An Interview with Professor Michael Shapira

Abstract

A n I nterview with P rofessor M ichael S hapira B S J Kuntal Chowdhary, Manraj Gill, Mariko Nakamura, Kaitlyn Kraybill-Voth, Atiriya Hari, Ali Palla The BSJ Interviews Crew had the opportunity to interview Professor Michael Shapira. Professor Shapira received his B.Sc. and his Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Following receipt of his doctorate, Professor Shapira moved to the Genetics department at Stanford University School of Medicine, where he trained with David Botstein and Man-Wah Tan as a Life Sciences Research Foundation postdoctoral fellow. Currently, Professor Shapira’s research is focused on understanding the fundamentals of host-pathogen interactions in the context of the whole organism. Through the use of his unique model organism, the soil nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, Professor Shapira’s current point of interest at the lab is pathogen recognition. BSJ: To start things off, how did you get interested in your research? Prof. Shapira: Well, things have happened as they sometimes do in science. I wasn’t always focusing on C. elegans; I used what seemed to be the most appropriate system at the time to answer a biological question. As my interests in stress and environmental stress conditions evolved to consider genome-wide responses, I moved to work with a eukaryotic unicellular model organism, in which analysis could be more complete, but actually, I was more interested in studying similar stress responses in multicellular organisms. By chance, a nearby lab was working with C. elegans, studying how it dealt with infection. I figured that that was a type of stress, and the system seemed overall very attractive: typically you study a one-sided response to stress, but when studying host-pathogen interactions, you have two sides that are responding to each other. I became increasingly fascinated with this host-pathogen interaction story. Again, nothing really stays the same, I started with stress and moved to the host-pathogen interactions, and before you know it, I’m back to stress. 65 • B erkeley S cientific J ournal • S tress • F all 2013 • V olume 18 • I ssue 1