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The chemist and the poet

Jeandele Elliot spent the summer studying a durable compound in pollen and developing equally durable friendships.

Saima Sidik
September 9, 2019

Jeandele Elliot was raised on poetry. Like the Nobel Prize winning writer Derek Walcott, she grew up on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia where the locals celebrate the epic, multi-volume poems that won Walcott the 1992 prize for literature. Elliot grew up with the adults around her extolling Walcott’s brilliance, but it wasn’t until she left St. Lucia that she understood why this island was so inspirational to Walcott. Young Walcott left St. Lucia to pursue a life as a writer decades before Elliot was born; similarly, Elliot left to study chemical engineering at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Although their vocations differ, Walcott infused his work with the qualities of his home country before his death in 2017, just as Elliot does today. While Walcott’s poetry returns again and again to his love for the island’s people and natural landscape, Elliot applies St. Lucia’s culture of hard work and resilience to her science.

These traits have served Elliot well at Howard University, where she’s currently entering her junior year. It also earned her a spot in MIT’s Summer Research Program in Biology (MSRP-Bio), for which she received a scholarship from the Gould Fund. During this 10-week internship, Elliot worked in biology professor Jing-Ke Weng’s lab, studying the biochemical pathway that produces sporopollenin, an exceptionally strong substance that coats and protects pollen grains.

Elliot has loved science since she was in high school, and her ambition to be an impactful researcher was initially inspired by the value St. Lucians place on academic success. Walcott is one of two Nobel Laureates who grew up on St. Lucia — the second being Sir Arthur Lewis, who won the 1979 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences — and every year the locals celebrate these two citizens during Nobel Laureate Week. The celebrations inspired Elliot to aim high when it came to her own career. “These people are from the same culture as I am, and they got so far. So I can definitely do the same thing; there’s nothing holding me back,” she says.

Elliot’s mother, a middle school principal, shared this sentiment, and she made it clear that she expected all of her children to pursue higher education. In preparation, she encouraged Elliot and her three siblings to focus on science starting in grade nine, when the St. Lucian school system requires students to begin specializing in either science, business, or arts. Scientific careers require many years of education, so she thought it would be best for her children to start learning this discipline early, even if they decided to switch to other careers later down the line.

“I studied science in high school knowing that I had to, but I also really enjoyed it,” Elliot says. She especially loved drawing chemical structures, then picturing these same structures as components of the reactions that changed colors and emitted interesting smells when the class performed experiments.

Sometimes practical considerations interfere with passions, however, and there was one hurdle Elliot had to overcome before she could attend college: money. Educating her three older siblings had exhausted her family’s finances, so Elliot was on her own when it came to figuring out how to pay for school. After finishing a two-year course of study in sciences called “A-levels” that St. Lucians pursue after high school, Elliot spent an additional two years working in a high school science lab while she looked for scholarships.

“That was one of the hardest times in my life because I wasn’t guaranteed to go to university,” she says. But, inspired by the Caribbean spirit of resilience, she resolved to find a way. In the end, Howard University offered her a full scholarship, which she happily accepted.

“Before I went to college, I had this infatuation with doing research,” Elliot says. “When I went to Howard, I was able to join a lab, and then I fully realized my passion.”

Elliot became captivated by the millimeter-long nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, and she discovered that a group of enzymes known for their role in protein degradation have a second function that affects the worm’s fertility. Not everyone would have enjoyed the hours that Elliot spent propagating tiny worms by moving them from one agar-filled petri dish to another, but she loved the moments of discovery that followed her hard work. That was when she knew she wanted to pursue a research career.

Elliot sought advice on her college applications from fellow Caribbean and MIT electrical engineering professor Cardinal Warde, who coordinates a program that introduces Carribean high school students to STEM careers. In addition to helping with her college applications, Warde told her about MSRP-Bio. This rigorous dive into research sounded like great preparation for graduate school, so the conversation stuck with Elliot, and several years later she applied, got in, and joined the Weng lab, studying sporopollenin.

