Sylvia Johnson

Sylvia keeps the day-to-day lab running, acting as lab manager, webmaster, party planner, equipment repair tech, construction liaison, regulatory contact, emergency response coordinator, and more as well as dissecting the occasional fly larvae, sectioning nerves, and keeping all the mouse pups genotyped. She’s been a member of the lab for over 20 years.

Her career in lab support started in the lab of her undergraduate mentor, Dr. Mark Kirk, at the University of Missouri-Columbia.  At the time, the lab studied central nervous system regeneration in the gastropod Aplysia californica.

Several years after graduating with a Bachelor’s degree in Biology, she moved to St. Louis and the Washington University Medical School. There she learned to work with budding yeast while studying nuclear pore transport in the lab of Dr. Susan Wente.

In 2002, she joined the DiAntonio lab and the wonderful world of Drosophila genetics. She was sad to learn that you can’t freeze down lines of fruit flies like you can yeast, but was happy to once again be working with a model organism that has a nervous system.