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EMMA R. SCHACHNER, PH.D. BY MATT SKOUFALOS
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rom an early age, Emma Schachner’s curiosity about animals presented itself in distinct ways.
At five, she asked her pediatrician for a human cadaver, and was rewarded instead with a box of nitrile gloves. At nine, her mother came home to discover Schachner boiling a crow to perform some amateur taxidermy. (It was not uncommon, she said, for her parents to chastise their daughter after she’d brought home roadkill to study.) But it wasn’t until she was dissecting animals in a veterinary anatomy program at the University of Pennsylvania that Schachner realized her true calling was not just a love of animals, but of their anatomy. After having completed an undergraduate degree in political science just in time to realize she was preparing for the wrong career, Schachner, who loves art as much as she does animals, was invited by Swarthmore College developmental biology professor Scott Gilbert to assist one of his students with a project on ancient turtles. From there, she said, it was a “sideways” entry into the world of paleontology. “I think everybody grows up liking dinosaurs, and some of us just don’t stop liking dinosaurs, and we continue on to graduate school to study dinosaurs,” Schachner said. “It was kind of an accident. My graduate supervisor, Peter Dodson, pointed out the ribs in a dinosaur skeleton, and said, ‘Look at those ribs; they look like bird ribs.’ I went from being obsessed with dinosaurs to being obsessed with their relationship to birds, their living descendants.” Schachner continued on to England, where she earned a master’s degree in paleontology; to the University of Pennsylvania, where she completed her Ph.D. in the field, and then post-doctoral years studying alligator physiology, dog orthopedics in veterinary school and finally radiology. Today, Schachner is an associate research professor 14
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in the department of cell biology and anatomy as well as a teacher of dental anatomy, with a secondary appointment in the Department of radiology at LSU Health-New Orleans. “I have a love of illustration, and [imaging offers] the best of both worlds,” she said. “Radiology is just beautiful; it’s combining art and science together to make a 3D model; you get to see inside an animal without destroying it.” Schachner is as offhanded about her polymath pursuits as she is committed to them. Describing herself as “a dumpster-diving scientist,” she’s nonetheless always shown up for an opportunity to further her education. She jumped at the chance to learn how paleontologist Larry Witmer uses computed-tomography-based modeling to create digital anatomical models of dinosaur anatomy from fossil evidence and modern animals, even though it meant crashing on a friend’s couch in Ohio to do it. “I always am trying to get people to rein in their speculation about dinosaurs,” Schachner said. “One of the things I’m interested in doing is validating the things that we do know, and I want them to be validated functionally. There’s very few things you can say with just a skeleton, and we’re working on making very hard linkages; we want to prove that the soft-tissue biology is connected to that skeletal element, and how it evolved to be that way, before making claims about extinct animals.” “If you talk to doctors, you’ll realize we’re just barely clinging to the edge of a cliff of our understanding,” Schachner said. “We’re still learning new things about people. We know next to nothing and it’s so amazing. Now I need to know all the things. I can’t stop.” That curiosity has impelled Schachner throughout various examinations of anatomy, but none has held her fascination so much as the study of the lungs of various animals, from birds and reptiles to humans to theoretical models of dinosaurs. Diversity of pulmonary structures is one of her chief interests, and it commands a significant ADVANCING THE IMAGING PROFESSIONAL
