Gabriela K. Popescu is a Romanian-born American Biophysicist with expertise in the molecular physiology of glutamate-gated channels. She is Professor of Biochemistry and Clinical Professor of Anesthesiology in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. She is best known for her quantitative work on the biophysical properties of NMDA receptors.

The oldest of three children with two economics professors for parents, she took for granted that she too would become an academic and teach Marxian economics to generations of Romanian undergraduate students. As a child, she loved literature and was an avid reader; enjoyed languages, especially English and Russian; and excelled in math. She shares, “Physics, chemistry, and biology were not in my field of view; not part of my envisioned future." That all changed in her senior year of high school when a lecture in genetic engineering inspired her to consider a profession for herself that felt more meaningful. She envisioned how genetically modified crops could feed the entire world to end hunger on the planet, and wanted to be part of that transformation. She knew that to pursue is career, she would need to excel in physics, chemistry, and biology. “I absolutely loved the challenge. One may say I found my calling," she shares. "I bought every textbook and problem set I could find and spent many late nights answering my own questions. I still love to do that although now I have the internet and PubMed at my fingertips”.

Gabriela graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Chemistry in 1984, and earned a Master’s degree in Biochemistry the following year. She was recruited to do biomedical research in the Oncologic Institute of Bucharest, where she worked testing anticancer drugs with enzymatic assays and started a family. Following the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, she joined the faculty of the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Bucharest as a lecturer. Two years she later enrolled in the Biochemistry Graduate Program at the University of Buffalo, SUNY. "Flying from Bucharest to Buffalo in 1991, I had a return ticket just in case," she shares. "My children, who were four and six at the time, joined me the following year, and the rest – as they say - is history.” She still thinks that graduate school in a foreign country, with two elementary school children, was the hardest thing she has ever done.  Years later, she uses that experience to guide, coach, and mentor students, postdocs, and junior faculty, with the knowledge that encouragement and support by a more experienced scientist can often make a real difference in a person’s life and can go a long way to attract and retain passionate and talented individuals in scientific research.

For Gabriela, graduate school was not only a period for research apprenticeship but also a time for reevaluating secondhand wisdom, articulating deeply held personal values, and envisioning more deliberate professional and life goals. The Counselling Center at the University at Buffalo, which offered free individual and group counselling sessions, was an unanticipated lifeline for her. Aside from invaluable psychological growth, the experience connected her with peers within the University, and stimulated her to begin considering the human mind from a scientific perspective. Rather than feeding the planet with genetically modified crops, she considered for the first time channeling her professional efforts into the exploding field of neuroscience: to understand how the brain works.

At turning points in her professional career, Gabriela has found self-directed hands-on learning approaches to the most effective. To move closer toward her new-found calling in understanding the physical bases of emotions and cognition, she sought postdoctoral training first in neurobiology and then in biophysics. She recalls, “I wanted desperately to understand my own psychological suffering and had no idea about the structures in my body that mediated my mental pain, depression, and turmoil. Sure it was in the brain, but where exactly?” She ultimately settled on the NMDA receptor as a fundamental element of how the brain modifies itself to respond and adapt to environmental stress. She embarked on the arduous journey of developing a research program dedicated to revealing the inner workings of this molecule.

“At the time when I was considering moving into neuroscience research, my children, whose wellbeing and welfare have always been for me guiding principles, were in middle school. They would not even consider moving to a different school, so moving to a different city was not an option," she explains. "I did not feel I had the right to uproot them yet again for my own professional gain. I had to make it happen in a way that worked for them too.” Gabriela sought postdoctoral training in Buffalo, first working in cellular neurobiology with Michal Stachowiak, in then in ion channel biophysics with Tony Auerbach. In 2003, she won a Ruth L. Kirschstein Postdoctoral Individual National Research Service Award (F32) to develop a kinetic model for the activation mechanism of NMDA receptors using single-channel recordings and kinetic modeling. This award afforded her unprecedented research independence. In the same year, she joined the Biophysical Society where she presented her preliminary results and met like-minded peers. This first meeting led to a collaboration and training in the late Jim Howe’s laboratory, at Yale, where she learned fast-perfusion techniques. This fruitful interaction became her model for learning new techniques while maintaining a stable home environment for the family. During a visit to the University of Michigan, she learned brain slice electrophysiology with Jose Esteban. Later, as a junior faculty she took a sabbatical break to learn structural biology with Sasha Sobolevsky at Columbia University, and three-dimensional rendering of protein structures with Rachel Gaudet at Harvard University. During her postdoctoral fellowship with Auerbach and Howe, Gabriela developed and validated the first kinetic model for the activation mechanism of NMDA receptors.

In January 2006, she accepted a tenure track faculty position in the Department of Biochemistry at Buffalo. Four years later, she was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure, and four more years later to full Professor. She says, "I keep telling my trainees that there is not one career path. We each have distinct constellations of talents, motivations, and opportunities which will shape own career trajectory. My experience speaks very clearly to that.”

When asked of her most dramatic life experiences she tells of living through the horror of a 7.2 Richter scale earthquake that killed more than 2000 people in Bucharest. She says: “When the ground under your feet moves violently and randomly, one get a deeply visceral sense of just how shaky and vulnerable life on this planet is.” Similarly, living through the brutality of an armed revolution and the ensuing civil unrest, which toppled the Ceausescu’s authoritarian regime in 1989, taught her about the transient nature of all social and political order. These experiences have nurtured in her a deep sense of appreciation and gratitude, for the privilege of living in a country at peace where people can follow their dreams, and to work in a meaningful and deeply satisfying profession.

Gabriela credits much of her life and career success to the unwavering support of her husband of 20+ years, Daniel J. Kosman, who is an American Biochemist, and SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Buffalo. They enjoy ballroom dancing, cooking and gardening, as well as their four children and the increasing number of grandchildren, on the two North American coasts.