Frances Separovic incoming President of the Biophysical Society, followed an atypical path to become a biophysical chemist. “I did not choose a career in science; I stumbled onto it,” she shares. “Almost all of us will struggle no matter what career we choose, so may as well have some fun along the way. My career in biophysics has not been easy, but I have enjoyed the journey. I am so pleased to have embarked upon a career in biophysics and being a member of the Biophysical Society helped me along the way.”
When Frances Separovic was a young child, her family immigrated from Croatia to Broken Hill, an outback mining town in central Australia — you may have seen it featured in the movies The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert and Mad Max. Her father was a miner and her mother cleaned houses to make ends meet. Separovic was the first in her family to complete primary school and never envisioned herself pursuing a career in science. “My family did not think in terms of careers — we thought in terms of making a living. I thought that if I were lucky, I could become an air hostess and get to fly and see other parts of Australia,” she shares. “However, this was very unlikely as there was a height requirement, which I was unlikely to reach as I was always the smallest kid in my class at school.”
After high school, she started at the University of Sydney, but left school after one term, working as a junior technical assistant in a microbiology lab at CSIRO Food Research, a government research organization.
Following the birth of her son, she was working full-time and struggling to make ends meet, so she decided to return to school part-time so that she could qualify as a technical officer. After getting a biological technician’s certificate in night school, and finding that she enjoyed physics and math, she undertook a math-physics double major at Macquarie University. Her degree program, which she pursued part-time, complemented her work at CSIRO, particularly when she switched to a physics lab.
Separovic found that she enjoyed science so much that she chose to work on her PhD at the University of New South Wales. “Although it was difficult working full-time and studying part-time, it was both rewarding and stimulating and enriched my life in so many ways,” she says. By the time she finished her PhD, her son had graduated from high school. She was awarded a Fogarty Fellowship and carried out a postdoc with Klaus Gawrisch at NIH.
Following her postdoc, she returned to Australia and joined the University of Melbourne as an associate professor of chemistry. “I found it difficult to transfer from a government laboratory, where I had worked for 23 years, to a university environment. It was compounded by being a physicist in a chemistry department and having to establish myself as a teaching and research academic,” she explains. “Also, I was considered too old to be an early career researcher and found that my age often impeded me at most stages of my career, more so for women than men.”
In 2005, she became the first woman professor of chemistry at the university, and in 2010 the first woman to head the School of Chemistry.
“Increasingly our lab has focused on membrane-active peptides, in particular antimicrobial peptides, that cross lipid bilayer membranes. Membrane-active peptides have been thought of as a means to defeat antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Alternatives to conventional antibiotics are heavily needed and could be derived from membrane-active peptides and understanding how to harness synergistic combinations of peptides and drugs,” Separovic explains. “During my PhD work, I started studying the peptide antibiotic gramicidin A by using solid-state NMR to determine its structure in a lipid bilayer. I loved NMR as it was a way of doing quantum mechanics every day. I went on to determine the structure of other peptides in membranes, and increasingly antimicrobial peptides.”
Separovic retired from the University of Melbourne in 2019 and holds the title Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor Emeritus. She is also deputy director of the Bio21 Molecular Science & Biotechnology Institute and an honorary professor of chemistry at the university. “Current projects are entitled, Integrating Quantum Hyperpolarisation in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Systems and Mechanism of Bacterial Resistance to Antimicrobial Peptides,” she shares. “We were awarded an equipment grant, Dynamic Nuclear Polarisation System for Molecular Structure Determination, and are studying antimicrobial peptides in live bacteria instead of model membranes. Since the structure of these peptides depend on their environment, to understand how they work it is important to study them in live cells.”
Going forward, she plans to continue collaborating with biophysicists around the world, and give back to the Biophysical Society, “which because of its blend of disciplines and cultures always made me feel at home,” she shares. “The Society can help make a difference worldwide so that policy makers understand the importance of scientific research and in turn use science to inform policy.”
“The Society has given me an international network which has helped me directly and indirectly. Not only does this lead to research collaboration but also to support when applying for jobs and promotion as well as awards and prizes,” Separovic says. “The Society is constantly evolving and trying to respond to the needs of its members. When I first went to the Annual Meeting, I found a home in one of the Subgroups, which helped nurture my career and from there I found out more about the committees and the increasing commitment of the Society to embrace diversity in many forms.”
Kalina Hristova, professor of materials science and engineering at Johns Hopkins University does not collaborate directly with Separovic, but the two share a passion for biophysics and the same interest in the structure and function of membrane active peptides. They first met when presenting posters at a Biophysical Society Annual Meeting in the late 1990s. “To this day, one of the highlights of the Annual Meeting is catching up with Frances and exchanging new ideas about scientific research and science policies. Her optimism, her dedication, and her forward-looking nature are inspiring, and make her the perfect companion for a cup of coffee — or a glass of wine.”
Collaborator Mibel Aguilar, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Monash University, first met Separovic shortly after she had taken up her academic position at the University of Melbourne. “We were both attending a biomolecular interactions symposium at the University of Melbourne, and she asked me a very relevant and insightful question. We were in the early days of developing our membrane biosensor techniques, and Frances really opened up the world of biomembrane structure to me and helped me gain confidence in the significance of our work,” she shares. Since then, they have collaborated frequently, and are currently working on elucidating the role of the bacterial membrane in bacterial resistance.
Aguilar admires her dedication both to the work and her community, saying “Frances combines her passion for science with a commitment to people — she reads voraciously and continually seeks opportunities to promote colleagues — and of course is unrelenting in her voice for women in science. She is truly a global citizen for science.”