Elliot spent the summer engineering bacteria to produce a protein called LAP3 that plants use to make sporopollenin, trying to isolate LAP3 so she could figure out where it falls in the chain of events that leads to sporopollenin production. She and her colleagues in the Weng lab want to understand the mechanism underlying this process because it may give engineers ideas for making strong, flexible, synthetic materials like wearable electronics. Sporopollenin degrades slowly after ingestion, so researchers have also suggested coating drugs with this substance so that they’ll be released gradually once inside the human body.

Elliot is fascinated by this intersection of technology and chemistry, and thinks she might like to center her PhD thesis on a similar topic. In particular, nanotechnology that improves cancer drug delivery has captured her imagination, and she may try to pursue such research at the Koch Institute at MIT after she graduates from Howard University.

Purifying LAP3 was a tricky task, as a portion of the protein that targets it to chloroplasts also made it difficult to separate from the bacteria Elliot was using to produce it. Removing this chloroplast targeting sequence made purifying LAP3 possible, but only in combination with a bacterial protein called a chaperone that is typically responsible for binding other proteins to make sure they maintain functional conformations. Elliot tested the function of LAP3 and the chaperone together, and found that they use a water molecule to break apart another protein in the sporopollenin production pathway. Other Weng lab members will continue to try to isolate LAP3 after Elliot leaves, in order to confirm the activity they observed can truly be attributed to this protein.

As Elliot solidified her knowledge of biochemistry, she formed lasting relationships with the people in her lab and in her MSRP-Bio cohort. Walcott wrote of feeling “burdened” by his conflicting loves for St. Lucia, where he wanted to live, and for writing, which necessitated leaving. When Elliot first moved to the United States, she truly understood these poems for the first time, as her island’s warm, familiar faces and wave-strewn shores were suddenly replaced with an unfamiliar culture and bitter winters. At MIT, Elliot found a fantastic group of coworkers who embodied the St. Lucian spirit of friendship. “Everyone in my lab treated me like I was one of them,” she says. “They reached out to me to strike up conversations, tell me funny stories, and just talk to me.”

Outside of the Weng lab, Elliot’s MSRP-Bio cohort also provided a wealth of friendship. For the first time, she found peers who truly shared her passion for research. The students all lived in an MIT dorm, where their conversations went on long into the night. “We’d go on and on about our experiments,” she says. “It was like a vortex of science.”

While Walcott and Lewis motivated Elliot to aim high, her time at MIT gave her the technical skills to handle whatever challenges science throws at her. “The MSRP program has made me quite savvy about the way research works,” she says. Combined with the St. Lucian spirit of working hard and always striving for success, Elliot is returning to Howard with the full array of qualities that will help her become the “hard working, efficient, and impactful researcher” that she wants to be.

Photo credit: Saima Sidik
A summer at the MSRP-Bio reveals connections between proteins, people, and passions

Undergraduate Meucci Ilunga spent 10 weeks investigating protein interactions, exploring career options, and making new friends.

Saima Sidik
September 4, 2019

Meucci Ilunga seems to know something about everything. He’s a videographer who’s branching out into podcasting. He’s researched cancer therapies and volunteered in a hospital. He grew up on a Navajo reservation, and he’s a year away from completing a biochemistry degree at the University of Arizona. “I’m excited about life in general,” he says. At the moment, though, he’s especially excited about a cellular conundrum that he investigated during the 10-week internship in the MIT Department of Biology that he completed as part of the MIT Summer Research Program in Biology (MSRP-Bio).

“Your cells are really, really complicated,” he says. “They’re packed with lots of different kinds of proteins. Yet when you look at how proteins interact, they’re specific.” How do proteins find the appropriate binding partners amongst all the noise? Ilunga and his MSRP-Bio supervisor, biology and biological engineering Professor Amy Keating, think that short sequences of amino acids — the units that comprise proteins — can mediate binding interactions more intricate than researchers had previously appreciated.

