Ilya Balabin, a scientist at Lockheed Martin, was born and raised in Zhukovsky, Russia. The small town just outside of Moscow was established after WWII and named in honor of Nickolay Zhukovsky, an aerospace research pioneer. Like most of the city’s residents at the time, Balabin’s parents were aerospace engineers. Both worked onYuri Gagarin’s first manned space flight. His grandfather had also been a mechanical engineer, designing and building railroad bridges and tunnels.
Balabin’s inspiring high school physics teacher, Lev Gurevich, was a big factor in Balabin’s decision to pursue a career in physics. Gurevich was “a brilliant enthusiast who showed his students how beautiful and exciting physics can be. His ability to explain great ideas in simple yet meaningful terms was admirable, and his passion for physics was just contagious. Being his student was hard but extremely rewarding,” Balabin says. He attended Moscow State University and earned his Master of Science degree in physics in 1985. He began reading biophysics books and journal articles at this time, though his studies were not biophysics-focused. His Master’s thesis research focused on unified geometric field theories in multidimensional space, predecessors of contemporary supersymmetry theories. It was at this time, he explains, “that I began to realize the enormous potential of applying theoretical physics methods to problems in biology.”
Balabin began a PhD program in José Onuchic’s lab at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). “Moving from Russia to Southern California in the 1990s was a big change, and life at UCSD was unbelievably interesting,” he says. His PhD research focused on exploring how the electronic donor-to-acceptor coupling in redox proteins is sensitive to the protein conformation details and thermal atomic motion. “I identified electron transfer pathway interference as the key factor that controls the sensitivity of the electronic coupling and developed a novel descriptor, the coherence parameter that characterized where the coupling is predominantly controlled by the protein structure or by thermal atomic motion,” Balabin elaborates. “My thesis research concluded with an application of the developed approach to two electron transfer reaction steps in bacterial photosynthetic reaction centers that was published in Science.”
“Biophysics combines the best of two worlds: physics, with its rigorous mathematical methods, and biology, with plenty of exciting systems to apply these methods to. ”
Balabin completed his PhD in physics in 1999 and began a postdoctoral position at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in the laboratory of Klaus Schulten. There, his research focused on theoretical analysis and computer simulations of functional motions in the F0 ATPase protein pump, a key element of the energy conversion in cells. This was a challenging question to address, because it required both extensive structural modeling as well as large-scale parallel simulations including modifications to the modeling and simulation programs VMD and NAMD. “It was great to have the opportunity to interact with their developers, most notably John Stone and Justin Gullingsrud,” Balabin says, “from whom I learned a lot about best software design and development practices.”
Balabin then moved to Duke University, in a second postdoctoral position, which turned into a research scholar position, with David Beratan. He extended his thesis research to explore how the structure and dynamics of the tunneling medium control the electronic coupling in a variety of biological and engineered molecular systems. Near the end of his time at Duke, Balabin started an independent project that aimed to understand and explain how structural motions in protein receptors mediate signal transduction. “I developed a novel descriptor that quantified allosteric interactions in receptor proteins,” Balabin explains, “and used it to describe allosteric effects in two Gprotein coupled receptors, bovine rhodopsin and human beta2-adrenergic receptor.”
Rocky Goldsmith, who was a graduate student in Beratan’s lab while Balabin was a postdoc, fondly remembers his time working there alongside Balabin, “[Ilya] was direct, energetic, pragmatic, and knew how to identify the essentials to get something done. He is also exceptionally gifted at coding, scripting, and at breaking down complex problems into easy steps.” Because they had worked so well together during that time, Goldsmith thought of Balabin when he was seeking collaborators later on. “When I ended up a federal scientist for the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Ilya was one of the first people I suggested to come on board. He joined a few years ago as a Lockheed Martin Information Scientist in a team of about a dozen supporting well over double to triple their staffing (probably 24-50 federal scientists), solving many of the problems that the agency scientists cannot.”
In his current position at Lockheed Martin, Balabin works with EPA scientists on developing novel computational methods for screening the influence of environmental chemicals on human health, and prioritizing those chemicals for further testing. “While the EPA runs a state of the art robotic testing facility that works around the clock, experimental testing is still prohibitively slow and expensive for exhaustive screening,” Balabin explains. “What I hope for is to develop a new generation of computational models based on concepts of geometry rather than the established machine learning-based models. While we are in the very beginning of the journey, preliminary results indicate high potential of the new models.”
Balabin’s career has led him through a broad range of research topics, from theoretical physics, to computational biophysics, and computational pharmacology and toxicology. “My interests have been gradually moving from an academic understanding of biomolecular processes per se towards exploring possibilities to utilize and control these processes for medical purposes,” he says. These transitions from one field to another have been rewarding, offering opportunities to pursue new questions, but have also come with challenges. When entering a new field of research, Balabin has responded by learning as much as possible so that he could perform the work with confidence. “In the end, the reward is well worth the effort,” says Balabin.
Even when Balabin is outside of the lab, he finds that his curiosity and focus do not let up. “It may sound shocking, but doing science is not something I can turn on or off at will,” he remarks. “When I have a difficult problem to solve, it stays in my mind 24/7 until a solution is found. That can happen—and has happened —when I am spending time with my family at home, reading a book, or outdoors hiking, cross-country running, swimming, downhill skiing, or biking.”
“Biophysics combines the best of two worlds: physics, with its rigorous mathematical methods, and biology, with plenty of exciting systems to apply these methods to,” Balabin says. He has two pieces of advice for early career biophysicists: “First, do not be afraid of taking on new and challenging problems as they emerge. Second, try to learn new methods and techniques all the time. Whereas doing incremental research is safer and easier, it would never be anywhere as useful or rewarding.”