Biochemistry and Biophysics Professor Jeff Gelles Celebrates Brandeis's Close-Knit Science Programs
October 11, 2024
Abigail Arnold | Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Jeff Gelles is the Aron and Imre Tauber Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology in the Department of Biochemistry and the Director of Graduate Studies for the graduate program in Biochemistry and Biophysics at Brandeis University. He has been a faculty member at Brandeis since 1989. He spoke to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences about his research work and the advantages of Brandeis’s small, close-knit, interdisciplinary science programs.
What's your academic background, and how did you find yourself at Brandeis?
My PhD is in chemistry, but I’ve always studied biochemistry. As a grad student, I also got very interested in the overlapping subject of biophysics. When I got my PhD, I did a postdoc and started working on something that was an exciting new field at the time: microtubule-based motor proteins. I did that for a couple of years and also looked at other motor proteins. Then I applied for faculty jobs and came to Brandeis in 1989. This has been my first and only faculty job.
What are you currently researching, and how does it connect to the work you were doing with the motor proteins?
My lab works in a bunch of different fields. The biggest one is studying the mechanisms by which genes are regulated through controlling the transcription of DNA into messenger RNA. The key thing that knits all of our projects together is the experimental approach of doing single-molecule biophysics experiments: instead of analyzing billions of molecules together, we study our materials with a light microscope to observe the behavior of individual molecules one at a time. These are really cool experiments because you can directly see what molecules are doing, but they are also really powerful approaches to understanding how tiny molecular machines work in ways that are difficult to do when looking at large molecular populations.
In my earlier work, we looked at motor proteins whose job is to move materials around in the cell; they position materials that are about to be secreted right under the cell membrane so that they’re poised to do that. The proteins involved in transcribing DNA have to do a functionally analogous thing – they move themselves physically along the DNA to read it. So they are also little motors, in a sense.
What kinds of influence does your research have outside the lab?
I really consider my lab to be a curiosity-driven lab, in the sense that we are not directly trying to develop a drug to treat a disease or condition. However, my lab has been funded by the National Institutes of Health for decades; we do basic biochemical research, of which they fund quite a bit. The rationale for this is that understanding biology and biochemistry has a long track record of contributing down the road to studying and treating diseases. Scientific research is unpredictable. Often people do curiosity-motivated studies, trying to find out how biology works, and what they find turns out to be incredibly valuable to treating a disease. Sometimes it’s valuable immediately, and sometimes we realize that something we discovered twenty years ago is really important. For example, when I worked on microtubules, we used a chemical compound called taxol which stabilizes them. It’s a naturally occurring substance isolated from the needles of yew trees. The scientific community did a lot of research on taxol and how it works, without a particular aim beyond curiosity. Later, people realized it might be a powerful drug to prevent cells from dividing, which people who develop drugs are very interested in because such drugs can be used for treating cancer. That turned out to be true of taxol, and it’s now one of the most important drugs used in treating breast cancer.
What do you think are the strengths of Brandeis’s graduate program in Biochemistry and Biophysics? What do you like about working with Brandeis’s graduate students?
Brandeis has a really unusual place in graduate education in the sciences. We are a very, strong research institution, but we are comparatively small. This means that the sciences are very close-knit at Brandeis. We work closely with scientists from other disciplines, which is different from many large universities. We share buildings between departments and, because the science faculty is small, the students and faculty know people from other departments and interact with them on a regular basis. For the work I do, this is incredibly important because it’s inherently multi-disciplinary work. I’ve had people in my lab with academic backgrounds in physics, biochemistry, molecular and cell biology, and computer science, and they all bring their own perspectives and ways of thinking about problems to the research. That contributes to the success of the research projects.
My lab has always been mostly students. Being able to teach both undergraduates and graduate students is one of the things that attracted me to Brandeis. Teaching is something I really enjoy doing and that is very beneficial to my functioning as a scientist and researcher. At Brandeis, we tend to self-select for students who are interested in our close-knit, interdisciplinary environment, so they tend to be students who are looking to work closely with faculty and we are faculty who want to work closely with a relatively small number of grad students.
Do you have any other thoughts on your experience at Brandeis?
I’ve been at Brandeis for a long time – almost thirty-five years. We can’t have all sub-disciplines in science represented because of the university’s relatively small size, so we tend to specialize in some areas and get small nuclei of really good faculty who work in those areas and like to collaborate. Over the years I’ve been here, the research foci have evolved with time in response to new developments in science. I’ve been particularly pleased with the nimble way we’ve been able to evolve our research interests and to hire young faculty who are working in exciting new areas. That’s been great for the institution, and I’ve loved the opportunity to learn from new colleagues and the students they recruit into their labs. Brandeis has been a very intellectually stimulating place for me to work, and I think students feel the same way.