The art in science

When Sylvie Garneau-Tsodikova, at the age of 24, thought her life of teaching and dancing as a classically-trained pianist and ballerina was coming to an end, she pirouetted towards her other love—science.

"Science was always intriguing to me," she said. "It is like art—you never know what's going to happen. When you paint you start on a blank canvas and you create something—it's the same with science. When you start mixing chemicals or looking at the biological system you never know what you are going to discover."

The daughter of a carpenter and stay at home mom, Garneau-Tsodikova was the first person in her family to attend university, but when she did, she not only realized that she loved science, but also that academia would allow her to follow her passions: teaching and science. "My family is very passionate about what they do," said Garneau-Tsodikova. "They are very hard workers. The passion that I have for science comes from their passion for whatever they do."

A top student throughout school and college, Quebec-native Garneau-Tsodikova, achieved the perfect glissade by pursuing a PhD in Chemistry at the University of Alberta, the English-speaking part of Canada. For her, this meant, that she would also have to learn English beyond the one, two, three, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday vocabulary of her youth. She achieved both the PhD and gained English fluency with equal grace and ease, still while teaching undergraduates in chemistry and just a few dance classes on the side. To Garneau-Tsodikova, art and science are the pas de deux extraordinaire.

At the end of her Ph.D., she wanted to add biology to her scientific discovery. So she joined Chris Walsh's lab at Harvard as a post-doc gaining insights into metabolites and enzymology.

And she continued to dance. That is how she met her husband, a Ukrainian physicist Oleg Tsodikov. He worked on the same floor at Harvard, and although she'd not bumped into him in the lab, he did happen to attend one of Sylvie's dance classes. They married and are now both on the U-M faculty, Tsodikov at Pharmacy.

Garneau-Tsodikova now works on small molecules that have anti-cancer, antibiotic or antifungal properties. Her lab looks at natural products to understand how Nature makes them and how to use chemical tools to make new antibiotics or new drugs, using Nature as the inspiration.

Her favorite part of her job is readily evident. Even though she's been at U-M only five months, she already has 10 students and a post-doc. Eventually, she hopes to build a team of 20 people in her lab with a healthy mix of biochemists, biologists, and chemists.

She still dances, plays piano, and paints in oils in her home studio every week. But she has left ballet behind.

"I love Salsa dancing, I love ballroom dancing, and I love Argentine tango," she said. "I still dance every week."

She begins teaching again in the Fall of '07 after spending a semester opening her lab and training students there. "I'm very excited about teaching—that's something so important to me about the academic setting—passing knowledge to others that is so very gratifying."