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BIOPHYSICAL SOCIETY NEWSLETTER
3
JUNE
2017
Profilee-at-a-Glance
Institution
NIH, Retired
Area of Research
Structure, function,
regulation, and
dynamics of membranes
and membrane proteins.
trouble, he would chastise me and insist that
I should be able to teach anyone whatever I
learned.”
Following completion of her PhD studies, she
worked in the lab of
Konrad Bloch
at Harvard Uni-
versity as a postdoctoral fellow. Her work focused
on the role of a supernatant protein factor in the
regulation of lipid metabolism and was supported
by an American Heart Association postdoctoral
fellowship and then by an F32 grant from NIH.
“During my training, lipids were considered messy
and to be avoided but they are so important and
necessary for membrane structure, integrity, activ-
ity and function of membrane proteins. Lipids
were not a ‘hot’ area then, but I persisted and
learned as much as I could,” she says.
Chin had trouble finding an academic position
focused on lipids in the New England area fol-
lowing her postdoc. In addition to running his
lab at Harvard, Bloch was a consultant with a
small biotechnology company in Cambridge and
suggested that she consider working in the biotech
industry, which she did. “I was hired to manipu-
late yeast metabolism for desired products. The
biotech world was very different but I learned a lot
about the different kinds of benefits and challenges
faced,” she explains. “Later, this experience would
help me appreciate what small businesses faced
when applying for SBIR and STTR grants to sup-
port their research. ”
She then accepted a position as an instructor at
Harvard Medical School in pathology and at the
Center for Blood Research and focused on char-
acterizing a protease inhibitor. Not long after she
began working there, her husband,
Don Schnei-
der
, moved from Dartmouth Medical School to
the Center for Scientific Review at NIH. For the
previous ten years, they had maintained a long-
distance marriage between Boston and Hanover,
New Hampshire, and Schneider hoped that she
would join him in moving to Bethesda. “After
much thought, I applied for and accepted a posi-
tion as a Senior Staff Fellow at NIH and NICHD
with
Rick Klausner
,” she says. “There I focused on
characterizing the relationship between iron sulfur
clusters and regulation of RNA motifs.”
Although she enjoyed the research, af-
ter a while she felt that it was time to
move on, and applied for a Program
Director position at NIGMS. The po-
sition allowed her to return to her first
and constant research passion, mem-
branes and membrane proteins. In
1994, she began with a small portfolio
of about 60 grants, and by the time of
her retirement this year, she had built
up the program to around 250 grants
focused on structure, function, and
dynamics of lipids, membranes, and
membrane proteins.
This work was very rewarding for her,
as she saw the growth and develop-
ment of the membrane protein field
and the success of applicants, grantees,
and their trainees in her and other port-
folios. She is extremely excited about the
amazing approaches, tools, and reagents developed
over the past 20 years to study the membrane
proteins. After working with this community for
23 years, Chin will especially miss talking with the
investigators.
She advises grant applicants: “Ask important
questions you really want to answer, even if they
are challenging and might take a long time to ad-
dress. Prepare and submit only when you and your
project are ready; don’t be a shotgun applicant.
The goal is not to submit as many applications as
possible but to submit your best application and
to focus on your important biologically driven
questions.”
Now that she is retired, Chin plans on playing
the piano again, taking more photos, volunteer-
ing, tutoring, and perhaps consulting. First and
foremost, she looks forward to spending more
time with her husband on their tandem bicycle.
“We tried riding single bicycles together, but he
is a strong rider and was always waiting for me to
catch up,” she says. “Since buying our first tandem
in 1994, we’ve traveled all over the United States
and abroad with our tandem. One reason to retire
this year was that I signed us up for more trips
than normal, so I didn’t have enough vacation
days.”
Chin and her husband on Bike to Work Day.