Biophysical Society Bulletin | March 2021

Biophysicist in Profile

The biggest challenge of his career has been his transition from student to supervisor. “I constantly feared my skill set and experience was insufficient to be a good leader for my research group, to live up to the experience I had during my PhD with Victoria Guixé in Chile and Elizabeth Komives in the United States as supervisors. I questioned not only my ability to train new students, but also to provide them with the confidence and encouragement that they needed in such crucial times of our paths as scientists. I also wondered if the research path I wanted to follow was interesting for the stu- dents and the research community,” he shares. “After being very secretive about my fears and concerns, I decided to be straightforward and make my students aware of the pros and cons of being a researcher, from the challenges we confront- ed when establishing a new experimental and computational laboratory from scratch to the struggles of submitting and resubmitting grant applications. It turned out to be an exer- cise of mutual support and trust in ourselves and our research that strengthened our group. In turn, our research has flour- ished, and we collectively have been recipients of recognition and awards.” One such award was the 2020 Biophysical Journal Paper of the Year Award, which Ramírez-Sarmiento won for his paper “Dif- ferential Local Stability Governs the Metamorphic Fold-switch of Bacterial Virulence Factor RfaH” written in collaboration with Pablo Galaz-Davison , José Alejandro Molina , Steve Silletti , Elizabeth A. Komives , Stefan H. Knauer , and Irina Artsimovitch . Komives, who has worked with Ramírez-Sarmiento since his graduate school days, shares, “César embodies what I like to refer to as the ‘no-fear’ approach to science. If a question can only be answered with a particular approach, he finds someone who can help him do the experiment and he learns how to do it, and how to interpret the data. The resources for science in Chile are sparse, so Chilean scientists need to travel to be able to do cutting-edge science. César is driven to understand how proteins work, and he stops at nothing to get the answers to his questions. He has built a research program that fully integrates theory, computation, and experiment and this has been a real bootstrap effort. I am most impressed with what he has been able to accomplish with limited resources. I am also impressed with his ability to recognize talent and the impact he is making through his educational efforts, both in the classroom and in the lab, to train the next generation of top Chilean scientists.” As for his plans for the future, he shares, “Since our incorpo- ration into the Millennium Institute of Integrative Biology in Chile, we are determining how we can contribute through our work on protein biophysics to other research areas, such as synthetic biology, systems biology, and functional genomics. We are also rethinking the way we do research in our labo- ratory to be able to continue our experimental and computa-

Ramirez-Sarmiento playing guitar in Chilean alternative rock band Libra.

tional work uninterrupted in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. We also hope to contribute to combatting the COVID-19 pandemic in underdeveloped regions through the development of low-cost and open-source methods for de- tecting viral infections.” Ramírez-Sarmiento tells students and trainees to keep an open mind: “Do not be afraid of exploring biophysics through different perspectives. If you are working on experimental biophysics, give computational biophysics a try. If your experi- ence is only in computational work, do not be afraid to consid- er joining a lab performing experimental work. The feeling of being able to freely converse with researchers from diverse backgrounds and to understand their vision is always satis- fying, especially in such an interdisciplinary world. Also, never forget that life is more than science and that science is meant to be enjoyed, so have fun!”

Profiles in Biophysics No two biophysicists have the same story. Read about the many paths that led each of them to become a biophysicist. www.biophysics.org/profiles-in-biophysics

March 2021

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