But seven years after relinquishing her old identity for a new career as a neuroscientist, it's clear Moore, a Lois Pope LIFE fellow, was repressing many hidden talents.

After four long, hard years working in the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute ophthalmology lab of mentor Jeffrey Goldberg, M.D., Ph.D., the senior Ph.D. candidate in the Miller School's neuroscience program has racked up some impressive accomplishments that portend many more in the future.

Last month, she was the first co-author on her first published journal article, which appeared in the most venerated of research magazines, Science. With a half-dozen collaborators, she helped Goldberg, assistant professor of ophthalmology and the article's senior author, identify a family of genes that may control the ability of the optic nerve to regenerate, long thought implausible.

"Absolutely critical," is how Goldberg describes Moore's role in the groundbreaking research that, one day, could lead to advances in treatment for degenerative eye diseases such as glaucoma, as well as for spinal cord injuries and other neurodegenerative diseases of the brain and spinal cord.

"Darcie really helped drive this. She doesn't work like a tech, simply doing something I tell her," Goldberg says. "She devises experiments and approaches and really thinks about the results, so she deserves a lot of credit."

Fellow collaborators include co-first author Murray Blackmore, Ph.D., postdoctoral fellow at the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis; co-author Ying Hu, M.D., Ph.D., postdoctoral fellow in the Goldberg lab; co-author Vance Lemmon, Ph.D., professor of neurological surgery; and co-author John Bixby, Ph.D., professor of cellular and molecular pharmacology.

Next on Moore's to-do list: This month, she'll complete and defend her dissertation, derived from her lab work that identified Krüppel-like factor-4 (KLF4) as a transcriptional repressor of axon growth by retinal ganglion cells, the neurons whose axons transmit electrical impulses from the retina to the brain, enabling sight.

Then next month, she's slated to graduate and, after a few more months in Goldberg's lab, head to a post-doctoral research position at an as-yet-undetermined university lab. But her ultimate goal is to become a professor of neuroscience so she can introduce students to the same wonders of the brain and the nervous system that captivate her.

That may sound like a big detour for an award-winning soprano who in 2000 was starring as Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro at Lyric Opera Cleveland. But Moore's first career actually propelled her to -- and prepared her for -- the second.

After earning her bachelor's and master's degrees in voice performance at The Cleveland Institute of Music (CIM) at Case Western Reserve University, and appearing in productions at the CIM Opera Theatre and Lyric Opera Cleveland, Moore was selected as a studio artist at the Chautauqua Opera in western New York, the oldest continuously running summer opera company in the U.S.

But when her three-month Chautauqua stint ended, she found herself dreading what she knew lay ahead: weeks, if not, months, of odd-job temporary work while waiting for the next gig.

"For the most part, performance jobs are short -- a few weeks, maybe a month, maybe a few months -- but not the whole year," Moore recalls. "So, in most cases, what you're doing to support your ‘habit' and pay for things like coaching is temping, which after a while is not really satisfying."

Moore decided it was time to mix her interest in music with a latent interest in science, and pursue a career in music therapy, a field she had been introduced to as an undergraduate while volunteering at Case Western's University hospital.

There, she had worked with renowned music therapist Deforia Lane, and was intrigued by how music was helping patients with neurological problems open locked doors.

"That really interested me, so after Chautauqua, I thought, ‘OK, I'll go to Colorado State's neurologic music therapy program,'" Moore remembers. "I was always interested in science but I didn't have a science background so I thought that would give me exposure."

But after taking required courses in neuroscience, neuroanatomy and physiology, Moore fell in love with her subjects and her science professors, who convinced her to switch to the master's program in biomedical sciences. One even assured Moore her performance background would be ideal training for a science career. He was right.

"To perform, you have to do things over and over again and have the discipline not only to practice but to make it perfect," Moore says, sitting at her lab desk, surrounded by cartoons about frazzled Ph.D. students. "We do the same here. It might take a month to learn to do an experiment right, and then you have to repeat it and repeat and repeat it again."

Moore's well-honed patience paid off in the lab. She spent months over-expressing more than 100 genes that change expression levels during retinal ganglion cell (RGC) development to see how they affect morphology and growth rates.

It was difficult work designed to take the next step from Goldberg's initial groundbreaking research. In 2002, he showed that RGCs lose their intrinsic ability to grow axons during development, a finding that also was published in Science while he was a graduate student.

Moore eventually found one "hit" that affected morphology and one that dramatically affected axon growth. When she and Goldberg unmasked the identity of the genes, they were elated to learn they were both KLF4.

When co-first author Blackmore found a related gene (KLF6) in a similar screen on neurons from the cerebral cortex, the team expanded its studies to look at the entire KLF family. They found the whole family may play a role in regulating regenerative ability, not just in the optic nerve, but also in neurons in the brain - findings that one day could improve the lives of millions.

And that's something Moore, who keeps her creative talents largely under wraps, should sing and dance about. In fact, Goldberg jokes, he'll see to it that she "defends her dissertation in full operatic style."