Just as proteins home in on their binding partners, Ilunga has always been drawn to science. As a kid, he told everyone he wanted to be an astrophysicist. “I had no idea what that meant,” he says, “but I loved the idea of exploring the unknown and being able to generate knowledge.”

Ilunga grew up on the Navajo reservation in Kinlichee, Arizona, however, and he didn’t have the same opportunities to engage in science as kids in urban centers. “Only about 60 percent of people on the reservation have running water and electricity,” he says, “so most people are pressed with more urgent matters than following their curiosities.”

Ilunga notes the myriad of difficulties his reservation faces, from prevalent diabetes to corrupt politicians and poor school systems, but says that the hardest part about being Navajo is feeling like his people’s problems are invisible to those outside the tribe. “A lot of us feel very forgotten about,” he says.

Ilunga quickly exhausted the opportunities that his high school in Fort Defiance, Arizona, had to offer, leading him to graduate early and leave for the University of Arizona at age 16. But he was determined to remember his roots. Balancing his love of science with his connection to the reservation — and finding a career that will let him return — has proven challenging.

“You can become an engineer, but there are no engineering jobs on the reservation. You can become a computer scientist, but there are no computer science jobs,” he says. So he decided to pursue biochemistry, as it would lay the foundation for medical school, and the reservation is always in need of doctors.

At his university, Ilunga started shadowing physicians and volunteering in a hospital. His path to medical school seemed clear. There was only one problem: He found medicine unfulfilling. “There’s so much more I could be doing. So I started looking at what else I could do to get back home,” he says.

This desire for balance is what made Ilunga choose to join the MSRP-Bio program, for which he received sponsorship from the Gould Fund. Ilunga met the MSRP-Bio coordinator, Mandana Sassanfar, at a conference for minority students, and she told him that MSRP-Bio promotes a balance between lab work and life. “What sold me on this program is that it understands that I’m more than just a scientist,” he says.

Over the summer, Ilunga has spoken with many MIT professors about the diverse professional paths scientists can take, and these conversations have inspired him to consider a career in policy.

“I could be someone who goes to Congress to fight — not only for Native American affairs, but also for scientific affairs,” he says.

Ilunga plans to pursue a PhD in life sciences in preparation for this career, possibly studying protein interactions like the ones he’s been working on all summer. He finds research most interesting when it has a clear clinical application, and understanding protein interactions lets researchers design drugs that disrupt them.

The protein interactions that Ilunga researched are mediated by sequences called short linear motifs, or SLiMs, which consist of contiguous stretches of only three to 10 amino acids — a small subset of the hundreds of amino acids that make up the typical protein. While larger domains are able to form tighter and more sustained interactions, SLiMs mediate weaker, transient interactions.

SLiMs make up in speed what they lack in strength. Allowing proteins to quickly bind and release each other is beneficial for some biological processes, and SLiMs can also evolve rapidly and let organisms adapt to change quickly. Researchers think this is why SLiMs have persisted in many different organisms over the course of evolution, despite being relatively unintuitive tools for forming protein complexes. The Keating lab noticed that sometimes proteins that contain SLiMs recognize their binding partners with a specificity that’s unexpected, given that so many proteins contain these short sequences.

Ilunga spent his summer looking into how small domains and short sequences can play a large role in protein pairing. His weeks began with culturing large quantities of bacteria that were used to produce SLiM-containing peptides; then he isolated these peptides and used a technique called biolayer interferometry to determine how tweaking their amino acid sequences affected how strongly they bound their target protein.

When he altered the amino acid sequence directly adjacent to the SLiMs, Ilunga found that the strength of their binding interactions could vary quite wildly. The Keating lab doesn’t understand how this occurs, and Ilunga’s findings pave the way for testing different biochemical mechanisms to explain this phenomenon.

When he wasn’t isolating proteins or chatting with the MIT faculty, Ilunga got to know the MIT community. “At a lot of top schools there’s a sense of prestige that fills the air, but it wasn’t like that at MIT. Everyone here is so humble,” he says.

He especially enjoyed getting to know his fellow MSRP-Bio students. Whether they were going on a boat cruise along the Charles River or helping each other troubleshoot lab work, he says it was an amazing group of people to spend the summer with.

