Heald grew up in Greenville, Pennsylvania,[5] and graduated from Hamilton College in upstate New York.[6] She said she was inspired by "Biochemistry Professor, Donna Brown. I barely had a clue about what I was doing, but discovered the joy of pipeting colorless liquids from tube to tube."[6] She received her Ph.D. from Harvard Medical School, where she worked in the laboratory of Frank McKeon.[6] She was a postdoctoral researcher with Eric Karsenti at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany.[5] She joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley in 1997, and has held the Flora Lamson Hewlett Chair of Biochemistry since 2011. In addition to running her research group, from 2018-2021 she served as a regional associate dean for research administration[7] and she is currently co-chair of the department of Molecular and Cell Biology.
Research
Heald studies topics in cell biology and developmental biology, including size control in animals, and the regulation of cell division.[5] She uses egg cytoplasmic extracts from the frog Xenopus laevis and the related, smaller frog Xenopus tropicalis to study the behavior and size scaling of the mitotic spindle.[8][9] She has shown that the volume of the cytoplasm in which a spindle forms is a key factor in regulating the size of the spindle,[10] addressing an important problem in cell biology, that of how cells sense and control the size of their organelles.[11] She identified a biochemical modification of the nuclear transport receptor importin α as a sensor that scales intracellular structures to cell size.[12]
Advocacy for collaborative structures in science
Heald has written about the challenges of starting a lab as a new Assistant Professor, and the benefits of collaborating with her neighbors Matt Welch and Karsten Weis to create a nurturing scientific and educational environment.[13]
