To the average person, zebrafish are an aquarium staple, a less exciting peer to pufferfish and coral reefs posed in fishtanks. To a handful of scientists at Notre Dame, zebrafish are changing the field of developmental biology.
Dana Klatt Shaw is one of these scientists. A recent addition to the Department of Biological Sciences team as an assistant professor, Klatt Shaw has been developing expertise on zebrafish for over a decade. Her research focuses on what makes an immune system regenerative in the central nervous system, specifically in response to spinal cord injury. Zebrafish are unique in being able to regenerate their spinal cords even after a complete severing.
“Just a few weeks later, without us intervening at all, the fish will completely regain function.” Klatt Shaw explained. “We don’t know of any mammals that have that capacity.”
Klatt Shaw grew up in Mid-Missouri, studying biochemistry at the University of Missouri as an undergraduate before completing her doctorate in human genetics at the University of Utah. There, she worked with Dr. David Grunwald, one of the first scientists to utilize zebrafish as a model organism to understand development and disease. In Grunwald’s lab, Klatt Shaw helped optimize tools to modify the zebrafish genome and create programmable nucleases.
She then returned to Missouri to complete a postdoc at the Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine in the lab of Dr. Mayssa Mokalled, where she began approaching the challenge of spinal cord regeneration in adult zebrafish. Her research remains focused on applying new technologies to understand cellular responses and functions in regeneration. For example, Klatt Shaw will compare non-regenerative cell types in mice to regenerative cells in zebrafish to understand what is present in fish and missing in mice.
Given that humans and zebrafish have similar genetics, molecules, and cells, this research has the potential to advance spinal cord repair in humans and other species with limited regenerative capacity.
Klatt Shaw went on the faculty job market in the fall of 2024, and Notre Dame had immense appeal. “I was blown away by the community mission on campus, as well as the emphasis on teaching and working with students.”
She believes Notre Dame, at its core, to be “building world leaders who are going to go out and impact the greater community.”
Klatt Shaw will start classroom teaching in the spring, but she’s enjoyed mentoring students throughout her first fall in South Bend. In her free time, she enjoys crafting, quilting, and taking her two dogs on long walks around South Bend.