As he heads back to the University of Arizona, Ilunga is taking many technical skills back with him, as well as a new outlook on life. He has always been hopeful that life will get easier for Navajos and other minorities. Now he’s confident that the medical and technological advances that institutions like MIT are creating can improve living conditions for people like his family back on the reservation.

“I used to think my optimism was blind,” he says. “Now I think my optimism is informed.”

Forging a new understanding of metal-containing proteins

Graduate student Rohan Jonnalagadda analyzes the 3D shapes of iron-containing enzymes to parse their role in cellular processes.

Raleigh McElvery
August 27, 2019

Raised in a computer-savvy family well-versed in software and information technology, Rohan Jonnalagadda had a strong desire to “decode” the world around him. But his kind of code, the genetic one, consists of four repeating letters: A, T, C, and G. “Just like a computer runs on software, I wanted to investigate the code behind the molecular hardware that gives rise to life,” he says. Now a sixth-year graduate student in the Drennan lab, he works to decrypt the structure of metal-containing proteins, in order to determine the roles they play in vital cellular reactions.

When Jonnalagadda was an undergraduate biochemistry major at the University of California, Berkeley, it became clear to him that the genetic code was more than just a string of letters; it also serves as the blueprint for all the proteins in the entire organism. These proteins fold into complex 3D structures, which ultimately beget function.

At UC Berkeley, he joined a lab studying the iron-containing protein Heme-Nitric Oxide/Oxygen (H-NOX) that senses nitric oxide gas in bacterial and eukaryotic cells. When H-NOX binds to nitric oxide, it must change its 3D shape in the process. Jonnalagadda used a technique known as X-ray crystallography to freeze H-NOX in various stages of this conformational change to determine how it binds the gas molecules.

“I think we sometimes ignore the fact that we need trace metals in order to survive,” he says. “I was interested in continuing to think about what different metals could do in the cell. And using metals opens up a whole new world of chemical reactions that you generally don’t learn about in class.”By the time he graduated and began his PhD at MIT Biology, Jonnalagadda had been using X-ray crystallography for over two years. Today, as a member of Catherine Drennan’s lab, he continues to leverage this same method to parse the structure of additional metal-containing proteins.

In fact, the two projects that he’s devoted most of his time to over the past five years involve reactions that he’d never even heard of before he arrived at MIT. The focus of his first undertaking was the iron-containing enzyme ribonucleotide reductase (RNR), which helps generate deoxyribonucleotides, the building blocks of DNA.

Jonnalagadda aims to understand how this enzyme is regulated to ensure the cell maintains the proper amount of each type of deoxyribonucleotide, in order to properly replicate and repair its genome. If those ratios are incorrect, the cell could experience detrimental stress.

Because the enzyme is regulated differently in humans than it is in bacteria, scientists hope to one day create antibiotics that target the bacterial RNR while leaving the human RNR unscathed. Jonnalagadda works with the human version, devising an assay that will allow him to better assess the differences between the two enzymes. RNR is notoriously difficult to work with, and so Jonnalagadda has spent much of his time developing ways to purify it so it remains stable.

His second project is a collaboration with researchers at his alma mater, UC Berkeley, investigating isonitriles — compounds containing a carbon atom tripled bonded to a nitrogen atom. Because isonitriles are used to make drugs like antibiotics, scientists have a keen interest in exploring new ways to produce them. The team discovered that one bacterium, Streptomyces coeruleorubidus, had a novel and mysterious way of synthesizing these compounds. Jonnalagadda wants to know exactly how these particular bacteria do it.

He is using X-ray crystallography to determine the structure of the iron-containing enzyme ScoE in S. coeruleorubidus, which is responsible for forming the carbon-nitrogen triple bond characteristic of isonitriles.

“It’s exciting to be working on a protein that’s only just been discovered,” he says. “There’s just so much more to learn about its fundamental biological function. I think that’s why basic research is so appealing to me; you never know where the work will take you, or the impacts it could have on human health later on.”

