Biophysical Society Newsletter - September 2016

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BIOPHYSICAL SOCIETY NEWSLETTER

2016

SEPTEMBER

“The postdoctoral era was one of the most interesting and stressful periods of my life. The PhD glut that everyone complains about now is nothing new, so I ended up doing a lot of postdoc jobs,” Wadkins says. “Later I was at St. Jude Chil- dren’s Research Hospital in Memphis, followed by the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC. I nearly gave up on science as a career, but caught a break.” He took a position at the San Antonio Cancer Institute and later was hired as an assistant professor of oncology at the Johns Hop- kins School of Medicine. Since 2003, Wadkins has been at the University of Mississippi, where he studies unusual DNA structures as drug targets. “My lab just moved into the National Center for Natural Products Research on campus,” he says. “My research is at the intersection of small molecules, natural products, DNA, and proteins that bind DNA.” Over the years, his biggest challenge has been one faced by nearly every scientist: funding. “I’ve been very fortunate to have had funding from one source or another for 18 straight years. It hasn’t always been enough to do everything we wanted to do, but it kept the doors open and the students busy,” he says. “You face [this challenge] by con- tinuing to try to get funding. If you have a basic science lab, nobody comes to you. You have to go to them and sell your idea.” Wadkins has spent the last year away from his lab, as the Biophysical Society’s first Congressional Fellow, working in the office of Congressman Steve Cohen of Tennessee. “This [experience] has opened my eyes as to how the government really works,” he says. “It’s much different from the civ- ics classes I took in elementary school — do they even teach those anymore? I handle the health- care portfolio for the congressman, and that is an incredibly complex issue, but unlike biophysics, the underlying principles are not simple. Nobel laureate Michael Levitt was here for the Biophys- ics Week Hill briefing, and I told him that if he thought quantum mechanics was difficult, try Medicare billing codes.”

His time on Capitol Hill will soon be coming to a close , and Wadkins says there is much he will miss upon returning to academia. “I’m going to miss the astonishing learning experience you get on the Hill. Not only do Nobel laureates drop by to give briefings, so do directors of programs at NIH, NSF, NASA, etc.; advocacy organizations for every imaginable cause; celebri- ties of every magnitude; political leaders of every stripe; business leaders of every area of com- merce; and military leaders,” he says. “They all come to the Hill to inform Congress what is happening in the world. It is a fire hose of knowledge, and I will miss trying to drink in every drop.”

Wadkins with Baltimore Orioles great Brooks Robinson at a Major League Baseball reception on the Hill.

He looks forward to returning to the University of Mississippi and putting his experience to good use in fostering government outreach efforts. “I am also playing Powerball every week on the slim odds that I could stay in the congressman’s office another year,” he jokes. Wadkins plans to continue looking into uses of DNA as a nanomaterial, despite some challenges. “Everyone working in the field knows that DNA is not cost-effective for mass production. I look forward to figuring out how to merge DNA’s ease of use with a material that is more conducive to use in scale-up applications,” he says. He advises early career biophysicists, “Hang in there. It’s a bumpy career. Even now, I get frus- trated some days and throw my hands up. But 30 years from now, you’ll look back to your first experiments in grad school and think, ‘I made the right decision to do this.’ And what I’ve discov- ered from being a Congressional Fellow for a year is that not only will your training get you ready for a career in biophysics, it will get you ready for everything.”

Profilee-at-a-Glance Institution University of Mississippi

Area of Research DNA as a nanomaterial