Margaret Werner-Washburne is an Associate Professor of Biology at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque and an NSF Presidential Young Investigator. The daughter of a Mexican mother and German father, both college graduates, she grew up in a small town in Iowa and in a mixed Mexican/Anglo environment. Dr. Werner-Washburne is a non-traditional scientist whose life's experiences have led her to devote a large part of her effort as a faculty member at UNM to increasing the representation of Native-American, Hispanic/Chicano, and African-American students in the sciences.
In the late 1960s, she entered Stanford University as a biology major and graduated with a B.A. in English with an emphasis in poetry. For a number of reasons, she never felt comfortable at Stanford. At that time, coming from a small town, 12 years of Catholic schools, a mixed ethnic background, and being a woman in the sciences at Stanford were all liabilities. "It took about 10 years for these to become assets," says Werner-Washburne.
After graduation from Stanford, she traveled to Mexico and Central and South America and while there, became interested in the indigenous uses of medicinal plants. The fascination with ethnobotany led her, after a year and a half, to return to the US where she settled in Alaska. In Alaska, she worked for one year as a trapper, writer, and teacher with Upward Bound, before moving to Minneapolis, where she worked as a paraprofessional nurse in a clinic treating low-income families, including mostly Chippewa, Sioux, and Blackfeet Indians. The clinic was associated with the University of Minnesota, where she began to take classes in botany. After a year, she left Minnesota to pursue a Masters Degree in botany at the University of Hawaii.
Hawaii proved to be a very comfortable environment for Werner-Washburne. The student body was very diverse and she had a supportive mentor in her M.S. advisor, the late Sandy Siegel, an exobiologist. She moved to Madison, Wisconsin, to pursue a Ph.D. in Botany, which she received in 1984 in the laboratory of Kenneth Keegstra. Her post-doctoral work was done at the University of Wisconsinon on yeast HSP70 genes in the laboratory of Betty Craig.
In 1988, she accepted a faculty position at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. She enjoys the opportunity to help to develop molecular biology within the biology department, but most of all, thrives upon the cultural diversity at the University of New Mexico. Of the 1,000 biology majors, about 300 are minorities, including about 70 Native Americans (mostly Navajos, Pueblos, and Apaches). Many of the students come from small towns and villages and have no idea that a career in the sciences is even possible.
She says that one of the most rewarding parts of her job is being able to help undergraduates, especially minority students, make the transition from their family homes to college. “No one was there for me as an undergraduate, says Werner-Washburne, and I consider it an honor to be able to be here for our undergraduates. I can see myself in so many of them talented and with lots of potential but terrified and with desperately low self-esteem.” Over the past three years, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and NSF-RIMI grants have allowed faculty in the UNM biology department to dramatically increase the numbers of undergraduates, especially minorities, in their laboratories. She believes that the scientific community has an obligation to help bring minority students into science. “The tax money that pays our grants comes from everyone's pockets and we need to do what we can to make sure that it is not taxation without representation”, says Werner-Washburne.
She credits National Academy of Sciences President and ASCB member Bruce Alberts as an exceptional scientist with a social conscience. She believes that we need more "Bruce Alberts" and that both minority and majority scientists must work together in an atmosphere of respect, learning from each other's cultures, if we are to solve the complex problems that lay before us. Sometimes it takes someone from a different culture, with vastly different perspectives, to solve a problem in a novel way or to recognize the problem at all.
Werner-Washburne's laboratory studies the process of entry into and survival during stationary phase in yeast, which is induced by nutrient limitation. The process is regulated by A-kinase and other common signal transduction pathways. One of the possible outcomes of this work is a better understanding of what regulates entry into and exit from Go in mammalian cells. "If you think about it, almost all the cells in the world are in stationary phase or Go. Mitosis is a very small part of the life cycle of most cells. It surprises me how little we know about non-dividing cells," said Werner-Washburne. Her future goals are to decipher the regulatory mechanisms required for the process of entry into stationary phase and to identify the conserved mechanisms that allow eukaryotic cells to enter and survive stationary phase arrest.
Calling it a miracle that she is a scientist, and perhaps even more amazing that she is a faculty member, Werner-Washburne believes that it is never a mistake for students to pursue a Ph.D., if their heart is in it. She finds it sad that mentors may discourage students, especially minority students, from studying for a Ph.D. because there are few academic jobs. “An education is never a mistake. There are many people I know who would have thought that coming to New Mexico was equivalent to dying. For me, it was a golden opportunity. We don't all see with the same eyes,” says Werner-Washburne.
She is married to Bruce, a social worker at the Veterans Administration, and has two children.
