Elena elucidated a genetic circuit of T lymphocyte development governing positive selection. She found that an early signal through Calcineurin and NFAT leads to the activation of a raf regulator required for competence to respond to positive selection signals at the double-positive stage. The work was published in Nature 2007. In addition, she found that the specificity of the immunosuppressant drugs cyclosporin A and FK506 is in part due to the selective use of this pathway in the development of hematopoetic cells. She is now at John Hopkins and can be reached at: galloem@gmail.com