FACULT Y SPOTLIGHT
Gone Fishin’ Cell biologist and former undergrad advisor Dave Gard now angling on the Green
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s a graduate student during the 1980s, Dave Gard recalls the first time he saw muscle cells he was growing in a petri dish begin to twitch. He was hooked. Cell Biology became his passion, whether in his lab investigating the assembly and organization of microtubules in frog eggs, or in the classroom teaching cell biology. After completing his PhD at Caltech and post-doctoral fellowship at UC San Francisco, Gard joined the Department of Biology in the summer of 1987. For the next twenty-three years, he and his students studied microtubules, microscopic filaments required for a myriad of cellular functions in eukaryotic (nucleated) cells. In 1989, Gard secured funding for the first laser-scanning confocal microscope in the Intermountain West. Using this technology, he and his students spent thousands of hours studying the organization and role of microtubules in frog oocytes, eggs, and embryos. When the confocal he had labored over for a decade became obsolete, it was replaced with a next generation scope. “We sold [the first confocal] for parts,” he opines, “but not before I entertained the thought of hiding away a note inside the machine’s scan head with ‘Dave Gard was here!,’” a nod to the ubiquitous “Kilroy was here!” seen in graffiti during WWII. Around 2000, Gard’s research interests took another turn. Molecular studies by his lab and others around the world had revealed proteins related to XMAP215 in both evolution and function, known as “homologs.” They were to be found in many if not all eukaryotic cells–those distinguished by the presence of a nucleus and organelles enclosed by a plasma membrane. Dave Gard on the Green River with a German Brown. Photo: Darryl Kropf
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