Biophysical Society Bulletin | January 2026

Biophysicist in Profile

Sally Pias Area of Research Biophysical mechanisms of transport processes impacting cell survival and cell death

Institution New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology

At-a-Glance

Sally Pias ’s path to biophysics—from rural New Mexico science fairs through the Peace Corps in Bangladesh, to her faculty position at New Mexico Tech—reflects the interdisciplinary curiosity that now drives her research.

Sally Pias

Sally Pias grew up in a rural mountain community in south ern New Mexico that originated as a tuberculosis colony and expanded into a farming and ranching community. She first developed an interest in scientific inquiry through participa tion in science fairs as a child. As a sixth grader, Pias conducted a Mendelian mouse-breeding study, working under the men torship of a PhD scientist who was a friend of her family. “My competitive side led me to aspire to more sophisticated research questions and techniques,” she shares. “I became more and more serious as I aspired to earn the opportunity to participate in the International Science and Engineering Fair and, just as importantly, to travel to various cities for the competition.” By high school, she had advanced to studying the effects of a noxious weed on pregnant rats, working with her father’s mentor, a biochemist and toxicologist. The goal was practical: characterizing and mitigating the weed’s toxicity to grazing cattle. “These mentored projects—and the science fair com petitions and associated community—gave me meaningful research experience, fed my curiosity, and taught me how exciting original research can be,” she recalls. Pias’s route to becoming a biophysicist was anything but linear. Although her educational background might seem like a patchwork of disparate interests—religion, chemistry, Bengali language, and Sanskrit—each thread has contributed to the interdisciplinary scholar she is today. At Emory University, she double majored in religion and chemistry while also studying and tutoring German. After completing her bachelor’s degree, she spent two years in Bangladesh as a Peace Corps volunteer, teaching English language and training teachers. She learned to speak Ben gali during that time and later studied Sanskrit at Emory when she returned for a master’s degree, combining study of religious texts in original languages with ethnographic and historical studies.

Eventually, Pias found her way to doctoral study in chemistry at New Mexico State University, focusing on structural biology of cell signaling molecules involved in cell migration and me tastasis. During her PhD program, she developed a significant interest in molecular dynamics simulation, using computa tional approaches to refine experimentally solved protein structures. She continued this computational focus during her postdoctoral training under Carlos Simmerling at Stony Brook University, working on enhanced sampling methods for studying large-scale conformational changes in proteins, with dynamics around the “wide-open” state of HIV protease as a model system. Since 2012, Pias has been a faculty member in chemistry at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (New Mexico Tech), where she earned tenure in 2018 and served as department chair during the challenging years of 2020–2023, spanning the COVID-19 pandemic. Her current research focus emerged from a conversation with a senior colleague during her first week as a faculty member. The colleague approached her with both a funding opportu nity and a curiosity question about oxygen effects on oil-wa ter emulsions. “We continued the conversation over several weeks, exchanging papers and ideas that led me to inquire how oxygen moves from its point of release in capillaries to sites of consumption within mitochondria,” she explains. This inquiry led Pias to explore membrane compositional effects on molecular oxygen transport—work that addresses fundamental questions about cell survival and death. Describ ing her specialization, she states, “I work to clarify biophysical mechanisms of critical transport processes that impact cell survival and cell death.” A pivotal moment came when she presented early work at a Bioenergetics Gordon Research Conference, where she met colleagues studying an ATP synthase “leak channel.”

January 2026

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