Name: Zachary Katz
Hometown: I’ve lived in Arizona, Florida, Virginia, New York City, and now San Diego.
Hobbies: I spend time outside the lab running on trails, exploring the outdoors, collecting cool rocks, growing unique plants (especially those that eat insects), reading, writing poems, and lots of art (my favorite is pottery).
What do you study? I study how our immune system works when we get sick. We have T cells that recognize when we are sick and I build microscopes to watch how they work. T cells have a unique ability to recognize a sick cell from a healthy cell and I am interested in how they can do that. Using a microscope, I can watch the changes that happen when a T cell touches another cell and figures out whether it’s sick or healthy.
Why is it important? Illness may occur when our immune system does not function correctly or when the immune system is too active. Studying T cells teaches us how we can tell our bodies to attack illness like the flu and even cancer. Figuring out what happens when T cells are too active has helped us develop treatments for something called autoimmune disease.
What do you like about being a scientist? I like figuring out how life works and actually seeing it happen. In science we are constantly learning something new and we encourage asking challenging questions. Most importantly, in science its OK to be wrong about a prediction. When something does not work, we do not get discouraged, we try to understand what happened.
This movie shows examples of living cells moving around while being filmed on a microscope. Immune cells patrol our bodies to look for infection or illness by moving around like this.