BIOPHYSICAL SOCIETY NEWSLETTER
11
OCTOBER
2014
Subgroups
Motility
The Motility Subgroup Symposium on Saturday,
February 7, will begin at 1:00 pm and include the
speakers listed below. For specific times and
location, please refer to the Motility Subgroup
web page which can be found at
org. Click 'About Us' and then click 'Subgroups'.
Confirmed speakers for the symposium include:
Erika Holzbaur
, Perelman School of Medicine,
University of Pennsylvania;
Richard McKenney
,
University of California, San Francisco;
Joseph M.
Muretta
, University of Minnesota;
Sivaraj Sivara-
makishnan
, University of Michigan; and
Christine
Cremo
, University of Nevada School of Medicine.
The Business Meeting will take place at 3:30 pm,
and the keynote will be presented by
David
Warshaw
, University of Vermont, at 5:20 pm.
We encourage you to support the Motility
Subgroup Symposium. Membership is free for
students and $20 for Biophysical Society
members. The registration form can be found on
the Society website. Go to 'About Us' and then
'Subgroups'.
Membership allows sponsorship of the Student
Research Achievement Award, ensures ample
seating for the session, as well as snacks and more
coffee for attendees of the symposium.
Looking forward to seeing you in Baltimore!
—
Jeffrey Moore
, Motility Subgroup Chair
BIV
Keeping up with the Crowd
For this issue, we interviewed one of the pio-
neers of in-cell NMR spectroscopy,
Gary Pielak
,
University of North Carolina (UNC), where he
is currently the Glen H. Elder Jr. Distinguished
Professor. He shares what got him into the field as
well as some practical advice.
Q: What got you into science? Singular event, or
a process?
It was a process. As a child of the 1950’s, the space
program drove me towards technology. I started
out in automotive engineering at Bradley Univer-
sity because I loved working on cars. However,
after a month of learning about threads and ball
bearings, I was bored. My toughest and most
interesting class was chemistry. I could see that
the subject was so deep that I would never get all
the way to the bottom of it. With this in mind,
I decided to switch to chemistry as a major and
never looked back. Professor
Singh
opened my
eyes to physical chemistry, and Professor
De Pinto
to biochemistry.
Q: Tell us about how your research work has
migrated to Biophysics in vivo (BIV)?
I owe my transition to my UNC colleague
Linda
Spremulli
. When I was an assistant professor,
Linda would say, “Gary all that enthalpy and en-
tropy of protein folding that your group measures
in buffer is great, but cells are crowded”. I let this
sink in for several years. After reading a slew of
Allen Minton
papers, I thought this would be a
challenging new direction.
Q: Tell us about an open problem of central
importance in BIV.
In my opinion, understanding native quinary
interactions, as defined by
McConkey
, is the next
challenge. We are beginning to understand how
the intracellular environment affects biophysics.
Now it is time to understand how the inherent
organization of the cytoplasm affects biophysics.
Q: What advice can you give young biophysicists
interested in research?
PIs nowadays are pressured into writing more
proposals and spending less time working with
their students. Find a mentor who will spend time
to train you!
—
Martin Gruebele
, Chair-Elect of BIV Subgroup