Extending the frontiers of any discipline requires some guesswork and metaphorical bushwhacking, and Jonnalagadda has learned almost as much from his failed experiments as he has from his successful ones. “I’m proud that I’ve been able to use what I’ve learned about experimental design to help others in my lab when they have questions,” he says.

As he considers life post-graduation, he hopes to use the biochemical and structural techniques he’s mastered over the years to secure a job in industry.

“Being part of a department with such broad and wide-ranging research interests has made it easy to see that my work doesn’t exist in a vacuum,” he says. “It connects to many different aspects of biology.”

Photo credit: Raleigh McElvery
Posted 8.23.19
BRAIN grant will fund new tools to study astrocytes
Picower Institute
August 27, 2019

In the brain, cells called astrocytes are at least as abundant as neurons, but are much less understood. While neuroscientists have begun to appreciate how closely astrocytes support the development and function of the neural circuit connections, or synapses, we depend on for all mental function – they haven’t been able to investigate many of the cells’ specific contributions because they have lacked the tools to manipulate them. With a new $1.5 million, three year grant from the U.S. government’s BRAIN Initiative, MIT neuroscientist Mriganka Sur will lead a three-lab partnership to develop new tools to study astrocytes.

“A great many genes of brain disorders involve astrocytes,” said Sur, Newton Professor of Neuroscience in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT. “If you remove astrocytes from a culture in a dish, neurons will not make synapses. So it’s of great importance to be able to study and manipulate astrocytes in order to understand their role in the brain in modulating neurons.”

Sur, together with postdoc Grayson Oren Sipe and their collaborators, propose to create three tools both for their lab’s research and to share with the broader neuroscience community. Each tool is meant to give scientists the ability to experimentally manipulate key properties of astrocytes in living animals wherever in the brain they want (spatial control) and with the timing of their choosing (temporal control).

The first tool, to be developed in collaboration with Professor Rudolf Jaenisch of the Whitehead Institute and MIT Department of Biology, will give scientists a new way to manipulate astrocytes genetically. Sipe and Jaenisch lab postdoc Xin Tang will use the CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing technique to knock out with spatial and temporal precision two genes that allow astrocytes to receive the neuromodulator noradrenaline. Noradrenaline is crucial for stimulating arousal circuits in the brain, so the new manipulation will allow scientists to see what happens to neurons when astrocytes are selectively taken out of the arousal process.

Sipe notes that while the Sur and Jaenisch labs will target genes related to arousal, other neuroscientists could use the technique to target genes expressed in astrocytes that are related to other functions.

To create two other tool, Sur’s lab will work with both Jaenisch’s lab and the lab of Ed Boyden, Y. Eva Tan Professor of Neurotechnology. Boyden is affiliated with the MIT Media Lab, the Departments of Bioengineering and Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. The tools will adapt for astrocytes a technology Boyden co-invented called optogenetics. Optogenetics changes cells to become responsive to flashes of visible light. Widely applied in neurons, optogenetics alters genes that regulate whether neurons electrically spike, giving scientists control over the cells’ electrical activity. In astrocytes, the team will target different genes related to calcium biochemistry.

One tool will give them temporal control over receptors that the cells use to regulate calcium levels around neurons, for instance to intentionally increase intercellular calcium levels. The other tool will allow scientists to experimentally disrupt the astrocytes’ uptake of the neurotransmitter glutamate by creating an ion channel called ChromeQ, that alters sodium ion currents within astrocytes. Manipulating ChromeQ to alter those currents will allow them to reduce glutamate uptake, which in turn will reduce intercellular calcium levels. By doing this specifically in the motor cortex, Sur’s team will be able to investigate the influence astrocytes have on neurons at the synaptic level in the process of motor learning in lab mice.

The grant started Aug. 15 and will run through July 2022.

