Dr. Gia Voeltz discovered her love for research as an undergraduate student at the University of California Santa Cruz. After graduation, she moved east to Yale University where she was a graduate student with Joan Steitz and studied RNA processing in Xenopus extracts. As a post-doctoral fellow in Tom Rapoport’s lab at Harvard, Voeltz tackled the question of how organelles, and in particular the endoplasmic reticulum, are shaped.
Voeltz started her own lab at the University of Colorado, Boulder in 2006. She became an HHMI Faculty Scholar in 2016 and an HHMI Investigator in 2018. Her lab investigates how the ER interacts with other organelles such as the mitochondria and endosomes via membrane contact sites and how these contact sites may regulate organelle division and function. Learn more about Voeltz’ research here.
