Biophysical Society Bulletin | February 2020

Biophysicist in Profile

Catherine Ann Royer Areas of Research Mechanisms of biological regulation at the molecular and cellular levels

Institution Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

At-a-Glance

Catherine Ann Royer , Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, is stepping into the role of BPS President this month. “BPS is the most democratic society I know. The science is great, and for the most part, the elitism that annoys me is absent,” she says. “The rules that no one can speak at the Annual Meeting within two years of their talk is really unique to BPS and ensures broad participation. I also appreciate the Society’s openness toward new fields and areas of study. BPS moves forward with the science, not behind it.”

Catherine Ann Royer

Incoming Biophysical Society President Catherine Ann Royer is a professor of biological sciences and chemistry and chem- ical biology and chaired Constellation Professor in Biocompu- tation and Bioinformatics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She grew up in Illinois — first on the South Side of Chicago and later in a working class neighborhood in Peoria. Her mother was an analytical chemist with the Chicago School Board and then a high school chemistry teacher. “I think the fact that my mother worked as a chemist, and a teacher, ended up making me consider the possibility of a career in science later on,” she shares. “Being a scientist would never have occurred to any of my friends in my rather low-income neighborhood.” Her preschool had French initiation, so she was interested in the French language from an early age. She wanted to be a French teacher when she grew up, and she began her college career studying French literature. During her first year she changed her major to chemistry. “I went on a year abroad program to France in my second year, but instead of studying French I studied natural sciences in French.” Then, she says, “instead of coming back after a year, I defected and ended up getting a natural sciences bachelor’s degree and a chemistry/ biochemistry master’s 1 degree — licence, it was called at the time — from the University of Pierre and Marie Curie - Paris 6.” After graduation, Royer and her future husband spent a year traveling in Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala before returning to Illinois. She worked waiting tables at a French restaurant, where she had a fortuitous encounter. One of her customers was impressed with her ability to pronounce the names of the dishes on the menu, and she explained that she had gone to college in France. “Politely, this person asked what I had studied, and when I answered biochemistry he asked who my professors were. It turned out that the customer was I. C. Gunsalus , a famous BPS member and former chair of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Biochemistry De- partment,” she explains. “He had collaborated with most of

my French professors. He suggested that I apply to graduate school, rather than continue to wait tables. I did, miraculous- ly the department accepted my application, and the rest is history.” Once she started at the University of Illinois, she was drawn to biological fluorescence and the lab of Gregorio Weber . Past BPS President Suzanne Scarlata was in the same lab, and Royer also overlapped with another Past President, Dorothy Beckett . Working in Weber’s lab sent Royer down the path to her current research. “I am still interested in the biophysical mechanisms of transcriptional regulation. During my PhD I also applied pressure-perturbation to characterize biophysical properties of allosteric proteins,” she says, “and still today I pursue the use of pressure to obtain biophysical information, as well as how organisms adapt to high-pressure environ- ments.” She names her thesis adviser as a scientist she admires, saying of Weber, “He was a fantastic visionary scientist and a true gentleman. Even in an age where sexism was still acceptable, he was not sexist at all. I learned a lot from him about science and how to do it.” After graduating with her PhD, she received a postdoctoral fellowship from the National Science Foundation and Cen- tre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) to work on allosteric binding and dynamics at the CNRS in Gif-sur-Yvette and the Université of Paris 7 in France. She then returned to the University of Illinois Physics Department to become the first user coordinator of the Laboratory for Fluorescence Dynamics directed by Enrico Gratton . “After three years, during which I got a National Institutes of Health starter grant to study bio- physics of a transcriptional repressor and was named adjunct professor of biochemistry at University of Illinois,” she says, “I got a tenure-track assistant professor position in the School of Pharmacy University of Wisconsin-Madison.” She was promoted to associate professor five years later, in 1995.

February 2020

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