Seychelle M. Vos

Education

  • PhD, 2013, University of California, Berkeley
  • BS,  2008,  Genetics,  University of Georgia

Research Summary

We study the interplay of gene expression and genome organization. Our work focuses on understanding how large molecular machineries involved in genome organization and gene transcription regulate each others’ function to ultimately determine cell fate and identity. We employ a broad range of approaches including single-particle cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), X-ray crystallography, biochemistry, and genetics to mechanistically understand how these molecular assemblies regulate each other across molecular scales.

Awards

  • New Innovator Award, National Institutes of Health Common Fund’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research Program, 2021
Study links certain metabolites to stem cell function in the intestine

Molecules called ketone bodies may improve stem cells’ ability to regenerate new intestinal tissue.

Anne Trafton | MIT News Office
August 22, 2019

MIT biologists have discovered an unexpected effect of a ketogenic, or fat-rich, diet: They showed that high levels of ketone bodies, molecules produced by the breakdown of fat, help the intestine to maintain a large pool of adult stem cells, which are crucial for keeping the intestinal lining healthy.

The researchers also found that intestinal stem cells produce unusually high levels of ketone bodies even in the absence of a high-fat diet. These ketone bodies activate a well-known signaling pathway called Notch, which has previously been shown to help regulate stem cell differentiation.

“Ketone bodies are one of the first examples of how a metabolite instructs stem cell fate in the intestine,” says Omer Yilmaz, the Eisen and Chang Career Development Associate Professor of Biology and a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. “These ketone bodies, which are normally thought to play a critical role in energy maintenance during times of nutritional stress, engage the Notch pathway to enhance stem cell function. Changes in ketone body levels in different nutritional states or diets enable stem cells to adapt to different physiologies.”

In a study of mice, the researchers found that a ketogenic diet gave intestinal stem cells a regenerative boost that made them better able to recover from damage to the intestinal lining, compared to the stem cells of mice on a regular diet.

Yilmaz is the senior author of the study, which appears in the Aug. 22 issue of Cell. MIT postdoc Chia-Wei Cheng is the paper’s lead author.

An unexpected role

Adult stem cells, which can differentiate into many different cell types, are found in tissues throughout the body. These stem cells are particularly important in the intestine because the intestinal lining is replaced every few days. Yilmaz’ lab has previously shown that fasting enhances stem cell function in aged mice, and that a high-fat diet can stimulate rapid growth of stem cell populations in the intestine.

In this study, the research team wanted to study the possible role of metabolism in the function of intestinal stem cells. By analyzing gene expression data, Cheng discovered that several enzymes involved in the production of ketone bodies are more abundant in intestinal stem cells than in other types of cells.

When a very high-fat diet is consumed, cells use these enzymes to break down fat into ketone bodies, which the body can use for fuel in the absence of carbohydrates. However, because these enzymes are so active in intestinal stem cells, these cells have unusually high ketone body levels even when a normal diet is consumed.

To their surprise, the researchers found that the ketones stimulate the Notch signaling pathway, which is known to be critical for regulating stem cell functions such as regenerating damaged tissue.

“Intestinal stem cells can generate ketone bodies by themselves, and use them to sustain their own stemness through fine-tuning a hardwired developmental pathway that controls cell lineage and fate,” Cheng says.

In mice, the researchers showed that a ketogenic diet enhanced this effect, and mice on such a diet were better able to regenerate new intestinal tissue. When the researchers fed the mice a high-sugar diet, they saw the opposite effect: Ketone production and stem cell function both declined.

Stem cell function

The study helps to answer some questions raised by Yilmaz’ previous work showing that both fasting and high-fat diets enhance intestinal stem cell function. The new findings suggest that stimulating ketogenesis through any kind of diet that limits carbohydrate intake helps promote stem cell proliferation.

“Ketone bodies become highly induced in the intestine during periods of food deprivation and play an important role in the process of preserving and enhancing stem cell activity,” Yilmaz says. “When food isn’t readily available, it might be that the intestine needs to preserve stem cell function so that when nutrients become replete, you have a pool of very active stem cells that can go on to repopulate the cells of the intestine.”

