Hughes Mentor:  Eric Alani

Department: Molecular Biology and Genetics

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An Interview with Professor Eric Alani, Dept. of Molecular Biology & Genetics

Dr. Alani is a professor in genetics at the department of molecular biology and genetics at Cornell University. He completed his undergraduate degree at Massachusetts Institute of Technology majoring in biology and completed his PhD at Harvard University. He has been at Cornell University for ten years.

Having motivated teachers in high school, professor Alani was inspired to study biology. He did a research project on fish development in tenth grade of high school and this experience specifically marked his educational path. During his undergraduate years he majored in biology with a minor in humanities. He also did research mainly focusing on transcription in yeast. He was also interested in medicine and therefore he applied to both medical and graduate school. However, he decided to continue on with graduate school partly because he preferred the flexibility of time in graduate school compared to medical school.

At Harvard, he was accepted into the department of biochemistry and molecular biology. He started to work in a bacterial geneticist laboratory, who later on switched to using yeast as a model organism. He and the group specifically worked on a gene called Rad50. Rad50 is involved in double strand break repair, damage repair, and keeping broken chromosomes together.

After graduating from Harvard, he worked as a post-doc for four and a half years in a cancer institute at Boston. His project involved protein biochemistry and genetics, and he mainly worked on general DNA repair mechanisms. Though, today he identifies himself more of a geneticist than a biochemist, but he has found these two coming hand in hand with each other.

In 1995, professor Alani was offered a position at Cornell University, and he has been a faculty member since then. His lab at Cornell mainly works on chromosome stability and he is also collaborating with other labs in population genetics and biophysics. The main part of his project involves understanding how mismatch repair proteins interact to prevent replication errors and facilitate genetic recombination in baker’s yeast.

Professor Alani enjoys living in Ithaca and he specifically commented on the quietness of this place for living. He has two young children and aside from reading and hiking he enjoys spending time with his children and family.

Dr. Eric Alani

Dr. Eric Alani is an associate professor in the department of molecular biology and genetics here at Cornell University. Originally from Roslyn, NY, Dr. Alani’s education includes undergraduate work at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, PhD work at Harvard University in biochemistry and molecular biology, and finally, postdoctoral work at Harvard Medical School. When asked why he chose to work in academia instead of industry, Alani answered that there is “no room for curiosity” in industry. For him, the best part of participating in research is identifying something mysterious during a fairly routine experiment and “imagining the story” behind its origins. Alani explained that when involved in research, he likes to call his own shots and ask the questions that are pertinent to his interests. As a bonus, Alani likes the idea of spreading his experience and knowledge to others through training members of a lab in an effort both to produce great science and to produce great scientists that can have a significant impact on the scientific community.

Dr. Alani’s research deals with mismatch repair mechanisms of DNA in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Questions that his lab is trying to answer include why are genomes able to maintain their obvious stability so well? and what are the mechanisms that stop DNA from being altered? Answering these questions in the Alani lab involves using techniques from various fields including molecular biology, biochemistry and genetics.

Admission into Dr. Alani’s lab is difficult however. At any given time he has at most, two undergraduate researchers working for him, so admission when there’s one or no undergraduates in his lab has an element of luck to it. Despite that, Dr. Alani suggests that students interested in his lab don’t waste their time sending him a generic letter asking for work that subsequently gets forwarded to ten different professors. Instead, a letter or e-mail should reflect a desire to investigate mismatch repair and should also show that considerable effort was put into reading the literature from the Alani lab so as to again, convey a substantial desire to investigate mismatch repair.

Once in the lab, undergraduates can expect a workload proportional to the number of credits they take, usually around 10-15 hours per week. A typical chronology of a student’s time in the Alani lab would involve meetings with Dr. Alani to discuss their research efforts and talk about future experiments, performing these experiments in an effort to generate meaningful data, more meetings to discuss the direction that a student’s data can be taken in and its overall significance, and a first draft of a student’s contribution to the lab’s project that the student is assisting in. In this way, an undergraduate in the Alani lab can potentially be a contributing author in one of the lab’s publications, which is obviously a great asset when applying for graduate school.

Students interested in the lab should have already completed BioGD281 and, (as a recommendation from the author), BioGD486, Dr. Alani’s advanced eukaryotic genetics course held in the spring. It gives a great overview of genetic techniques, many of which are used in the Alani lab.

Professor Eric Alani

Professor Eric Alani grew up on Long Island. Faculty at his high school encouraged students to explore their interests, and in his junior year, Dr. Alani had his first research experience.

He found that he enjoyed research immensely and continued to do research throughout his time as an undergraduate at MIT. There were few biology majors at MIT, so Dr. Alani gained valuable mentorship. His undergraduate research focused on transcription in yeast. He completed his graduate degree at Harvard in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and had a post doctorate position at Harvard Medical School before coming to Cornell.

According to Dr. Alani, one of the best things about Cornell is the high quality of research being done in all the academic departments and the excellent opportunities for collaboration that this affords. Dr. Alani’s current research interests center on genetic recombination and draw on knowledge of genetics and biochemistry. Using yeast as a model system, he studies proteins that act as spell checkers during DNA replication. The spell checkers remove incorrectly paired nucleotides in the DNA sequence. These spell checker proteins are called mismatch repair (MMR) proteins. They are conserved in organisms ranging from simple bacteria to humans. When MMR systems are functional, replication errors are decreased from approximately 1 in 10 million to approximately 1 in 10 billion. However, a mutation in these spell checkers is correlated with an increased risk for early onset colorectal cancer in humans. These mutations affect 5% to 6% of the population. Dr. Alani is interested in how MMR proteins work together to promote replication fidelity, thus maintaining genome stability.

Dr. Alani highly values having undergraduates in his lab. He sees it as an excellent opportunity to help train the future generation of scientists. He also enjoys the openness of undergraduates to new ideas and their willingness to try new things. He only requires that students have a genuine interest in science and are passionate about working in research. Dr. Alani takes two undergraduates in his lab at a time so they can have adequate attention and support. His lab is currently full, but one position will be opening in May 2005. Dr. Alani expects his undergraduates to work at least 10 hours a week during the semester and to be willing to work in the lab at least one summer. A graduate student or postdoc often supervises undergraduates in the lab. However, some undergraduates choose to work alone and report directly to Dr. Alani. All undergraduates in the lab meet with Dr. Alani weekly for about a half hour to discuss the progress on their project. They also gain interaction with Dr. Alani through lab meetings and other lab based activities.