Catherine S Key

Dr. Cathy Silver Key hails from the Midwest, having been born and raised in St. Louis, MO. She received the Muriel E. Babcock Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Biological Sciences upon graduating magna cum laude with her B.S. in 1988 from the University of Missouri at St. Louis. She worked for one year as a research technician at Washington University in St. Louis on the Human Genome Project before moving to North Carolina to pursue her Ph.D. in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Upon completing her Ph.D. in 1997, she joined the Biochemistry Department at Duke University for a short post-doc. When twins came into her life, she transferred to Elon University to teach as an adjunct for 2.5 years. In 2001, she returned to UNC-CH as a post-doctoral fellow in the Seeding Postdoctoral Innovators in Research and Education (S.P.I.R.E.) program, which gave her the opportunity to begin research on the developmental genetics of Drosophila melanogaster and teach at a variety of institutions, including NCA&T State University. In 2005, she joined the faculty at NCCU, where she continues her research on a gene important for DNA replication (former NIH/NIGMS-funded research). Recently, she has shifted her research focus to behavioral genetics: alcohol-induced behaviors and a male sterility phenotype.

Dr. Silver Key has taught Genetics at NCCU since 2005 and absolutely loves it! Telling mini-case study stories and engaging students in learning through many "active learning" methods will never grow old, in her opinion. Likewise, training students to be tomorrow's successful biological and biomedical researchers in her research lab is always an adventure! As an example of both learning in the classroom and conducting research in the lab, Dr. Silver Key is a member of the Genomics Education Partnership (GEP) (http://gep.wustl.edu/), which aims to teach students gene structure and provide a bioinformatics-based research experience.