The findings suggest that a ketogenic diet, which would drive ketone body production in the intestine, might be helpful for repairing damage to the intestinal lining, which can occur in cancer patients receiving radiation or chemotherapy treatments, Yilmaz says.

The researchers now plan to study whether adult stem cells in other types of tissue use ketone bodies to regulate their function. Another key question is whether ketone-induced stem cell activity could be linked to cancer development, because there is evidence that some tumors in the intestines and other tissues arise from stem cells.

“If an intervention drives stem cell proliferation, a population of cells that serve as the origin of some tumors, could such an intervention possibly elevate cancer risk? That’s something we want to understand,” Yilmaz says. “What role do these ketone bodies play in the early steps of tumor formation, and can driving this pathway too much, either through diet or small molecule mimetics, impact cancer formation? We just don’t know the answer to those questions.”

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, a V Foundation V Scholar Award, a Sidney Kimmel Scholar Award, a Pew-Stewart Trust Scholar Award, the MIT Stem Cell Initiative, the Koch Institute Frontier Research Program through the Kathy and Curt Marble Cancer Research Fund, the Koch Institute Dana Farber/Harvard Cancer Center Bridge Project, and the American Federation of Aging Research.

Mentorship and scholarship keep summer biology research program strong

Support from Squire Booker PhD ’94 and the Bernard S. and Sophie G. Gould Fund helps MSRP-bio students excel.

Laura Carter | School of Science
August 20, 2019

When you get a call offering you the chance to get involved in research at MIT, says Squire Booker PhD ’94, as he did when he was a student back home in Beaumont, Texas, with no summer plans, you don’t say no. This is how he joined seven other students from around the United States as the first class in the MIT Student Research Program (MSRP), even though the start date was only days away. “I was given the opportunity to get out of Texas, the opportunity to go to a big cosmopolitan city, the opportunity to go to MIT. So, I got a plane ticket and flew up a few days later,” says Booker.

Thirty-three summers later, back on campus to deliver the doctoral graduation ceremony speech, where he had lunch with several current members and fellow alumni of the program, Booker insists that he has no regrets with his decision.

Booker was one of three from that inaugural class who remained at MIT to pursue a PhD to continue the research he started during the program. He was incredibly fortunate, he notes, to get a “perfect match” placement, working with former professors of biology Bill Johnson and Chris Walsh on a project that aligned with his interests of combining chemistry and biology. He didn’t have much more of an idea of his preferred area of study than that.

Prior to arriving at MIT, given the lack of exposure to science, he didn’t know what research entailed, or what scientists did every day. But he says he quickly fell in love with the subject and his research group, even joining their summer lab softball team.

Although Walsh left MIT the year Booker was accepted as a PhD student, he easily shifted into the lab of Novartis Professor of Chemistry Emeritus JoAnne Stubbe, a new faculty member at the time, who was also working on the interface of chemistry and biology and provided the amount of hands-on support he needed as a new graduate student. “Ever since leaving the lab, she’s been my number one supporter,” he says of Stubbe.

Stubbe and her research inspired the direction Booker’s education took. He continues to conduct research revolving around proteins and catalysis reactions as a professor at Penn State University and a principal investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Now, he heads a large lab group himself.

From mentee to mentor

Booker oversees an average of 10 group members at any given time, not including undergraduate students. Like his mentor, he tries to be very hands-on, resorting to email when he’s traveling — which is often. He admitted with a chuckle that his students keep track of where he is at any given time by following his Twitter account. Always trying to find ways to include motivated students who approach him about contributing to his research, the only time Booker turns them away is for their benefit — if they have a full course load and additional time on research will overload their schedules. He even considers high school students.

The first high school student to join his lab was Martin McLaughlin ’15, who Booker describes fondly as “aggressively motivated” and “trembling with excitement to do research.” Within the first week, McLaughlin was taking the initiative to use his lunch breaks from school to bike to Booker’s lab. Martin’s results, which were published in Science in collaboration with Professor Cathy Drennan in the MIT Department of Biology, introduced Booker into a new niche: crystallography.

