Dr. John Wallingford

At age 12, John Wallingford decided to become a biologist. Thanks to a "really inspiring" 7th grade science teacher with whom he is still in contact, Wallingford's career path was clear. "I always liked taking things apart," Wallingford says. "Anything that broke in the house my family would give to me so I could take it apart and look inside it, which is what I still do with science."

The Houston-native attended Connecticut's Wesleyan University where he double majored in biology and biochemistry. At Wesleyan, he encountered another inspiring teacher who introduced him to the research topic that continues to fascinate him: embryo shape-generation.

"The key question for me is that all eggs are more or less spherical, yet people and dolphins come from these same structures," Wallingford says. "So how do embryos generate their shape?"

His research is a subset of developmental biology called morphogenesis.  While much of developmental biology focuses on questions like "how do kidney cells know to be kidney and brain cells know to be brain," work in the Wallingford lab focuses on how these cells move and change shape in order to build the appropriate structures in the embryo.

When Wallingford began researching this topic, there wasn't an "inkling of understanding" about what the genes involved were. "We had no idea what genes were going to be important for cell movement, but it was pretty clear that they'd be different than the genes important for cell-type changes," he says. "The decision to be kidney or brain are governed by a different set of molecules than the molecules that govern how cells move. Now we have a pretty good handle on what genes are important. How they work is another matter entirely - I think we're a long way from solving that question."

For his PhD, Wallingford chose UT because he wanted to be in a basic science department rather than a medical school. His graduate research focused on kidney development, and absorbing the techniques of molecular biology in hopes of eventually applying it to morphogenesis.

"Learning molecular biology was what was fundamental for me in graduate school," he says.

Wallingford wants to understand at the most basic level how genes and cells work. His lab works on projects related to neural tube defects and asthma, yet he doesn't expect to directly cure any diseases.

"It would be wonderful to have some big impact on medical science, make people's lives better, keep babies from dying, but I believe that we basic scientists all contribute a little bit," he says. "There are the few super geniuses that win Nobel Prizes, but the rest of science progresses through tiny little bits of information. We add to the body of human knowledge, and the hope is that as basic scientists discover things, doctors will come along and say, 'that's useful to me.'"

Driven by discovery, Wallingford doesn't believe fun and hard work are mutually exclusive - students wanting to research with him can expect both. "The fun part is discovering things, and if you're not working really hard, other people are going to discover them," he says. "If you don't work hard it takes too long to discover anything fun. Making it fun keeps people working hard.

Dr. John Wallingford

Wallingford, who enjoys approaching problems in ways outside the norm, says his students can work on anything they choose in his lab "as long as it's not boring."

Opening people's minds to topics about which they were previously less aware, and watching them learn to love these subjects is Wallingford's favorite aspect of teaching. He aspires to be the same type of teacher that inspired him in the 7th grade.

"So many people don't like their jobs, but I love mine," he says. "Every couple weeks we find out something that nobody knows … that nobody has ever known. That's just incredibly cool and rewarding."