Many Biophysical Society members and meeting attendees will recognize Jean Chin, retired Program Director in the Division of Cell Biology & Biophysics at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant workshops she has organized and chaired for the Annual Meeting over the past ten years. “I remember meeting [former BPS president] Ken Dill when he was visiting NIH and offering to do a workshop, and being surprised when he accepted. I had written a demonstration study section meeting script and thought it would work as a teaching tool. I recruited and organized my ‘reviewers’ and chaired the ‘review’ session, thinking it would be a onetime session, but the committee kept inviting me back,” she says. “When there were so many changes at NIH, I organized panel discussions to present and discuss these changes and new opportunities at NIH. The last one in New Orleans elicited lots of questions and discussions.”

Chin, who retired from the NIH in March 2017, was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, to parents who had emigrated from China. Her father worked in the restaurant business and her mother worked in the home. By the time she was to enter second grade, the family moved to Boston. “Growing up in the city was very different and challenging to a seven-year-old but soon I was walking everywhere,” she shares. “One especially favorite weekend outing was to walk to the magnificent Boston Public Library in Copley Square with neighborhood friends, to explore and return home with a stack of books to read.”

She enjoyed childhood singing and piano lessons, but realized that she would not have a career in music. “Luckily a distant relative who visited my family told me about her biochemistry research. At twelve, I liked the sound of the word and the combination of biology and chemistry so I decided that I would become a biochemist,” she says.

After graduating from Girls’ Latin School, she attended Simmons College in Boston, majoring in chemistry. “From there and after a few detours to work in a couple of great research labs, I completed my PhD research at Dartmouth College with T.Y. Chang on the coordinate regulation of cholesterol and unsaturated fatty acids metabolism in CHO cells,” Chin says. “Most of the enzymes involved were membrane proteins in the endoplasmic reticulum. I first found that compactin, the basis of the current statins on the market, caused a dramatic decrease in the half-life of HMG-CoA reductase, the rate-limiting step in cholesterol biosynthesis. I also saw that compactin caused massive accumulation of lipid vacuoles in cells. My thesis work was supported by an American Heart Association predoctoral fellowship.”

Chin has a great admiration for her father, who despite not finishing high school stressed the importance of education and hard work in all endeavors, big or small. “He also kept me humble,” she says, “by asking me to explain to him in plain English what I had learned in class. When I had trouble, he would chastise me and insist that I should be able to teach anyone whatever I learned.”

Following completion of her PhD studies, she worked in the lab of Konrad Bloch at Harvard University as a postdoctoral fellow. Her work focused on the role of a supernatant protein factor in the regulation of lipid metabolism and was supported by an American Heart Association postdoctoral fellowship and then by an F32 grant from NIH.

“During my training, lipids were considered messy and to be avoided but they are so important and necessary for membrane structure, integrity, activity and function of membrane proteins. Lipids were not a ‘hot’ area then, but I persisted and learned as much as I could,” she says.

Chin had trouble finding an academic position focused on lipids in the New England area following her postdoc. In addition to running his lab at Harvard, Bloch was a consultant with a small biotechnology company in Cambridge and suggested that she consider working in the biotech industry, which she did. “I was hired to manipulate yeast metabolism for desired products. The biotech world was very different but I learned a lot about the different kinds of benefits and challenges faced,” she explains. “Later, this experience would help me appreciate what small businesses faced when applying for SBIR and STTR grants to support their research. ”

Chin and her husband on Bike to Work Day at NIH.

She then accepted a position as an instructor at Harvard Medical School in pathology and at the Center for Blood Research and focused on characterizing a protease inhibitor. Not long after she began working there, her husband, Don Schneider, moved from Dartmouth Medical School to the Center for Scientific Review at NIH. For the previous ten years, they had maintained a long distance marriage between Boston and Hanover, New Hampshire, and Schneider hoped that she would join him in moving to Bethesda. “After much thought, I applied for and accepted a position as a Senior Staff Fellow at NIH and NICHD with Rick Klausner,” she says. “There I focused on characterizing the relationship between iron sulfur clusters and regulation of RNA motifs.”

Although she enjoyed the research, after a while she felt that it was time to move on, and applied for a Program Director position at NIGMS. The position allowed her to return to her first and constant research passion, membranes and membrane proteins. In 1994, she began with a small portfolio of about 60 grants, and by the time of her retirement this year, she had built up the program to around 250 grants focused on structure, function, and dynamics of lipids, membranes, and membrane proteins.

This work was very rewarding for her, as she saw the growth and development of the membrane protein field and the success of applicants, grantees, and their trainees in her and other portfolios. She is extremely excited about the amazing approaches, tools, and reagents developed over the past 20 years to study the membrane proteins. After working with this community for 23 years, Chin will especially miss talking with the investigators.

She advises grant applicants: “Ask important questions you really want to answer, even if they are challenging and might take a long time to address. Prepare and submit only when you and your project are ready; don’t be a shotgun applicant. The goal is not to submit as many applications as possible but to submit your best application and to focus on your important biologically driven questions.”

Now that she is retired, Chin plans on playing the piano again, taking more photos, volunteering, tutoring, and perhaps consulting. First and foremost, she looks forward to spending more time with her husband on their tandem bicycle. “We tried riding single bicycles together, but he is a strong rider and was always waiting for me to catch up,” she says. “Since buying our first tandem in 1994, we’ve traveled all over the United States and abroad with our tandem. One reason to retire this year was that I signed us up for more trips than normal, so I didn’t have enough vacation days.”