Sandra Schmid: Collaring endocytosis

T hroughout her career, Sandra Schmid has been at the leading edge of endocytosis research. It was her laboratory that fi rst identifi ed the GTPase dynamin as a central player in en-docytosis (1). Since then, she's devoted her research efforts to characterizing this critical cellular process (2) and dynamin's role therein, as the protein that collars and then pinches off forming endocytic vesi-cles (3, 4). Schmid did her graduate work in James Rothman's lab at Stanford University (5) and her postdoc with Ira Mellman at Yale (6). For the past 22 years she's headed up her own lab at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego. There, she's managed the responsibilities of being a lab head, department chair, and mother, while also serving on the editorial boards for several research journals. Schmid also recently completed a master's degree in executive leadership at the University of San Diego and agreed to take on the presidency of the American Society for Cell Biology in 2011. Yet, we managed to collar her for a quick chat about the things that have been keeping her busy. Where did you grow up? I grew up in Vancouver, Canada. My father was a high school science teacher, and he actually wrote the textbooks that were used in grades eight through ten in a couple of Canadian provinces. Is that what fi rst interested you in science? My father was defi nitely an inspiration to me, but another strong infl uence was my early schooling. I was enrolled in something called a Major Works Class, which was a special class for gifted students from all over the city. There were maybe 25 of us in the class and we stayed together from fourth through seventh grades. We had phenomenal teachers, and they had a really unique approach to education: we didn't do anything according to the textbooks or the regular curriculum. The teacher would just throw it out the window and we'd do it our own way. Our teachers were always challenging us to look outside of textbooks to get our own information, and to think critically about what the different sources of information had to say. I think it was really that class that informed my approach to science. How would you characterize your scientifi c approach? I'm always questioning whether I really understand how things work. Once you have formulated a hypothesis of how …