Where were you before coming to Clemson as faculty in the
Department of Bioengineering?
I did my B.S. degree at Clemson in electrical engineering. After graduation, I had the opportunity to experience many
different types of research jobs in many different places, starting with my graduate degree at Princeton University in
New Jersey. During the summer of my first year at Princeton, I did an internship at HP Labs in Palo Alto, California. Then,
after earning my Ph.D., I did postdoctoral research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Finally, I worked as a senior professional staff member at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, a University Affiliated Research Center (UARC) in Maryland.
I am very appreciative of what I have learned at each of these positions and the wonderful people that I have had the opportunity to work with. I hope to use my experiences to advise students on the breadth of career options available to them if they pursue a degree in bioengineering. Indeed, the world is truly at their fingertips. Of all of the places that that you can go with a Clemson engineering degree, however, I truly believe that “there’s something in these hills” (besides the gold that the Bob Campbell Geology Museum tells me about). I am very happy to call Clemson my home again!
How did you find yourself working in biology, after having gotten your B.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering?
I have always been interested in the interface among engineering, math, and biology. As an undergraduate at Clemson, I did my honors thesis with Dr. Earnest Baxa on
wavelet analysis of electrocardiographs. After I had spent most of my first year in graduate at Princeton on computer engineering and security, biology started calling again. During the summer of my first year, my eventual Ph.D. advisor, Dr. Ron Weiss, joined our electrical engineering department and talked about “programming cells.” At the time, the term ”Synthetic Biology” had not been established. I felt that graduate school offered a unique opportunity to take a risk and work on something totally new, even if the direction and career opportunities were not immediately clear at the time. I jumped into what is now known as synthetic biology.
What exactly is your research about now?
I do synthetic biology and microbiome research. The overarching goal of synthetic biology is to apply engineering principles to the development of new biological systems, which is useful for applications in remediation, sensing, biomaterials production, and chemical synthesis. In synthetic biology, I initially worked on engineering
intercellular communication pathways in bacteria. Enabling bacteria to talk to one another is useful for dividing complex tasks among multiple populations of bacteria. It’s also useful for engineering bacteria to form patterns of gene expression.
After working on engineering communication in bacteria, I began working on “cell-free” systems, in which we create extracts from living cells. These extracts contain the
components that are essential for making new proteins. This allows us to do synthetic biology in vitro. One advantage is safety. Whereas there may be concerns with using engineered microbes in the environment for remediation or sensing, cell free systems cannot self-replicate. There are a number of advantages in terms of the flexibility of cell-free systems as well.
Besides cell-free systems, I have also been working on microbiome research, in particular the human skin microbiome. We are taking an interdisciplinary approach
to understanding why individuals have very different microbiomes, how microbial communities vary spatially across the body, and the relationship between skin properties and skin microbes. Overall, this research has relevance not only to issues such as skin diseases and wound infections, but also to vector-borne diseases. For instance, certain bacteria on the skin produce volatile compounds that either attract or repel disease carrying arthropods such as mosquitoes.
What was the transition from electrical engineering to a biology-intensive research direction like?
Moving from purely computational work to incorporating a large amount of experimental biology was a major lifestyle change. It often felt like bacteria controlled my life by deciding when to grow and how to behave. However, once I adapted, it became thrilling to see how living things work. I ended up really enjoying making new DNA constructs and also found microscopy particularly fun. I hadn’t taken a biology class since ninth grade. However, a lot of research is ultimately about learning what you need on the fly. I was eventually able to realize the benefit of interdisciplinary work – the ability to come from a different perspective and see things in a different light.
Tell us more about yourself
Outside of research, I love the outdoors and music and, when I can find the time, I enjoy art and painting. My wife, Sharon Bewick, is an assistant professor in biology at Clemson. I also have a one-year-old Tiger in Training who likes restaurants, lamps, fans, Dadda’s guitar, and finds books delicious.
