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BIOPHYSICAL SOCIETY NEWSLETTER

2

SEPTEMBER

2016

BIOPHYSICAL SOCIETY

Officers

President

Suzanne Scarlata

President-Elect

Lukas Tamm

Past-President

Edward Egelman

Secretary

Frances Separovic

Treasurer

Paul Axelsen

Council

Olga Boudker

Jane Clarke

Bertrand Garcia-Moreno

Ruth Heidelberger

Kalina Hristova

Robert Nakamoto

Arthur Palmer

Gabriela Popescu

Joseph D. Puglisi

Michael Pusch

Erin Sheets

Joanna Swain

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.

Randy Wadkins

, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University

of Mississippi, grew up in Iuka, Mississippi, a small town in the northeast

corner of the state, where Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee meet. His

father owned a grocery store and his mother was an elementary school

teacher. He became fascinated with science through watching Star Trek

reruns as a child in the 1970s. “I had no idea a career in science was even a

possibility,” Wadkins shares. “I did well in math and science when I was in

high school, and like a lot of kids, I started college in the pre-med program.

It wasn’t until I took organic chemistry that I realized how much I liked it

and switched to the chemistry program. My pre-med advisor thought I had

lost my mind. Then I took physical chemistry and it became clear what I

wanted to do with my life.”

Wadkins received his Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry in 1986 from

the University of Mississippi. As a graduate student at the school the fol-

lowing year, he had a defining moment at the Biophysical Society Annual

Meeting. “My very first meeting was in 1987 in New Orleans. I was a first-

year grad student, a kid from Mississippi. I was doing a combination of

experiments on drugs binding to DNA, which involved quantum chemical

calculations of DNA bases stacking with drugs,” he remembers. “I had a

poster with my results at the BPS meeting that year. The late

Bernard Pull-

man

, the world’s expert at the time on quantum biochemistry, came to my

poster—specifically to see MY POSTER—and asked questions about what

I was doing. I talked to him for half an hour, and as he was leaving he said,

‘Nice work.’ That’s when I said to myself, ‘I can do this. I can have a career

in biophysics.’ And I did.”

He earned his PhD in chemistry in 1990, and then

took a postdoc position in

Tom Jovin’s

lab at the Max

Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry where he

worked for a year. It was here that he became enamored

with biophysics. “I made a weird discovery. That era

was when DNA synthesis first became possible, and we

could work with individual strands for the first time,

and not just double strands like calf thymus DNA that

has been around for decades,” he says. “I found that

single-stranded DNA could be a high-affinity target for

antitumor drugs. That led to a 25-year obsession with

unusual DNA conformations.”

Paul Roepe

, Georgetown University, met Wadkins in the

early 1990s at a Biophysical Society meeting. “We had adjacent posters.

We struck up a great conversation on the biophysics of drug diffusion,” he

shares. “He is a scientist that takes nothing for granted and nothing at face

value. Meaning that for Randy, hypotheses are of course very useful and

enlightening, but they are just hypotheses; the data, and rigorous critical

evaluation of the data, are really all that matter.”

Randy Wadkins

Biophysicist in Profile

RANDY WADKINS

Wadkins in a DeLorean from the

Back to

the Future

movie, at a Motion Picture

Association of America reception on

Capitol Hill.