Valentina Greco: Got hair?

I n mammalian hair follicles, follicu-lar tissues and new hairs are generated during a cyclical growth cycle. The growth phase is followed by a period of degeneration and then by entry into a resting state that terminates with a new round of growth. The transitions between different stages of the cycle are triggered by interactions of hair follicle stem cells with underlying mesenchymal cells, but the detailed cellular and molecular mechanisms involved in this process are still being worked out. Valentina Greco became interested in stem cells' role in hair follicle regeneration as a postdoc in Elaine Fuchs's lab (1). Greco's own group at Yale has shown how the positioning of stem cells within the hair follicle's stem cell niche affects their activity and contribution to successive rounds of tissue regeneration and regression (2, 3). Recently she has also begun investigating parallels between regenerative processes in the hair follicle (4) and in a form of regressive skin cancer (5). We called her to talk about some of the hairy details of her work. You're from Italy… Yes. I grew up and did all my schooling through my undergraduate degree in Palermo, Italy. It is a big city, so I felt no need to go abroad. I felt I was born to live in Palermo for the rest of my life. Why didn't you stay in Italy? I spent the last two years as an undergraduate working full time in Aldo di Leonardo's lab, which studied the activity of tumor suppressor genes in mitotic cell division. When I fi nished my undergraduate degree, I wanted to stay in Palermo. I applied to the graduate program there, but I was not accepted. That turned out to be a good thing because it pushed me to consider other places for my PhD. My friend Eugenia Piddini, who had shared lab space with me when we were undergraduates, was accepted to the EMBL graduate program. She kept telling me how I had to come too, so I applied to EMBL and was selected for an interview. I went two weeks ahead of time because my Eng-lish was extremely poor. To help me prepare for the interview, Eugenia and all her friends spoke to me only in English for those two weeks. Then I had to go through 21 interviews with different professors, all in English. Somehow I made it. Why did you choose Suzanne …