We had worked in the same lab as undergraduates and he was now a Professor in the same department. He mentioned that if I were interested in moving back to New Mexico, they were hiring. That was six years ago. My mom, sisters, nieces and nephews all live in Albuquerque (save one misguided Texan). I have many relatives throughout the state. My husband loves New Mexico and I no longer miss it. I've loved every place where I've lived, but there's no place quite like home.