Rebecca Burgess , PhD, still remembers the first time she peered into a microscope as a child. Her father, a pathologist, invited her and her siblings to look at slides of tissue samples and tumors. Those moments sparked a lifelong curiosity. Why does a healthy cell stay healthy? What changes when a disease takes over? How do cells “decide” their function? That curiosity led her to Miami University of Ohio for biochemistry, then to Mayo Clinic Graduate School , where she studied how epigenetic information is passed from one cell to the next. She continued her postdoctoral training at UT