Biophysical Society Newsletter - February 2016

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BIOPHYSICAL SOCIETY NEWSLETTER 2 FEBRUARY 2016
BIOPHYSICAL SOCIETY
Officers
President
Edward Egelman
President-Elect
Suzanne Scarlata
Past-President
Dorothy Beckett
Secretary
Frances Separovic
Treasurer
Paul Axelsen
Council
Olga Boudker
Ruth Heidelberger
Kalina Hristova
Juliette Lecomte
Amy Lee
Robert Nakamoto
Gabriela Popescu
Joseph D. Puglisi
Michael Pusch
Erin Sheets
Antoine van Oijen
Bonnie Wallace
Biophysical Journal
Leslie Loew
Editor-in-Chief
Society Office
Ro Kampman
Executive Officer
Newsletter
Catie Curry
Beth Staehle
Ray Wolfe
Production
Laura Phelan
Profile
Ellen Weiss
Public Affairs
Beth Staehle
Publisher's Forum
The Biophysical Society Newsletter
(ISSN 0006-3495) is published
twelve times per year, January-
December, by the Biophysical
Society, 11400 Rockville Pike, Suite
800, Rockville, Maryland 20852.
Distributed to USA members
and other countries at no cost.
Canadian GST No. 898477062.
Postmaster: Send address changes
to Biophysical Society, 11400
Rockville Pike, Suite 800, Rockville,
MD 20852. Copyright © 2016 by
the Biophysical Society. Printed in
the United States of America.
All rights reserved.
Suzanne Scarlata, Whitcomb Chair of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Worces-
ter Polytechnic Institute (WPI), whose term as Biophysical Society President
will begin in March 2016, grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a fact
which is evident by her lingering accent. Her mother was a very success-
ful hairdresser and her father worked as a quality control specialist for the
helicopter division of Boeing. No one in Scarlata’s large family worked—or
was particularly interested—in science and as a young person, Scarlata herself
was not very interested in it either. In fact, she did not give much thought to
what career she would pursue at all. “In high school, I was put in the secre-
tarial track where they placed students who weren’t interested in going to
college,” she says. “After taking classes in typing (which has served me well)
and shorthand (which has not), I switched to the college preparatory track.”
Scarlata did indeed go to college. She attended Temple University and began
studying science. “I started taking science classes in college because there
seemed to be more science-related jobs than in the fields that I enjoyed more,
like sociology, art, and history,” Scarlata explains. Once she started down
the path toward a science career, however, she unlocked an interest within
herself. “In my junior year, I started an undergraduate project that focused
that I realized I wanted a career
lor of Arts in chemistry and then
ersity of Illinois in Urbana-
different fluorescence methods
to study protein dynamics and to quantify protein associations,” Scarlata
says. “After characterizing the movement and interactions of proteins in
model systems, I wondered how these data relate to proteins in their native
cellular environment.”
Scarlata met Catherine Royer in the fall of 1980 at UIUC. They became
friends quickly and worked together during their thesis studies, co-authoring
a paper on protein interaction and dynamics. In the late 1980s, Scarlata and
Royer worked together again on histone interactions. “I remember the papers
well, because we measured fluorescence lifetimes via frequency domain prior
to the automation of the instrument,” Royer recalls. “We calculated that
we turned the knob between sample and reference 6,000 times for the data
in the paper. We called it the Bengay paper! Younger biophysicists will not
appreciate the amount of elbow grease we put into our work back then!”
Scarlata notes that Royer, now at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, got sun-
burned from aligning light from the Xenon arc lamp, since those were the
days before lasers were easily available.
After earning her PhD, Scarlata took a permanent position at AT&T Bell
Labs, in their materials and optics division, developing optical testing meth-
ods for printed circuit boards. She wanted to pursue biophysical research
further, so she left AT&T, taking a position at Cornell University Medical
College in Manhattan. Early in her career, she faced a crisis of confidence
Biophysicist in Profile
SUZANNE SCARLATA
Cartoon by friend &
freelance cartoonist
Barbara Kelley