Even as a young child, Jane Clarke, now President of Wolfson College, Cambridge, knew she would grow up to be a scientist and a teacher. “I was always a scientist — surely all young children are!” she says. “That is, curious and testing how the world about them works. I was encouraged by my parents to explore, ask questions, investigate, test every answer. My mother was a science teacher and although my father left school at 15 he was always mathematically and technically minded — he worked on radar during World War II.”
She earned a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from York University and then followed in the footsteps of her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, becoming a high school teacher. After she had been teaching for many years, Clarke and her family moved to Atlanta, Georgia, for her husband’s work as a banker. She was not certified to teach in Georgia, so she decided to return to school to update her scientific knowledge. She enrolled at Georgia Tech, where she fell in love with research.
“I did a course with the protein crystallographer Bud Suddath (who sadly died shortly after I left the United States) and that was when I decided a career in research was for me. I knew I wanted to work on the ‘next step’ in the DNA-to-RNA-to-protein paradigm — that is, how a linear sequence could encode the structure of the protein, the pathway by which the protein folds to that structure, and its biological function,” she shares. When the family returned to the United Kingdom, Clarke, at the age of 40, joined the group of Alan Fersht at the University of Cambridge and completed a PhD in three years. “I joined Alan Fersht’s lab just after he had started using protein engineering to investigate protein folding … and essentially, I have never looked back,” she says. “That big question is still one of the most interesting questions in biophysics, as far as I am concerned.”
Prior to starting with Fersht, she had been discouraged by another scientist, who told her that it was not possible to pursue a PhD and have a successful career in science while raising children. “Being older, I had the confidence to reject that misogyny — the supervisor in question would never have said that to a man,” she explains. “Turns out it was a great thing that he rejected me — Alan Fersht was doing far more interesting research and he nurtured my career.He never asked, ‘Why are you leaving at 4 pm?’ He only cared about what you achieved.”
Following completion of her PhD, she won a training fellowship to do her postdoctoral research on biological NMR with Mark Bycroft in Fersht’s lab.
In 1997, Clarke received a Wellcome Trust Fellowship, and has held a series of fellowships from the Trust since then. “These fellowships are marvelous — you are free to explore your questions, follow your nose, without teaching and administrative obligations, and you only have to write a grant proposal once every five years!” she says. “Of course, the down side is that you have no security and could be out of a job if you fail to get the next one. Just as well my husband was a banker!”
After running her own lab for 20 years, Clarke retired from research last fall, as is mandated at age 67 at the University of Cambridge. “In my case this is hard, closing down my lab after only 20 years! My final students are writing up. They have all been working on intrinsically disordered proteins, which fold upon binding to a partner macromolecule — a case where protein folding and unfolding is part of the function,” she explains. “Plan A was to travel, support and mentor young scientists, and look after the five grandchildren more regularly.”
Instead, a new opportunity arose for Clarke — to serve as head of a Cambridge college. “Last October I started my retirement with the position of President of Wolfson College Cambridge. This is an amazing job. Wolfson is a relatively young college, taking only mature undergraduates (returners to learning) and graduates. It is a modern, inclusive, and diverse community of students and researchers in all disciplines. At the moment we have students from 79 countries. It is a privilege to work with young — and not so young — scholars and see them forge their way, follow their passions, their ambitions to change the world,” she shares. “And actually, it turns out that being a biophysicist is a good training for this job. Of the 32 Heads of Colleges here in Cambridge 4 of us are biophysicists! There is Greg Winter at Trinity, my old mentor Alan Fersht in Gonville and Caius, and Chris Dobson at St John’s.”
The biggest challenge of Clarke’s career has been working in a field in which so few women reach the top. “That can be lonely. There is such a macho ‘got to work long hours’ culture, and it is frustrating watching brilliant young women decide that punishing schedules will be too heavy a price,” she says. “I learned to keep it small — keep your group tight. That way it is manageable, easier to fund, you don’t get hung up with all the admin, and you can still be close to the results — even if it’s your students who are actually collecting the data.”
Over the years, she has also built a support system of fellow women in science. “I have a number of close friends who I have only met through biophysics, mainly women, who I admire and who have supported me through the last 20 years, and I have supported them back,” she says. “Perhaps I will single out Carol Robinson, who left school at 16, took 9 years out after her PhD to look after her children, and yet is one of the world’s most eminent biophysicists (she is the Biophysical Society Lecturer this year). She demonstrates quite clearly that there is not just one way to be a success.”
Outside of science, Clarke most enjoys playing with her five grandchildren, aged one to eight years. “I don’t do that enough because none of them live close enough,” she says.
Asked what advice she would offer to those just starting their careers in biophysics, she says, “Follow your dream. Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t. But don’t be frightened to take it slowly, to take breaks. Keep your eye on what is important — your science and your family and friends — we’re not in this for fame or fortune. And marry a banker!”