Rachel Brewster, an associate professor in the department of biological sciences, was profiled in a recent issue of Science magazine. The article titled, The Adapter, explores how Brewster, in a world of tight funding, adapts her work on neural development, and continues training graduate students.
Jennifer Couzin-Frankel writes in Science:
“Brewster landed at UMBC in 2003, after marrying a biologist she met at New York University (NYU) who accepted a job at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Since securing tenure, she aspired to create a different culture from the one she experienced during her postdoc, in a prestigious lab at NYU’s Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine. “I do not want to have the kind of cutthroat lab where people feel the pressure to work Saturday, Sunday, 16 hours a day,” she says. “But then there’s of course a price to pay,” she admits. “The price to pay is in productivity.”
“Her lab uses zebrafish to disentangle how the early brain is shaped, and Brewster has also made it a priority to support women and students from minority groups. In part that reflects her own background—she grew up in Switzerland, the child of a Jamaican mother and a British Guyanese father who worked for the United Nations. She’s fiercely proud of UMBC, a state school that graduates a remarkable 40% or so of its students, many of them minorities, from science-based majors, well above the national average of 25%. “A lot of our students are daughters and sons of recent immigrants, people who still believe in the American dream and who are investing every penny and dime they have to get their kids an education,” she says.”
If you’re looking for a good read about one of UMBC’s scientists then this article may be for you.
