Michael Yonkunas whiled away countless hours of his childhood in his basement, dismantling broken radios and TVs to figure out how they worked. "I was always getting shocked by capacitors," he recalls. Those self-taught experimentation skills are coming in handy for Yonkunas, one of the first graduate students to enroll in the new molecular biophysics and structural biology (MBSB) graduate program offered together by Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh.
Instead of dissecting old electronics, 30-year-old Yonkunas now uses mathematical models to deconstruct the glutamate receptor–a key regulatory protein found in almost all nerve cells. Understanding how the molecule functions might enable scientists to prevent neurological damage after a stroke or develop better drugs to treat brain trauma.
Applied problems like this are at the heart of the new interdisciplinary graduate program, says codirector and Carnegie Mellon biology professor Gordon Rule. Approximately 40 faculty and 18 students involved the MBSB program are working at the interface of modern physics and the life sciences to unravel biological systems molecule by molecule.
"Getting down to the single molecule is really critical because that is how things actually happen in the cell," Rule says. With that kind of knowledge, he says, we could make better drugs for treating a wide range of diseases, such as cancer and AIDS.
Yonkunas believes that he and his classmates in the joint doctoral program are receiving world-class training in technologies that will position them to help lead the molecular revolution. "It's a very demanding field," he says, "and that's the way I like to work–on the edge of my seat."
