Liz Gavis Interview

Elizabeth Gavis first became interested in lab research as an undergraduate, when she got involved with research projects run by Steve McKnight at the Carnegie Institute and Joe Gall at Yale: long afternoons spent performing DNA microinjection into frog oocytes kindled a lasting fascination with both gene expression and animal development. Following her graduate work at Stanford with David Hogness, where she studied proteins that control development of the body plan using the classic fruit fly model, Gavis completed her postdoctoral work with Ruth Lehmann at the Whitehead Institute in Boston.

When it came time to start her own lab, Gavis was thrilled to receive an offer for a faculty position in the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University, which was populated by scientific luminaries who were also her personal heroes in her field: Eric Weischaus, Trudi Schüpbach and Paul Schedl, to name a few. But what made the choice to come to Princeton a “no-brainer”, she says, was the congeniality and supportiveness of her colleagues. It felt like a place where everyone wanted to help you succeed.

As faculty at Princeton, Gavis established a world-class research program studying the role of RNA localization and translational control in animal development, and is now preparing to take on a new role as the fifth Chair of the Department of Molecular Biology. Her term as Chair begins on July 1, 2025.

The following is excerpted from an interview with the incoming Chair.

Congratulations on your appointment to Chair. For those who don’t know, what are the responsibilities of the Department Chair?

Wow. [Laughs] You know, no-one has handed me a detailed list of my duties. But I believe my main job is to make sure that I do everything possible to enable us to continue to pursue our mission, which is doing top notch research and teaching at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

The Chair oversees the undergraduate program, the graduate program, faculty searches, decisions about appointments and tenure, department finances, and more. Of course, what generally happens is that the Chair delegates leadership positions to faculty in the department to assist with these tasks, but it is going to be my responsibility to ensure all is functioning smoothly.

The Chair also, with feedback from the faculty, makes decisions about where the department's going to go in the future. What kinds of people do we want to hire and in what research areas? Do we want to start a new relationship with another research institute? Much of the vision for where our research and our teaching are headed comes from the chair.

You’re taking the helm as Chair at what can be fairly characterized as a rather difficult time for American science and research.

Yes. I think a lot of my focus is going to be on keeping everything together, basically. Making sure that we take care of our faculty research programs so they thrive, so that junior faculty get promoted to tenure, so that when we hire new faculty they have the best support possible; also that our undergraduate program continues to stay strong, and that we are able to attract great graduate students and postdocs.

We'll do our teaching and we'll do our research to the absolute best of our abilities. That's what we care about.

A challenging job even before the recent hits to University budgets…

Department Chairs always have to make hard decisions about budgets and about how money is going to be spent, but I expect a lot of my responsibilities will be budget related because of the funding crises. We’re thinking about where we can be conservative financially. What kind of cuts can we make in the face of lost income and still meet our mission? But also, what new sources of income can we identify that don’t depend so much on the federal government?

What will be your other priorities as Chair, with this opportunity to shape the Department?

I am currently on a listening tour, meeting one-on-one with every faculty member in the Department to hear what people are thinking and if they have ideas for where they think the department should be going and where they do or don’t want us to change. I'm gathering ideas from my colleagues because we are a very collegial and democratic Department and we make decisions as a group, in general.

One thing I’d personally like to work on is balancing the Department’s relationships with other Institutes at Princeton. For example, we've avoided overlap with the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, but we love cell biology and neurons are really important cells. There are a lot of talented young scientists out there doing really interesting mechanistic molecular and genetic studies in the area of neuronal cell biology. Mala Murthy, who is the Director of PNI, and I have chatted already about how to foster better interactions between the two departments.

I think we also need to re-evaluate our curricula. Our graduate curriculum worked well when we developed it many years ago, but I think it doesn’t serve our current graduate student population as well as it should and we really need to rethink it. We are also re-evaluating our undergraduate curriculum, doing a big survey of alums to find out how we could change it to better serve students’ needs today.

Speaking of curricula, will you still be teaching, going forward?

I won't be teaching the big MOL 214 (Introduction to Cellular and Molecular Biology) course anymore—because as Chair I just can’t manage such a large course. It’s a big commitment to teach it well. But I will continue to teach MOL 514, a seminar-style class I teach with Tom Silhavy for first year graduate students.

And on top of this, you’ll still be running your own lab. Can we talk about your research?

Of course!

A major theme in your research involves Nanos, a developmentally important protein, and the messenger RNA that encodes it…

The nanos mRNA was originally more interesting to me than the protein. I was studying it as a model to understand how cells can control where proteins are produced within them by moving RNAs and then translating them only in that location. Nanos RNA is a great example of this because it’s crucial for development of the animal and mutations that affect the localization of the RNA have dramatic consequences.

Nanos mRNA is deposited in oocytes by the cells that surround it in the ovary, right?

Right, but then it gets moved to the posterior pole of the oocyte and remains there in the embryo. If nanos RNA is not localized to the posterior and translated there to make the protein, the animal does not develop any abdomen at all. And if nanos gets translated anywhere except at the posterior, it screws up the development of the head. It has been a really good model to pick apart a type of gene regulation that we now know is used by many cell types and is really important for controlling protein synthesis in space and time.

I became even more interested in nanos when it was found to have a highly evolutionarily conserved role in the development of the germ cells, which are the cells that give rise to the eggs or sperm of sexually reproducing animals. Nanos protein prevents germ cells from differentiating into other types of cells, and its localization at the posterior of the developing embryo is important because that’s where the germ cells form.

Another aspect of nanos that really interests me is that the RNA gets packaged into ribonucleoprotein granules, a type of biomolecular condensate that has garnered much interest recently. We’ve become very interested in how these granules form, how RNAs gets into them, how residing in granules affects RNA translation, and what that has to do with making germ cells. We’ve parlayed nanos into a jumping-off point to explore the larger terrain of RNA regulation.

In what other types of cells is mRNA localization important?

Neurons are a classic example because they have very long extensions—the dendrites and axons—that can project really far away from the body of the cell. Localizing RNAs to these extensions is an effective way to deliver proteins at such distances. In some cases, RNA is sitting there, poised out in the dendrite, the sensory part of the neuron, where it can be translated when a signal from another neuron is received to make proteins on demand that then reinforce the signaling between the two neurons.

RNA localization is also important in polarized cell types such as epithelial cells, where the two ends of the cell may have different functions and need different sets of proteins for those functions. It’s also been observed in motile cells, in formation of the membrane extensions they use to crawl. You name it, probably every cell has RNAs that are sub-cellularly localized.

Any closing thoughts?

We are lucky to have such a dedicated community of students, postdocs, faculty, and research and administrative support staff. I want to make sure that the Department knows that my first priority is to do everything I can to make sure that we can continue to teach and do our best science.