Training Ground
In the LSI's collaborative environment, trainees build the skills to become team leaders
When we watch professional athletes performing at the height of their careers, it’s not always easy to remember their origin stories. While some catapult to instant fame and recognition, the more common narrative is one of methodical development, with years spent on training squads, patiently working toward the spotlight.
As an athlete evolves, their training environment plays a critical role in their eventual success. They thrive under the guidance of insightful coaches, hone their skills by training with talented teammates and discover their own signature style of play.
Training a professional scientist is no different. The skills and expertise necessary to advance the forefront of the field cannot be acquired overnight — they are the result of a steady progression toward a goal. A developing scientist needs supportive mentors, collaborative colleagues and the freedom to pursue training that aligns with their scientific interests.
At the Life Sciences Institute, the principles of mentorship, peer-to-peer learning and scientific agency are foundational to trainee maturation. Researchers ranging from undergraduate students through graduate students and postdoctoral fellows come here to train, to gain the guidance, experience and expertise that prepare future scientific leaders.
Coaching a Scientific Mindset
Chloe Warrell first learned about natural products in her high school chemistry class and was intrigued by the science behind how the indigenous use of natural products resulted in healing properties. Her desire to better understand the science behind these products led her to David Sherman’s lab at the LSI. Now, as an undergraduate researcher in the Sherman lab, she is learning to harness nature’s chemistry to produce important molecules.
Warrell, a junior biochemistry major, works on a joint project between the Sherman and Filipa Pereira Labs, led by graduate student Christina McBride. This team approach allows her to seek guidance from multiple mentors. She credits the multi-tiered mentorship she receives as key to her evolution as a researcher.
McBride specializes in creating “bacteria factories.” Some molecules are incredibly complicated to produce in the lab and use a lot of resources, making their synthetic production harmful for the environment. McBride’s research focuses on genetically altering bacteria to manufacture these molecules, increasing production efficiency and reducing environmental impact. With enough of the molecule in hand, the lab can begin experimenting with different chemical modifications to try to increase the compound’s medicinal properties.
Warrell focuses on purifying the molecules produced by the bacteria and analyzing their purity, yield and chemical structures. To improve production, she also experiments with various growth conditions to see what will have the highest yield of the desired molecule. She is now using a similar system to produce another molecule, which is equally laborious to make synthetically.
I’ve really built my scientific intuition at the LSI. I see patterns of what will and won’t work, and why.”
“At first, I helped Christina with her project and grew my scientific problem-solving mentality,” she says. “But I eventually gained the skills to be able to branch out to my own project.”
Long term, Warrell is eager to use the research skills she began developing at the LSI to explore how natural products can make the agricultural industry more environmentally friendly.
“My mentors have helped me figure out how to move on when a result isn’t what I expected or wanted, and how we can shift a poor result into a positive product,” she says. “I’ve really built my scientific intuition at the LSI. I see patterns of what will and won’t work, and why.”
Free Agent
One of the most challenging and rewarding aspects of Romie Azur’s thesis work was the agency he was given while designing his experiments. While some graduate students are assigned to planned projects, LSI faculty member Tzumin Lee allowed Azur more autonomy.
“If it aligned with his lab’s goals, Tzumin was supportive,” says Azur, a fourth-year student in the Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology Ph.D. program. “Ihad to think hard and critically about where I wanted my project to go, but I was able to design a project that satisfied my curiosity.”
And Azur was curious about what controls neuronal fate in the developing brain.
During brain formation, neurons go through a series of iterative cell divisions, resulting in neurons that are born at different points on the developmental time scale. The timing of a neuron’s genesis helps dictate its neuronal fate, or what type of cell it will become.
Based on previous work, Azur suspected that a gene called Imp1 influenced neuronal fate. He wanted to use a tool invented by the Lee lab, called TEMPO, to test this hypothesis. This genetic tool uses fluorescent colors to label neurons as they divide, revealing the birth order of neurons in relation to each other.
For that approach to work, however, TEMPO needed to be surgically delivered to early-stage embryos — a procedure that only a few people in the world know how to do. For the initial Imp1 experiments, Azur was able to leverage an existing Lee lab collaboration; but he knew that his future research goals necessitated that he become proficient in the technique himself.
Lee connected with a collaborator in Japan who knew the technique and was willing to train Azur. He traveled to Japan for 10 days of specialized training, in part with support from the LSI’s David and Michelle Kroin Graduate Student Professional Development Program. This donor-funded program supports LSI graduate students pursuing external professional development opportunities.
“The LSI’s Kroin Program helped a lot in terms of having the financial support to go somewhere and train for more than a week,” Azur says. The effective administration of TEMPO confirmed Azur’s hypothesis that Imp1 regulates neuronal fate. In the longer term, Azur and the Lee lab are interested in using his training to perturb other genes that are predicted to influence brain development, to uncover greater insights into how these genes influence cell type production, division and location.
“My time at the LSI and Tzumin’s style of mentorship helped me to grow into a more independent researcher, a better advocate for my own science,” Azur says. “It comes with time, and here I think you get all the time you need.”
A Deep Bench
Postdoctoral fellow Jingcheng Wang came to the LSI looking to expand his scientific playbook. As the May-Walt fellow in the Michigan Pioneer Fellows Program, which aims to support exceptional earlycareer scientists on their journey to independent leadership, he wanted an opportunity to rapidly gain a variety of skills that could prepare him to one day lead his own lab.
Wang’s graduate research had focused on using traditional biochemistry and cell biology to study how lipids change the shape and function of proteins. A desire to augment his research approach with new skills in next-generation genetic tools led him to David Ginsburg’s lab at the LSI.
“There are quite a few different interests and specializations in the lab,” he says. “There was one senior investigator who specializes in evolutionary biology and another with a lot of expertise in the assay I’m performing. They helped me get started.”
This variety of expertise has proved critical to the success of Wang’s research into the movement of a key regulator of cholesterol in our blood, a protein called PCSK9. Extending some of the lab’s previous research on PCSK9, Wang is investigating how a carrier protein called SURF4 transports the PCSK9 where it needs to go within the cell to support healthy cholesterol levels.
This project requires not only the knowledge Wang brought from his graduate training but also quite a few new skills, fostering opportunities for him to learn some trick plays from his teammates.
The expertise of fellow lab members Laura Haynes and Matthew Holding, in particular, was critical to advancing his project, Wang says. Each detail of the experiment needed to be carefully planned, including the preparation of the samples that would be sent for sequencing and how the results would be analyzed. Haynes’ experience with screening experiments and Holding’s specialization in bioinformatics helped guide Wang’s strategy for executing initial experiments.
It’s an ideal atmosphere to learn new skill sets and build beneficial connections.
Within months of his start date, a few other postdoctoral scholars joined the lab. “The new hires help each other out, and if there is something we all need, we work together to get it,” Wang says.
The synergy within the Ginsburg lab has allowed Wang to identify additional mutations for further investigation, and he considers this synergy a defining feature of the culture of the LSI.
“The science here at the LSI is very collaborative, and we all care about each other,” he says. “It’s an ideal atmosphere to learn new skill sets and build beneficial connections.”