Elaine Ostrander, branch chief, cancer genetics, NHGRI, Bethesda, Maryland

Like most scientists, Elaine Ostrander's work has benefited from collaborations. But somewhat unusually, she estimates that 90% of her publications feature work with scientists who were not based at her principal laboratory. In fact, she didn't even seek out those collaborators who have proved most valuable — they found her.

Ostrander feels that her career path was equally fortuitous. Her early thesis work and postdoctoral research concentrated on DNA structure. But a cluster of meetings on the genomes of the fruitfly, nematode worm and mouse caught her attention and she decided to change tack. She moved to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1991, just as it was beginning to map the dog genome, which offered her the opportunity she was seeking. Her good fortune continued when she met her key collaborators, who helped her forge links between dog and human. (see CV).

She ran into her first major collaborator, Francis Galibert of the University of Rennes in France, in 1993 after she gave a talk at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. A little later, Janet Stanford, Kathleen Malone and Janet Daling from the Public Health Sciences division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, approached her, saying that they had large human genetic sets for breast and prostate cancer. These allowed the group to look for genetic mutations shared by both species in an effort to pinpoint genes related to disease.

Ostrander's guiding principle behind joining collaborations has remained constant. “Find people who are doing interesting things,” she says, “and put your heads together to find ways to do things that are bigger than what you can each do on your own.”

The need for bigger challenges is one reason why Ostrander is moving to the US National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) in November. With the dog genome mapped, she is ready to take a wider look at gene function. Access to proteomics tools at the NHGRI's campus in Bethesda, Maryland, will allow her to ask broader questions. And the National Institute of Health's huge number of employees will provide her with plenty more potential collaborators.