Catalytic early funding opened doors of opportunity
2010 Cottrell Scholar and Scialog Fellow Rae Robertson-Anderson, a professor of physics at the University of San Diego, says her career is a great example of how early seed funding can create opportunity over time. For her, early-career discoveries have led to cycles of new funding, new avenues of research, and new collaborations.
Robertson-Anderson studies the viscoelastic properties of polymers on a molecular level. With her first RCSA grant, a Cottrell College Science Award in 2010, she built a new instrument combining optical tweezers with fluorescence microscopy.
Publishing a couple of papers using this instrument led to more funding, including the Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Award in 2012. That award allowed her to expand what the instrument could measure, and more fully develop the field of optical tweezers microrheology.
Developing further techniques using this instrument led to a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2013, which took her research in a new direction, from working with DNA to working with actin filaments. She published more papers and formed new collaborations.
Then she was invited to Scialog: Molecules Come to Life in 2015, calling it “an amazing experience.”
The initiative brought together researchers in physics, biology, and closely related disciplines to “understand what’s happening at a molecular level that gives rise to life,” Robertson-Anderson said.
As a Scialog Fellow, she became part of an interdisciplinary team of researchers including CS 2010 Jenny Ross, physics, Syracuse University, and Mike Rust, biology, University of Chicago. Ross is an expert on microtubules and single-molecule microscopy, and Rust is an expert in engineering bacterial circadian oscillator systems outside of cells. Together, they envisioned making a “creepy crawling material” that, it turns out, is creating a completely new class of materials.
The team’s idea was to incorporate circadian oscillators into a cytoskeleton scaffold made with actin and microtubules that could cause the material to contract and expand or soften and stiffen in a very periodic manner. “If you can do this, you can imagine, it could crawl,” Robertson-Anderson said.
“We got some seed money through the Scialog to work on this crazy idea, and the second year we were awarded more funding to keep pursuing this because we had made a little progress,” she said. “It was a really fun project and expanded what my lab was able to do.”
With her lab branching out and gaining expertise in microtubules, she was able to secure a National Institutes of Health grant on related work looking at DNA transport in the cytoskeleton.
With some preliminary data in hand, Robertson-Anderson and her Scialog colleagues then went looking for further funding to pursue their idea.
Along with Moumita Das, physics, of the Rochester Institute of Technology, the team received a $1 million Keck Foundation Research Grant in 2018 at the frontier of materials research to “create a revolutionary class of autonomous materials that can harness energy-driven, biological ratchets to perform user-defined motion and work.”
According to Keck: “By fusing the information processing and signaling capabilities of circadian clocks with the mechanical tunability and versatility of the cytoskeleton, this revolutionary approach to materials engineering has the potential to create an entirely new class of autonomously active materials that can not only intelligently respond to external signals, but also anticipate future demands.”
“It's really exciting and it’s really starting to come together,” said Robertson-Anderson. “We actually think it’s going to work, which is awesome.”
In addition to creating new opportunities for research, Robertson-Anderson says an important part of being part of the RCSA community has been the ability to form connections between undergraduate institutions and research universities.
She and 2004 Cottrell Scholar Peter Iovine, chemistry, University of San Diego, received two RCSA grants to host regional research meetings at USD in 2017 and 2018 entitled “Frontiers of Soft Matter and Macromolecular Networks.” These meetings included faculty, postdocs, graduate students and undergraduates from 15 different institutions who presented their research, networked, and discussed collaborations.
“We don’t have a graduate program at USD, so in my laboratory undergraduates do the really heavy lifting,” Robertson-Anderson said. “Undergraduate research is something that Research Corporation has really supported.”
She also said becoming a Cottrell Scholar has helped build relationships and networks that have not only advanced her career but created a community of support for her work.
“One thing I love about RCSA is that it feels very much like a family,” said Robertson-Anderson. “You’re not just a proposal you have submitted. It’s very much about keeping in touch and building a relationship and a network, and a family helping you throughout your career.”
