Biophysical Society Bulletin | April 2023

Communities

Ranajeet Ghose Public Affairs Committee (PAC)

Ranajeet Ghose

Is this your first volunteer position for BPS? If not, what other positions have you held? This is my first volunteer position with the Biophysical Society. Why do you volunteer? Scientific societies like BPS play a critical role within the global scientific community. The Annual Meetings provide a venue for scientists at various career stages, from diverse disci plines, and from different backgrounds to discuss science, share their scientific journeys, and learn from each other. In teractions within the Society enable people with complemen tary, but divergent, expertise to come together, providing the means to tackle otherwise intractable problems. My roughly decade-long involvement with BPS has shown me that the Society does this better than most other scientific groupings that I am, or have been, a part of. I have benefited tremen dously, on both a scientific and a personal level, from BPS. Therefore, I felt that it was time to give back in a small way. When the then-President of the Society, Cathy Royer , whom I have known and admired for many years, suggested that I consider serving in some role, I jumped at the idea. What has been a highlight from your volunteer experience? My time as a member of the BPS Public Affairs Committee (PAC) began in 2020 during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The PAC members felt that organizing a session during the 2021 BPS Annual Meeting, to be held virtually, about the lessons learned from the ongoing pandemic to better prepare for future ones, would be especially timely. The session, which I moderated, brought together a panel of experts, including a structural virologist with interest in coronaviruses, a microbiologist at the forefront of therapeu tic strategies, an industrial researcher involved in vaccine development, and a social scientist who studies the impact of disparities in the availability of healthcare. It was a challenge to plan the session by connecting scientists across three different continents (and time zones) with different levels of internet connectivity. However, thanks to the hard work and behind-the-scenes efforts of BPS’s fearless Director of Advo cacy & Public Affairs, Leann Fox , the session was a resounding success. I felt that I learned a lot, and I hope that the audience did too.

Do you have advice for others who might be thinking about volunteering? I would say that one should absolutely do it. It would be an extremely rewarding and gratifying experience. When not volunteering for BPS, what do you work on? My laboratory uses a variety of experimental and computa tional approaches to study the structure, interactions, and regulation of protein kinases in prokaryotes and eukaryotes. We are especially interested in understanding the mecha nisms through which “unconventional” protein kinases are activated and are able to phosphorylate their substrates using atypical structural scaffolds.

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April 2023

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