In the fall of 2005, Mary Allen was beginning her third year of work on a doctoral degree in the Program of Cellular and Molecular Biology (CMB) at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Seen here in green in the back row, Allen had grown up in Michigan a precocious adolescent; she enrolled at Spring Arbor University at age 15. Intelligent but not yet familiar with the various scientific disciplines, she did not know how to respond when told she must pick a major. Flipping through a handbook, her eyes landed on a major that sounded challenging: biochemistry.

During Ms. Allen's second year at Spring Arbor, one of her biochemistry professors took the class on a tour of the U. Michigan biochemistry graduate school. She decided then and there to aim for graduate school, and began working in a cancer research lab.

After graduating in 2002, she narrowed her choices to Illinois, Wayne State, Michigan and Wisconsin, some of the highest ranked departments in the country. She could not choose between Michigan and UW, finally settling on UW simply for variety.

Her first week in Madison in Fall 2002, Allen met geneticist and associate professor Dr. Elizabeth Goodwin, 47.

Seen here in blue in the front row, ‘Betsy’--as everyone in her lab knew her--was bright, funny, and incredibly personable. The senior woman in the Genetics Department and a CMB trainer, Dr. Goodwin had already published nearly two dozen articles on the genetics of sex determination in embryonic development of C. elegans. She would soon publish an article in Science, perhaps the top journal in her field.