As a graduate student at the College of Biological Sciences, Jennifer Ross-Wolff experienced the joy of seeing neurons up close in professor emeritus David Zarkower’s lab. At the time, they were researching male tail neurons in C elegans, a one-millimeter roundworm that normally lives in rotting vegetation. Ross-Wolff was particularly interested in the genes that need to be turned on during development for a neuron to “know” it’s in a male nervous system and, therefore, prompt behaviors necessary in mating.
“I’ve always been interested in developmental biology, which is how a single cell becomes an organism that orchestrates behavior and does all the things an organism needs to do to be alive,” Ross-Wolff says. “Seeing the male-specific neurons for the first time and finding genes that we didn’t know were involved in male nervous system development really got me hooked.”
One of the genes Ross-Wolff worked on in Zarkower’s lab turned out to play an important role in maintaining the sex of the testes and ovaries of adult mice—proving that the same mechanisms that exist in the microorganism are also present in much larger animals, including humans.
Today, Ross-Wolff continues work on sex-specific neurons in C elegans in a small lab at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, where she’s been for the last 20 years teaching developmental biology, genetics, and introduction to biology to undergraduate students. She is also the director of the Perlman Center for Learning and Teaching.
Ross-Wolff brings the same collaborative spirit she experienced as a graduate student at CBS to her students today.
“We use techniques like CRISPR, the gene editing tool, and we make neurons glow with the green and red fluorescent protein, so we can see them in living worms,” she says. “It’s always neat to watch the students look in the microscope and say, ‘Is that a neuron?’ You can see the axons and the dendrites, and it’s really remarkable.”
Teaching has always been central to Ross-Wolff’s career. At CBS, she took every opportunity she could to TA, including for the late geneticist Peter Snustad. She also found the collaboration among different labs enlightening, and it gave her the opportunity to present her work to other students.
Ross-Wolff credits her time at CBS for helping her hone her skills in bridging the gap between research and teaching. Her guiding principle is that there’s always a way to get a student interested in biology, and everyone should have the opportunity to achieve what they want to in their careers.
“Not everybody taking a biology class is doing it because they’re going to be a graduate student or because they’re going to be a doctor,” Ross-Wolff says. “But we all interact with biology in some way. Helping students see and think about where they come from and how they can make meaning of what we’re learning in class in their own world is where I start from.”