Miriam B. Goodman is the Mrs. George A. Winzer Professor of Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine. She is also a Professor in, and current Chair of, the Molecular & Cellular Biology Department.
Her research focuses on the molecular events that give rise to the sensation of touch, temperature, and proprioception using caenorhabditis elegans as an animal model. Specifically, her team examines mechanoreceptor neurons, their ion channels. Also they are studying their signaling to determine how, within specialized sensory cells, the mechanical forces behind touch are converted to neurochemical signaling (termed mechanotransduction) at the protein level. Goodman’s team uses in vivo whole-cell patch clamp electrophysiology to examine the structure-function relationship of transduction proteins. Her lab is funded by multiple grants from the NIH’s National Institutes of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) and the National Institutes of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS).
Goodman received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Biochemistry from Brown University. Following her graduation from that institute she worked with Dr. Jeffrey Barker at the NIH. She went on to receive her PhD in Neurobiology from the University of Chicago, where she completed her dissertation research with Dr. Jonathan Art. There, she studied voltage-gated ion channels in hair cells, critical for the mechanical aspects of hearing. She then went on to postdoctoral research at the University of Oregon in the laboratory of Shawn Lockery, where she first began studying c. elegans. She went on to a second postdoc at Columbia University under Martin Chalfie, where she helped publish groundbreaking work in Nature, Nature Neuroscience, and the Journal of Neuroscience. Her research was on the contribution of a protein channel subunit to mechanoreceptor current in the context of touch stimulation. Goodman’s current list of publications is too extensive to provide here. She also currently serves as a Reviewing Editor for the Journal of Neuroscience and for eNeuro, as well as serving as an Academic Editor for PLoS Genetics.
Goodman began her teaching career at Stanford Medicine in 2002, becoming associate professor in 2010 and full professor in 2017. She is noted for her commitment to diversity and to trainees, having received the Landis Award for Outstanding Mentoring from the NINDS (2019) and the Excellence in Diversity and Inclusion Award from Stanford’s School of Medicine (2015). She has an impressive mentoring track-record. Her past trainees include many up-and-coming scientists, teaching instructors, and academic leaders including: Dr. Dail Chapman (Georgetown University), Dr. Bronwyn MacInnis (Broad Institute), Dr. Jan Kubanek (University of Utah), and Dr. Austin L. Brown (UC Davis).
You can find Dr. Goodman on twitter @wormsense
Thank you to Deborah Rupert for this entry!
References:
http://med.stanford.edu/goodmanlab.html
https://neurotree.org/neurotree/tree.php?pid=7834
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(13)00198-X.pdf
https://med.stanford.edu/profiles/miriam-goodman?tab=bio
Photo credit: https://med.stanford.edu/diversity/commission/internal-leaders/miriam-goodman.html