Biophysical Society Newsletter | September 2017

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BIOPHYSICAL SOCIETY NEWSLETTER

2017

SEPTEMBER

Biophysicist in Profile OTONYE BRAIDE-MONCOEUR Otonye Braide-Moncoeur , assistant professor of chemistry at Gordon College in Massachusetts, had a truly international upbringing due to her father’s career as a diplomat. “I’m considered a third culture kid,” she shares. “I grew up in several countries: Gabon, Nigeria, United States, Philip- pines, Austria; I moved a lot. Within the United States alone I have lived in Texas, New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Georgia, Florida, and now Massachusetts.” As a child, Braide-Moncoeur told her parents that she wanted to do work that would help people. “My mom planted the seed a typical Nigerian parent would,” she says. “At least back then, the approved career paths were lawyers, doctors, engineers, pharmacists. So it was only fitting that I become a medical doctor and since I felt I liked kids, pediatrician was it. But I also thoroughly enjoyed the arts and have always participated in it.” She combined the two into a big dream of becoming a pediatrician by day and a Broadway actress by night. By the time she was in high school, Braide- Moncoeur was still planning to become a medi- cal doctor, but found herself drawn to biology and afraid of the chemistry and physics classes. “This fear carried on into college even though I was determined to be a pre-med major,” she says. “Freshman year I took my general biology prereq- uisites but completely avoided general chemistry; I was also happy calculus-based physics was not in my future.” Toward the end of her freshman year, a friend encouraged her to get on track with her pre-med requirements. She enrolled in general chemistry the next semester and it suddenly clicked. “From that point on, science became this big puzzle that required solving and I was stimu- lated in so many new ways. I eventually switched to be a chem major, which meant doing calculus- based physics and more math, but I found myself enjoying them,” she shares. As an undergraduate, Braide-Moncoeur par- ticipated in a number of Research Experiences

for Undergraduates (REUs), which sparked her interest in a research career rather than one as a medical doctor. It was during a Multidisciplinary International Research Training (MIRT) REU program facilitated through Winston-Salem State University that she first became interested in biophysical topics. “Through this program, they placed me in a proteomics research group in Biomedicum Helsinki based on my interests. Dr. Marc H. Baumann assigned me to a project where we purified and characterized the recombinantly produced Tyrosine-kinase Hck SH3,” she ex- plains. “Our overall goal was to determine which segments triggered aggregation and formation of amyloid fibrils, which was of particular interest for understanding various neurodegenerative diseases. This opportunity really impacted my desire to pursue work that would allow me to study pro- teins especially in relation to diseases.” A few years later, during her PhD studies at the University of Florida, she was officially introduced to biophysics in the lab of Gail E. Fanucci . “As a physical chemist, her group used various tech- niques — EPR, NMR, etc. — to tackle biological questions, and it was through her accepting me into her research group that I learned what bio- physics entailed,” she says. “She also encouraged me to apply for the Minority Affairs Committee [now the Committee for Inclusion and Diversity] travel award to attend the Biophysical Society An- nual Meeting; BPS made a remarkable impression on me.” During her graduate studies, Braide-Moncoeur had a long journey to finding a lab that was the right fit for her, in terms of research interests and mentorship. “The desire for this combo, though it seems reasonable, became the biggest obstacle for me during my graduate school career. In one case, the advisor I had was cornering me into computa- tional work, which focused on cyclic square wave voltammetry. In another case, the initially agreed- upon project was no longer of interest to the

Otonye Braide-Moncoeur

Profilee-at-a-Glance Institution Gordon College Area of Research Mechanistic understanding of pulmonary surfactant at the membrane-fluid interface

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