Dr. Heide Schatten is Professor at the University of Missouri, Columbia, USA. She is a cell biologist with research focused on cytoskeletal regulation in various cell systems and on cytoskeletal dysfunctions that play a role in disease such as cancer.Her interest in cancer research was stimulated by father and sister physicians who as clinicians were faced with treating incurable diseases for which research on cell and molecular levels had not yet advanced to our current state of knowledge. She pursued her interest in research and received her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Karl-Ruprecht University in Heidelberg, Germany, and performed her Ph.D. research studies at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg to explore the mechanisms leading to abnormal cell divisions in cancer and to test drugs that prevent abnormal cell proliferation. She performed pre-and postdoctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and entertained numerous collaborations with colleagues in the USA, Canada, Europe, China, and Latin America in the fields of reproduction and cancer using cell and molecular biology approaches. She has given numerous presentations in these and other countries. Her studies also included collaborations with NASA scientists and experiments aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour to examine the effects of spaceflight on centrosome-cytoskeletal regulation during development. She also holds an M.S. degree in music from the School of Music in Heidelberg.She is a member of the American Society for Cell Biology, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Microscopy Society of America. She has received numerous awards including grant awards from NASA, NIH, and NSF. She has published over 210 papers, 13 book chapters and edited several special topics journal issues and 9 books with several more in progress.