Fay Guarraci is a recent recipient of a National Science Foundation Major Research Instrumentation Award. And yet, that may not even be the most amazing aspect of her brief tenure at Southwestern. Rather, it might be the simple fact that she is here at all.

If not for some of the tough decisions made by others and a few cosmic convergences, Guarraci may have been conducting her research at the University of Trieste--Italy rather than Southwestern University at Georgetown, Texas. Guarraci, with her husband, Russ, immigrated to Texas in 2003 all the way from back east. But in 1923, her grandparents made the monumental decision to emigrate from Italy to America. Barring that event, who knows if Guarraci would have ever made it all the way to Georgetown.

She inherited her grandparents' sense of wanderlust and left her native New Jersey to attend McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. She came to this decision after she fell in love with the city while visiting a friend. Another interesting quirk of fate led to a major and, ultimately, a career in psychology. Guarraci explains, "My interest in neuroscience was inspired by a course I took my first year at McGill. It was an advanced class that I shouldn't even have taken, but I got in anyway because we registered for classes electronically. It was a hard course, but was so cool that I was hooked on neuroscience. The course was Human Behavior and the Brain."

After finishing at McGill, Guarraci headed south--to Vermont. There she earned her master's and doctoral degrees in behavioral neuroscience and planned for a career in neuroscience research. Again, the decisions of others and the Fates opened up another door. When her Ph.D. advisor left for a sabbatical during her last semester of graduate school, she was asked to teach his course. She had not considered teaching as a career option up to that point. Says Guarraci, "I didn't want to teach. When I taught this class though, I thought, 'Wow! This is really fun!' I really enjoyed having my own class and having the opportunity to work and interact with the students."

Guarraci and her husband both searched for tenure-track positions after three years at Dartmouth College, where both were post-doctoral fellows, and consider themselves fortunate to have landed in Central Texas. "We moved to Austin not only because we both got positions (he is at St. Edward's and loves it), but mostly because I liked Southwestern the most of all the institutions with which I interviewed." Additionally, Guarraci revels in the community of scholars with whom she works. She notes, "I have a great group of friends here. My colleagues are interesting, fun and supportive. The faculty and staff here are awesome. Everything in my transition to life in Texas and at Southwestern has been better than I could have ever imagined." Southwestern also has provided Guarraci with extracurricular outlets for her adventuresome nature. "I really like that the faculty can play intramural sports. I have played softball, flag football, dodgeball and basketball."

It is inevitable when talking to Guarraci to get caught up in the enthusiasm she has for her work. "Being a neuroscientist is like being a detective. Using clues from the literature and experiments, you try to piece together the evidence to understand this very mysterious topic--understanding how the brain works and how it controls behavior." She conveys this excitement to her students through her lectures, labs and daily interactions. Thanks to the award she received from the NSF, she can now provide Southwestern students with significant, hands-on research opportunities in the area of behavioral neuroscience--an opportunity typically reserved for students at large research universities.