Ahna Skop
geneticist
Ahna Renee Skop is an American geneticist, artist, and a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is known for her research on the mechanisms underlying asymmetric cell division, particularly the importance of the midbody in this process.
Education
Skop grew up in New Haven, Connecticut and Fort Thomas, Kentucky. She earned a Bachelor of Science in biology and a minor in Ceramics from Syracuse University and before completing her Ph.D. in cellular and molecular biology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She did postdoctoral work at the University of California, Berkeley in the laboratories of Rebecca Heald, Barbara Meyer and John Yates (Scripps), after which she returned to the University of Wisconsin–Madison where, as of 2018, she is a full professor of genetics.
Career
Skop is known for her work on Caenorhabditis elegans, a free-living worm, and mammalian tissue culture cells where she has studied the mechanisms that control cell division. Her early work was on the final stages of cell division in C. elegans, and she identified the proteins in the midbody that are involved in cell division. Her more recent work examines defects that could be caused by problems in the mammalian midbody, where she has shown that midbody is an organelle that harbors translationally active RNA.
As a faculty member, Skop guided the creation of a diversity committee within the genetics department in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at the University of Madison-Wisconsin and led the creation of their STEM Diversity Network.
Skop collaborated with undergraduate students Elif Kurt and Caitlin Marks to release Genetics Reflections: A coloring book in 2020.
Artistic career
Skop has curated a scientific art show at the International C. elegans meeting, the "Worm Art Show", and she worked with a Madison, Wisconsin artist, Angela Johnson to create an art installation called "Genetic Reflections".
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