Dangerous Behavior on College Campuses
Making the Hydrogen Car Viable
Connecting Environmental Science and Public Policy
Probing the Evolution of Galaxies
Answering Fundamental Questions About the Universe
Examining Bacteria's Response to Oxidative Stress
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©2008
Examining Bacteria's Response to Oxidative Stress
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Monica Chander |
Though this is Monica Chander's first year as an assistant professor of biology at Bryn Mawr College, Chander is no stranger to Seven Sisters schools. She earned a B.A. degree from Mount Holyoke College in 1993. Before joining the Bryn Mawr faculty, she returned to Mount Holyoke to work as a research associate and visiting assistant professor.
"I think there's something special about Seven Sisters students," Chander says. "They're very confident, and not afraid of speaking their mind. I feel that I can be their teacher and can also be their friend." She is impressed by her students at Bryn Mawr, she says. "These kids are mature, perceptive, and sharp."
Chander attended an all-female high school in her native India and set her sights on liberal-arts institutions—and Seven Sisters schools in particular—when applying to colleges. Her undergraduate experience, she recalls, was "just phenomenal, both academically and socially."
"Despite the fact that they're small, there's a lot of diversity at the Seven Sisters," Chander notes. "Although we came from all over the world, everyone was very accepting of each other's differences at Mount Holyoke. There was a special kind of bonding among the students."
Chander earned her Ph.D. in 2000 in biomedical sciences with a concentration in biochemistry and molecular biology from the University of Connecticut in Farmington. Like her undergraduate department, the graduate program at UConn's medical school was very small, Chander says. "There were five or six students in my matriculating year. The smallness really appealed to me."
Integrative Field
Chander says her interest in science began to blossom in the eighth grade. "I don't know how it happened; I don't have a single scientist in my family," she says. She enjoyed both biology and chemistry, and was thrilled to discover that biochemistry would enable her to straddle both disciplines. "I was so naïve," she says with a laugh.
Biochemistry was a good fit. "The more courses I took, the more it appealed to me," Chander says. "Biochemistry a very integrated science—you have to apply principles from all the scientific fields in biochemistry." She also enjoys the rigors of the discipline. "The more difficult you make it, and the more challenging it is, the more it appeals to me," she says.
From 2000 to 2004, Chander worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health, where she found the size of the institution off-putting. "If you have a question, you have to wait several days before the professor has time to talk to you," she explains.
Though she didn't find Harvard's size appealing, the academic environment did not intimidate her, Chander says. She attributes her confidence to the training she received in a female-only setting. "If students are told, ‘You can do this,' then they will be able to do it," she says. "One just has to believe in one's ability—the rest will happen naturally."
When she began to develop long-range career plans, Chander knew teaching had to be part of the equation. "Science is really hard," she says. "Experiments fail 99.5 percent of the time. It's hard to get funding; it's hard to come up with creative ideas and make them work. You have to get your fix from somewhere, and the students often provide that for me."
Chander turned to her network of contacts at Mount Holyoke and landed an appointment as a visiting scientist. "I thought, ‘Let me go back and see if I can be a professional in this environment,'" she says. "It was a perfect fit." When she saw an ad for a faculty position at Bryn Mawr, she realized that "this is fate."
At the time she was applying for faculty jobs, several liberal arts colleges were seeking biochemists, Chander notes. "People recognize how important biochemistry is," she says. "Students are interested in studying it in college, because it prepares you well for graduate, medical, and veterinary schools."
Uncovering Molecular Details
Chander's research at Bryn Mawr is an outgrowth of the work she did at Harvard. "My interest, broadly speaking, is how bacteria respond to environmental signals, oxidative stress being one of them," she explains. She is investigating the SoxR protein, which senses oxygen-based free radicals—highly reactive molecules that can impede cell function—and responds by initiating biochemical reactions that repair cell damage in E. coli. "Although the SoxR protein is present in many bacteria, there is reason to believe that the protein may regulate different functions depending on the bacterial species under study," she says. Chander is currently focusing her attentions on the SoxR protein in the antibiotic producer, Streptomyces coelicolor. Streptomycetes are found in soil and decaying plants and have a distinctive "earthy" odor. One of Chander's objectives is to learn whether SoxR functions the same way in S. coelicolor as it does in E. coli.
Chander explains that the Streptomyces research is "totally in the beginning stages." Her studies of how organisms protect themselves against oxidative stress could ultimately have implications for cancer treatment.
Chander has co-authored several papers with undergraduates. "It's fabulous to mentor them," she says. "You spend a lot of time and energy and resources training them, but you know that the effort will be well worth it!"
Barbara Spector writes on science and technology as well as business topics. She is the editor-in-chief of Family Business magazine and former editor of The Scientist.