Vice President Candidate
Edward Snell
President and Chief Executive Officer, Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute
Education:
B.Sc. Hons 1st Class, Applied Physics, Liverpool John Moores University, 1992, Ph.D. Chemistry Department, University of Manchester UK, 1996, National Research Council Fellow, NASA Biophysics Laboratory, 1996-1999.
Professional Activities:
President and Chief Executive Officer, Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute. Professor, University at Buffalo. Director of the NSF BioXFEL Science and Technology Center. ACA member since 1996.
Research Interests:
Crystallization, structural biology, dynamics, and identifying and overcoming weaknesses in techniques by using complementary methods. Expert in X-ray and neutron diffraction, synchrotron methods, small angle scattering, and complementary methods including spectroscopy and ion beam studies. An empirical thinker.
Statement:
I am proud to be a member of the ACA, and even prouder to be elected a fellow. I am truly humbled to be nominated to stand as vice-president. While I have a background working with government, industry, and academia in structural biology, many of the member constituents of the ACA, I am also aware that the ACA extends well beyond this. If elected, I will support the entire structural science community and help the ACA grow and impact others careers as much as it has helped mine. I aim to make others proud to be members. The ACA already does many great things and I want to continue and preserve these traditions. However, I also want to help enable the ACA to continue evolving by incorporating the great ideas and perspectives of our membership, young and old. I will dedicate time to meet and learn about community members, gathering feedback and identifying areas of improvement. Why do new members join, why do old members leave? What can the ACA do to help members, build careers, influence decision makers, and promote the community?
I never set out to be a crystallographer, but my interest was always in physics and biology. I was the first person in my family to go to university, studying applied physics in Liverpool, England. After a detour working for the British Government at Fort Halstead, just south of London, I heard a talk by Prof. John Helliwell, who later became my graduate advisor in the Chemistry Department at Manchester University. My thesis involved using synchrotrons to study biological mechanism. The intersection between high-energy physics machines, dynamical biology with the most evolutionary perfect biological catalysts, and studying them and seeing the individual atoms, got me hooked. I became fascinated with using X-rays, neutrons, and electrons to look at structure, and how structure functions, and I remain fascinated to this day
My first exposure to structural biology was earlier, working on a light-activated system and processing Laue data as part of an undergraduate summer project. Looking back at that, my mentor had a lot of patience. We used X-ray film, with slow computers, and had to take care to make sure the films were all the right way up and the right way round. It took me all summer for that project. Fast forward to graduate school, and I produced my first structure, a nickel containing aluminophosphate. This project was one of the first applications of an image plate at a synchrotron and it cemented my fascination with light sources and the experimental equipment associated with them. Since then, I’ve worked on many of the world’s synchrotrons, three neutron sources, an X-ray laser, and have been fortunate to visit many more.
I became involved with exploring the impact of gravity on crystal growth and obtained a National Research Council fellowship to do my post-doctoral research at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Moving to a new country is hard, especially if all your belongings fit in one large backpack. After making the leap across the Atlantic, I was introduced to the ACA. My first experience with this was when the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr) meeting was in Seattle in 1996. At this meeting, members of the ACA reached out to me and helped introduce me to the American community. I found that the ACA can be like a large and welcoming family, who were willing to offer support and mentorship to a new member – a self-described introverted extrovert. That first meeting was incredible. I can’t remember exactly how many Nobel Laurates were in one session, but there were a lot. At the same meeting I was introduced to my first collaborator in the US. Together we wrote a proposal, cut up figures from our posters to paste into it, and submitted it at the end of the meeting. It was funded; two early-stage investigators benefited from attending that first conference. There are more stories like that, decades long collaborations with ACA members, and growth in careers together with others in networks built and nurtured at ACA meetings.
I have had the fortunate opportunity to contribute to the ACA community by being chair of the Biological Macromolecules Special Interest Group, chair of the Communications Committee, serving as the ACA representative on the American Institute of Physics, News and Media Advisory panel, chairing many sessions, judging posters, presenting a few of them, and giving many talks. I had a wonderful opportunity in 2016 to co-chair the Denver ACA meeting with Amy Sargent, who was coincidently also running against me for vice-president at the time - she got my vote. I admire what she and the council members she joined did for the ACA and the pathway they helped set for those who followed. Many positive changes were made and continue to be made to this day, perhaps the most noticeable one being a dynamic new logo and a bold vision as “the Structural Science Society”. It is an active and responsive association.
We are in a unique time where, while COVID cost us many loved ones and a couple of years of disruption to virtually everything in the world, it provided the public with a glimpse into what we do. People know what the spike protein looks like. There is still some education required, if you ask what color it is, some will say blue, others red, and it’s only when you realize that the object everyone is looking at is smaller than color itself, you see the profound power of structural biology and crystallography. It would be remiss not to mention the contributions of cryo-electron microscopy and other structural techniques involving X-rays, neutrons, and electrons, and this is a strength of the ACA, providing a home to a community that explores the world at the atomic scale. The ACA needs to educate the scientific community and evidence-based decision makers to the impact of structural studies in virtually every scientific or technological area critical to the economic prosperity, safety, and health of the nation. I also believe that we must consider ‘American’ fully and grow the participation of South America to mirror the activity of Canada in the association.
Membership is always a concern; how can we increase this? We need to attract new members but also keep the old ones. I was pleased in Baltimore to see one of the most diverse ACA meetings I have ever attended because this has been a passion of mine, to increase the number of different backgrounds and therefore the ideas that are brought to the table. I have been a member of the IUCr Gender and Equity Diversity committee for several years and there is a lot we can still do. It was good to see the diversity equity and inclusion session, Expanding Access and Opportunities in Structural Science, in the main program, rather than as a less attended evening session. The discussions that resulted were powerful and resonated even as far as the general meeting. This is an important way to bring in new members and benefit the association. Another is to make meetings useful for new members, perhaps introducing professional development sessions with subjects chosen from ‘Making the most of a meeting’, ‘Writing powerful proposals’, ‘Working with different cultures’ etc. I know the ACA meeting is packed, but I think these would encourage more students to attend and allow them to gain knowledge beyond science but equally useful to their careers. I also see considerable strides made to encourage more early career scientists to contribute to the association, this should be actively continued. I’m thankful that the ACA has embraced complementary methods and provided a home for them, which also increases membership, and frankly the influence of the association.
I’ve been to every ACA since 1996, including the Buffalo one in 1999 where the weather was so bad, I vowed never to return. Despite that I ended up joining and later running the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute based in Buffalo. At each ACA meeting I have met new people and over the years built a network of young and old friends. The family has been supportive, new members have entered as careers have prospered, graduate students have come along, and friends have grown in their careers. I’ve found it to be a very supportive and open organization and I want that to be the experience of every ACA member, new and old. This is how I see the future of the ACA.
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