Rockefeller Convocation Student Speaker Reflects On How His Scientific Discoveries
Thrived Without Departmental Boundaries

Scientific discovery knows no boundaries.And The Rockefeller University, with its lack of departmental boundaries, encourages collaboration between such seemingly disparate fields as immunology and neurobiology. As a graduate student, Matthew Albert found a niche between Associate Professor Nina Bhardwaj's immunology lab and Associate Professor Robert Darnell's neuro-oncology lab. As Albert says, "There is a phenomenal amount of space to be creative when you hang out in the cracks." Today, Albert receives his doctoral degree from The Rockefeller University. A Staten Island native, Albert's thesis research began at The Rockefeller University Hospital. Established in 1910, the hospital links laboratory investigations with bedside observations to provide a scientific basis for disease detection, prevention and treatment. This special hospital environment served as a model for the Warren G. Magnuson Clinical Center, opened at the National Institutes of Health in 1953, and similar facilities supported by federal funding at more than 75 medical schools in the United States. Working at the bedside of patients with a rare debilitating brain disease called paraneoplastic cerebellar degeneration, Albert, with his faculty advisors, found that these patients had the remarkable ability to fight cancer, many of whom did not even know that they had cancer until they were diagnosed with the brain disorder. He uncovered a novel mechanism by which the immune system activates killer T cells. Published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature Medicine last November, the results of this work may enable Albert and other scientists to reproduce in cancer patients what is naturally occurring in these patients' immune response and develop more effective treatments for cancer and other diseases of the immune system.

"Work being carried out now will hopefully lead us back to the bedside, this time with the intent of reproducing in cancer patients what is naturally occurring in our cohort of patients with tumor immunity," says Albert. Albert came to Rockefeller after receiving a B.Sc. from Brown University in solid state chemistry. How does one make the transition from studying solar cells to delving into the mysteries of the human body? For Albert, an important attraction of Rockefeller's graduate program was the openness of the scientific community, an openness that allowed him to pursue a course of biomedical research, despite a lack of training in biology."From my first day at Rockefeller, no one judged me because I wasn't a biologist," says Albert. "Instead, I was encouraged to learn through my own experience and exploration, made possible because, at Rockefeller, there are open doors at every turn."

Albert went on to publish half a dozen articles as a first author in scientific journals such as Nature, Nature Medicine,Journal of Experimental Medicine and The Immunologist, and he has two more articles and a book chapter submitted. Outside the laboratory, Albert has tried to give something back to the community, both locally and globally. He is a member of Healing the Children, an international team of doctors that travels to developing countries performing maxillofacial and plastic surgery, repairing cleft palates and contractual scars from burns. As a surgical assistant, he traveled to Colombia in 1995 and to Bolivia in 1996. Closer to home, he was part of a group of Rockefeller scientists who, working with Bonnie Kaiser's Precollege Science Outreach Program, helped New York City School District III develop science programs. He worked on an HIV education program for sixth, seventh and eighth graders at the Salk School of Science on East 20th Street. Albert will complete his medical degree at Weill Medical College of Cornell University in 2000, after which he plans to continue his studies of the immune system. Albert thinks that as more information is uncovered about the mechanism of T cell activation, scientists will be better prepared to manipulate the immune system in response to infections or tumors by activating T cells, or in the case of autoimmune diseases like lupus and Type 1 diabetes, turning off, or inactivating, the effector cells involved. Reflecting on his years at Rockefeller, Albert says, "I've had the opportunity to address the ideas burning inside me, and the support I've been given here has meant a nurturing community that has given me both the tools and the freedom for responsible scientific explorations." Click here for Albert's Convocation Speech

Rockefeller Third-Year Biologist Receiving Fellowship
Embodies Newest Breed of Researcher

Morgan Huse, the 1999 winner of The Rockefeller University's David Rockefeller Fellowship, knows as well as anyone the frantic pace that science is setting as the century draws to a close. His field of structural biology is evolving so quickly that complex, arduous problems quickly become straightforward tasks that uncover a flood of new information. At 25, Huse is the face of science's future, assimilating and building upon earlier findings while keeping up with a torrent of new data. As technology speeds ahead, a primary task of scientists will be to keep up with powerful computational tools and an exponentially growing body of molecular knowledge. This third-year Ph.D. student says he already notices new challenges emerging to replace the old ones. "A number of people have told me that the biologists of the future will be the databasers, the people who know how to process and make sense of huge amounts of information," he says. "It's getting to the point now where it's becoming very easy to generate lots and lots of data. The really limiting step has become actually sitting down and sifting through it."

Making sense of that information requires more than data skills. Huse embodies the qualities of the typical Rockefeller researcher‹an inquisitive nature, a tenacious focus on the scientific question at hand and the capacity to adapt to a rapidly changing field. As a structural biologist, Huse uses computer imaging and a technique called X-ray crystallography to determine the shape of large molecules and how parts of them fit together when carrying out vital cellular functions. Huse is focusing on certain molecules involved in signal transduction, the mechanism by which cells react internally to stimulation from outside. In particular, he is studying the TGE-Beta pathway, which plays a role in the body's suppression of tumors. Learning more about the structure of the TGF-Beta receptor could help scientists understand how some cancers develop. When Huse came to Rockefeller in 1996 and began studying the TGF-Beta receptor, he thought solving one region of the receptor¹s crystal structure would take up his entire five-year period at the university. But advances in technology -- many of them originating at Rockefeller, which has one of the world¹s leading programs -- spurred the field of structural biology, allowing Huse to reach his goal in half that time. "Structural biology has just exploded," Huse says. "It's hard to imagine it getting much more frenetic. The tools we have are faster, and they're becoming more standardized," he says. "I've never seen crystal structures solved this fast before." Not only has Huse taken on and solved an intricate problem, he also has mastered a considerable amount of leading-edge crystallographic science. The advances that have made structural biology such an active and fruitful field allow scientists to ask questions about how things fit together on a very small scale. "These things we¹re studying are like little machines -- they have on and off switches," Huse says. "We¹re interested in how they¹re turned on and off at an atomic level, how the levers get pushed and pulled." The David Rockefeller Fellowship, first awarded last year, goes to an outstanding third-year student who demonstrates exceptional promise as a student and a leader. A graduate fellow in John Kuriyan's laboratory of molecular biophysics, Huse will receive one year's stipend and an additional monetary prize.

"Morgan has shown outstanding skills as a laboratory scientist by tackling and solving a difficult problem in structural biology," says John Kuriyan, head of the laboratory where Huse conducts his research. "At the same time, he has consistently shown a willingness to participate in and shoulder more than his share of responsibility for the communal activities that move forward the overall research programs of the laboratory and the university." After majoring in biochemistry at Harvard, Huse was drawn to Rockefeller because it offered him "the ability to do whatever I wanted to do. You design your own education. I was tired of being assessed every few months. It was nice to come to a place where they didn't ask you to do too many administrative things." The university's 80 independent labs allow for easy collaboration among scientists in different fields of expertise. This kind of teamwork may become more common as scientific disciplines like chemistry, biology and physics begin to converge. "This is probably how things should be," Hughes says. It's always nice to get some crosstalk across different fields. It certainly has a lot to do with this field." Although Huse lives in a dorm across the street from the laboratory, he has not let his research dictate every waking hour. He runs frequently, visits Lincoln Center often, and likes sports, reading and cooking. Given the pace of change in his field, he hesitates to make long-range predictions about his career. "I'd like to think I'd be working on something different, but I really have no idea what science is going to be like in 10 years," he says. "I have enough trouble predicting what it's going to be like in two years."