Biophysical Society Bulletin | November 2024

Biophysicist in Profile

in 2001. We were hot on their heels with our papers in 2002 and 2003, measuring transition temperatures and tie-lines. That 2003 paper has been cited over a thousand times now. Sarah convinced her fantastic friend Ben Stottrup to join the group. I might have initially taught Sarah and Ben about phase behavior in lipid membranes, but they got me tenure and taught me how to run a group. They and many other students ‘mentored up,’ and I am so grateful.” At BPS Annual Meetings, Keller and Veatch connected with Lee, Erin Sheets , Anne Kenworthy , Kalina Hristova , Anne Hinter liter , and Susan Gilmore , forming the Membrane Chix. As Keller told Living Histories , “We didn’t have an Old Boys Network, so we became our own network. We shared stories about which colleagues you could trust and which you should not share preliminary results with,” she explains. “We also noticed that some outstanding senior women in our field had not won major BPS awards. We ganged up on them and encouraged them to apply.” Keller remarks, “For me, BPS meetings are the annual reunion of my scientific family: through my ‘direct lineage’ of Sar ahs, my mentor-aunties and -uncles, my science-cousins in related fields, and my brilliant nieces and nephews in the next generation. BPS meetings are important for all our careers because they are where we network to learn the quiet backstory: the experiments that didn’t work, the ideas that weren’t funded, the job offers that were declined, and the collaborations that didn’t continue.”

While Keller was finishing her dissertation, she contemplat ed possible career paths. She felt that becoming a professor was impossible because when she and other women in her department asked their Chair why there were no tenure-track women on the faculty, he told them that any woman hired would have to be unassailable so that no one could say she had been hired just because she was a woman. Keller told Living Histories , “I interpreted that to mean that [any woman] had to be better than nearly all the men on the faculty. That’s when I stopped thinking I could ever become a professor.” Nevertheless, she still loved biophysics, and she wanted to apply imaging techniques to biophysical problems. She leveraged her next BPS Meeting to decide what her next move would be. She reveals, “I brought a list of labs doing cryo-electron microscopy to the meeting and asked everyone who the best mentors were. The clear consensus favored Joe Zasadzinski , who is indeed a great mentor! After I joined Joe’s lab, my lab-mate, Ka Yee Lee , told me how much she loved working with Harden McConnell. ” As a result, Keller completed postdoctoral fellowships in the Zasadzinski lab at the Uni versity of California, Santa Barbara, and in the McConnell lab at Stanford University. “In Harden’s lab, I was researching liquid-liquid phase transitions in lipid monolayers, thinking about stripe phases and critical phenomena. I was also gener ating most of my own research directions. An idea crept back into my head about maybe becoming a professor,” she shared with Living Histories . Keller told Living Histories that after she began a faculty position at the University of Washington, “the first graduate student to join my group was the brilliant and driven Sarah Veatch . We happened to be doing the right research at the right time. We were trying to find large-scale liquid-liquid phase separation in model lipid bilayers when the first paper showing how this behavior could be achieved was published The first graduate mentee of Sarah Keller (left) was Sarah Veatch (right), whose first graduate mentee was Sarah Shelby (center).

In addition to her career, Keller enjoys traveling with her partner, Rob Carlson , hiking with her University of Washington colleagues Anne McCoy and Julie Theriot , and making art. The October 1, 2024 issue of Biophysical Journal features an oil painting of Keller’s, highlighting her team’s result that most methods of making giant vesicles incorporate similar ratios of lipids. She also volunteers to broaden voter turnout in elections. One year, she celebrated a student’s dissertation defense by making a cake on the theme of their research, and “thesis cakes” became a lab tradition to highlight and cele brate the work of her trainees. Sarah Keller holds up a “thesis cake” she made to celebrate a student’s dissertation defense.

November 2024

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