When McLaughlin asked to continue working on the discovery with Drennan as an undergraduate at MIT, he didn’t hesitate to agree. McLaughlin had moved into Drennan’s lab a week into his first semester.

Research for all

Not all students share this drive to delve into research. Like Booker himself, many aren’t even aware of possibilities to get involved in science and consider a career in research. It’s still hard, he says, even though “people are more serious about this diversity thing,” as he calls it, than when he was first starting his education.

Booker tries to reach out, especially to other minority students, through several programs, much like the MSRP, an invaluable program. While on campus this past spring, Booker met with current and past MSRP students.

One of those students was Jeandele Elliot, a chemical engineering student at Howard University from Saint Lucia in the Caribbean, who is working in the Jing-Ke Weng Lab in the Department of Biology this summer on a molecule that can protect pollen grains. For her, meeting Booker was another connection the program affords her. “The MSRP program has been beneficial to me in a special way since it has connected me with people I can really relate to,” she said.

The advice he gave to Elliot, and the others in the same position he was in once, was to prepare for exciting careers. The program is not just a steppingstone into research, he proclaimed, but it places participants with the best mentors and being privy to the best frontiers. Booker was delighted that some of the 25 current and past participants then attended MIT for graduate school as he did.

Tsehai A.J. Grell PhD ’18, a current chemistry graduate student in Drennan’s research group and an alumnus of MSRP, calls Squire Booker a “labhold” name — a household name in the lab. “As an African-American professor of biochemistry, an alumnus of my department, and a leader in my field, he instantly became one of my role models,” Grell said. “This was further solidified when I found out that he was a part of the first cohort of MSRP students, the summer research program which is responsible for me enrolling in MIT’s graduate program.”

Grell reminisced on his experience and the spring luncheon with Booker. “Because MSRP was such a foundational experience in my career, I am always enthused to interact with the current MSRP cohort and to encourage them to make the most of this opportunity, as it can be a pivotal summer in their careers,” says Grell. In addition, he said, “the excitement of the students is palpable and contagious. It reenergizes me and gives me purpose.”

Elliott, Grell, and Booker are three of more than 800 students from institutions with limited research opportunities who have participated in the MSRP, which was divided into two subcategories in 2003: general and biology, the latter of which has hosted 450 students. Since 2003, the MRSP-Bio program has been administered by Mandana Sassanfar, a biology lecturer in charge of the Department of Biology’s diversity and outreach programs. Since then, nearly 70 MSRP alumni have, like Booker, continued their research as graduate students at MIT.

Going for Gould

Bernard “Bernie” Gould ’32, who received his BS from MIT, was a longstanding and beloved biochemistry professor in the Department of Biology, well known for being an incredibly dedicated mentor to biology and pre-med students at MIT for nearly 40 years. His wife, Sophia Gould CMP ’48, shared his passion for counseling students. To honor this investment in encouraging student learning, the Goulds’ son, Michael, and his wife, Sara Moss, founded the Bernard S. and Sophia G. Gould Fund in 2016. Gould is a philanthropist and the retired chairman and CEO of Bloomingdales. Moss is the vice chairman of Estée Lauder Companies. The Gould Fellow Fund sponsors students, such as Elliott, in MSRP-Bio. Each year, Gould and Moss return to the MIT campus to meet with students benefitting from their support.

Recently, the couple has designated a second fund, which will aid in extending the academic careers of students interested in the life sciences by providing support for MSRP-Bio alumni entering into the MIT biology graduate program.

Six of the 16 Gould Fellowship alumni who have graduated from college have already been admitted to MIT as graduate students. “This is an exceptionally high rate by any standards, which demonstrates the amazing success of this initiative,” says Sassanfar. “Gould Fellows are truly grateful for the generosity of Mike and Sara and are very eager to succeed and give back to their communities,” a goal that is always stressed by the founders.

With successful role models from previous MSRP cohorts, like Booker, combined with philanthropy from those like Gould and Moss, who believe strongly in supporting the education of our next generation of scientists, students are given the opportunity to thrive.