VT College of Science Magazine Annual 2014 | Page 9

good for me and now there are a lot
of things I do as a mentor where I try
to emulate what he was doing.

“One interview was in a place
where I didn’t meet any women in a two-day visit,” she said.
“Another interview was here at
Virginia Tech and there were
plenty of women and a lot of
the faculty had kids and that
made me feel like this was the
place for me.

“I started to see the issue of women
in science when I came to the U.S. I
don’t know if the problem doesn’t exist or it didn’t exist where I was, but
I started to become more informed
and reading more, eventually becoming a member of the American Society for Cell Biology, which has a section on women in cell biology where
they discuss the issues of women in science. But I’ve never felt like it
was so hard for me. I feel like my colleagues respect me for the work
I’ve done; but for me being aware of the issues was fundamental
when I looked for a job. I really wanted to find a job in a place where
there were other women and people with families because I knew I
wanted to have a family – I wanted to have it all (laughs). I wanted
the job and the family and I knew the environment, the work environment, would determine if I could do that or not.”
As a practice run, Cimini sent out a few job applications to get an
idea of how the process worked, and she landed a few interviews
that she thought would just be for practice.
“One interview was in a place where I didn’t meet any women in a
two-day visit,” she said. “Another interview was here at Virginia Tech
and there were plenty of women and a lot of the faculty had kids and
that made me feel like this was the place for me. The town I grew up
in was small. I’m not a city person even though I went to school in
Rome. I like a place like this where everything is easy and the kids are
safe, so when I got an offer I decided to come. My trial interview, as it
turns out, was real.”

The first research paper Cimini published
after starting work at Tech was recently included in the book, “The Biology of Cancer,
2nd edition,” by Robert Weinberg. The study
looked at errors in cell division and the defects in the geometry of mitotic spindles
– the machine that separates the chromosomes during mitosis.

“We thought the geometry may affect mitosis, even if there is a defect that is transient
in the geometry, it may affect the fidelity of
chromosome segregation and because we
needed a good model system to look at geometry defects, we realized
cancer cells had this particular problem a lot. So, initially the project
wasn’t looking at cancer cells, but rather the mechanisms that cause
errors in mitosis. This is actually very important because I think students sometimes don’t realize that. I try to stress the fact you really
have to understand the basic mechanisms if you want to understand
what’s wrong in a cancer cell. The research in our lab is really exemplary for that. We study basic mechanisms, but this is important for
cancer biology and there are more labs, particularly in the mitosis
field, that have started to look at this because of the work we’ve done.”

Now working out of offices at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute,
Cimini hopes to do more with computational biology and mathematical modeling.
“I didn’t do any mathematical modeling before coming to Virginia
Tech,” she said. “The modeling makes progress faster by allowing us
to make predictions and design experiments to test those predictions. It has re-inspired me to pursue this approach.”

That was 2006 when she arrived with her husband – who is French
and who she met while he was at Duke – and a 2-week-old baby.
Since then Cimini has been concentrating on cell division, and while
she doesn’t consider herself a cancer biologist, much of her work
directly supports cancer study.
“I study cell division but a lot of the research we do is important for
cancer research because cancer cells don’t do cell division very well.
They make a lot of errors. If we can understand those errors and why
they are made, that will help us understand cancer,” Cimini said.
(top left) Daniela Cimini with husband Christophe, and sons Matteo and Nicolas in
the gardens of the royal palace Reggia di Caserta in Italy, about two hours from her
hometown. (right) Cimini with Matteo taking an opportunity to sight-see while
with the family during a conference trip to Japan in 2010.

www.science.vt.edu

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