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BIOPHYSICAL SOCIETY NEWSLETTER
3
SEPTEMBER
2016
“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.”
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
Wadkins with Baltimore Orioles great
Brooks Robinson at a Major League
Baseball reception on the Hill.