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Note: Elizabeth (Liz) Jonas has been a Whitman scientist at С����Ƶ nearly every summer since the mid-1990s.

Elizabeth Jonas first got interested in mitochondria by chance.

In 1995, she was a postdoctoral researcher at Yale, working at the Marine Biological Lab in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where she was trying to record electrical currents inside the neurons of squids.

“Squid provide a good model for how the brain works,” said Jonas, who is now a Yale professor of neuroscience. “More specifically, in our case, they provide a good model for how the synapse, or the connection the between two neurons, works.”

Jonas eventually discovered that the recordings of electrical currents were coming from an unexpected place within the squids’ presynaptic terminal — mitochondria. These tiny organelles, which generate most of the energy in cells, are critical for the life and death of neurons and other cells.

Jonas, the Harvey and Kate Cushing Professor of Medicine and professor of neuroscience at Yale School of Medicine, is still studying mitochondria — and the role they play in memory formation and in neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s disease.

Source: Are mitochondria the key to a healthy brain? | Yale News