UW-Madison: Visually impaired, but visionary

Contact: Andrew Hasley, (970) 314-1752, hasley@wisc.edu

Madison – When you ask questions about Drew Hasley, the answers often revolve, paradoxically enough, around questions. He was selected for his first biology research job at Albion College in Michigan by a professor who was impressed by the difficulty of his questions in class.

At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Hasley’s graduate advisor, geneticist Francisco Pelegri, fondly describes him as “extremely well-rounded and always raising questions and thinking about various aspects of a problem.”

A question that has bedeviled the field of developmental biology for 150 years surfaces when you ask Hasley about his dissertation research in the Pelegri lab. The dissertation was built on three distinct projects, he says.  “The thing that ties them together is, how do you go from a single cell to a fully functioning organism with, in the case of a human, trillions of cells? How does development happen?”

An unspoken question lurks behind some of these conversations: How did Hasley accomplish the work necessary to become the first legally blind person with a UW-Madison doctorate in genetics – and possibly only the second blind UW-Madison Ph.D. in biological sciences?

What makes Hasley, now 30, special? For one thing, Drew, as he’s universally known, is approachable, optimistic, quick to laugh – yet he’s determined to build on his record of success so “there are more people like me” in the sciences.

The discussion turns, logically enough, to his parents. “This conversation would not be happening,” he says, “if I did not have parents with college educations who could do research, who could go to the library and learn enough to say to my doctors, ‘I don’t think that diagnosis makes sense because of this and this.'”

As a child in Arizona and then Colorado, Hasley was diagnosed with Leber congenital amaurosis, a mutation that has destroyed most of his retinas. He says his mother, a historian, and his father, an aircraft mechanic, “did not fall for the ‘woe is me, poor parents with this disabled child’ routine. Kids pick up on that. They were really supportive of just about anything I wanted to try, and were very active in suggesting things I could try.”

READ MORE AT http://news.wisc.edu/a-vision-for-genes-one-of-a-kind-geneticist-snags-ph-d/