Lynmarie Thompson, President-Elect of the Biophysical Society, reflects on her scientific journey, which led her to specialize in biophysical chemistry, specifically on mechanistic studies of bacterial chemotaxis receptor signaling complexes. As president, she aims to expand the impact of biophysics, emphasizing its applications in medicine and encouraging early-career biophysicists to engage with the community and pursue meaningful, balanced research projects.
Incoming Biophysical Society President Lynmarie Thompson moved around frequently in her early years, with a father who served as a pilot and engineer in the US Air Force. Her mother was a high school and college Spanish teacher, although Thompson herself learned Spanish primarily from her Cuban grandmother, who lived in the household as well. Thompson was born in Texas and lived in Charleston, South Carolina; Boulder, Colorado; and Dayton, Ohio before landing in southern California, where she went to high school and college.
She shares, “As a kid I always loved math. I had a fantastic chemistry teacher in high school and decided I wanted to study science in college. I didn’t think I liked biology, because I thought it was all memorization, and I preferred concepts and equations. As a freshman at Caltech it seemed to me that biology was really chemistry, chemistry was really physics, physics was really math, and math was really wild stuff. I chose a chemistry major but also took nearly all the requirements for the biology major. In the spring of my sophomore year, I looked for a lab in which to do undergraduate research and realized that I really liked biophysical chemistry—applying physical chemistry tools like spectroscopy to understand a biochemical question. That summer I started doing research in the laboratory of Sunney Chan.”
In graduate school Thompson worked in Gary Brudvig’s lab on a membrane-protein complex, photosystem II. She explains, “For my postdoc, I wanted to learn a technique that I could then use on membrane proteins that did not have built-in spectroscopic handles—photosystem II contains multiple metal centers and chromophores. My husband and I are both scientists, so finding two jobs in one place was a challenge. I approached this with a willingness to make sacrifices, but not too big a sacrifice. I took a postdoc in Boston while my husband was starting his new faculty position at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass), a two-hour drive from Boston. I decided there was not a good postdoc opportunity for me at UMass, so it was worth taking a short-term position at a distance. For us it made sense to do this for a couple of years, getting together on weekends, until I got a position at UMass.”
For her postdoc, she worked in Bob Griffin’s lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) on bacteriorhodopsin. Thompson says, “It was a great time to get into this field, as lots of new methods were emerging that would be applicable beyond the active site chromophore. I worked on NMR of trapped photocycle intermediates and performed distance measurements at the active site of bacteriorhodopsin.”
Now Thompson is a professor at UMass in the Chemistry Department and the Graduate Program in Molecular and Cellular Biology. She continues, “My group assembles functional chemoreceptor signaling complexes and applies biophysical methods to compare the structure and dynamics of the kinase-activating and kinase-inhibiting signaling states. For example, solid-state NMR measurements focusing on the protein-interaction region of the receptor are helping us to determine how the receptor contacts change to transmit the signal that controls the kinase. Our hydrogen exchange mass spectrometry experiments on signaling complexes have revealed that signaling involves changes in protein order and stability for both the receptor and the kinase, and we are now investigating the coupling protein to determine whether it is involved in transmitting the signal.”
Thompson notes, “I love when we see our results converge into an interesting story that reveals how the system works. For instance, we struggled for a while when our hydrogen exchange studies showed unusual patterns that were not easily analyzed by the standard computer program. But we figured out a way to analyze them, and in the end these patterns led to the most interesting conclusion of that study: that receptors are partially disordered within functional complexes. I also love watching and helping students become independent scientists. It’s great when a previously hesitant student becomes bold enough to want to venture into new territory, diving into the literature to figure out how to do something new and how to critically interpret the results.”
As the incoming president of BPS, Thompson envisions an exciting future for the field. She states, “I find it exciting to see biophysics being applied on a broad scale, with things like proteome-wide approaches to deduce determinants of protein stability. Along with these fundamental advances, I believe biophysics will have an increasing impact on medicine. An important contribution that biophysicists can make is to retain rigor even as they extend their experiments into more complex systems. As president of BPS, I look forward to helping the Society to continue to have a positive impact at many levels—from individual biophysicists to society as a whole. I look forward to supporting the many successful ongoing activities of BPS, and I welcome ideas for new activities that BPS might pursue to foster the success of our members and enable us to benefit the larger community.”
Her advice for early-career biophysicists is that they use opportunities like the Annual Meeting to connect with scientists who are excited about their work and about science. She says, “I think the Annual Meeting provides wonderful opportunities to learn new systems, approaches, and techniques and connect with potential collaborators and friends. I have greatly enjoyed and benefited from the community fostered by the Annual Meeting. I love being part of this inclusive and supportive biophysics community.”
With respect to suggestions for trainees, she instructs, “Choose projects you find interesting and impactful, and work diligently and carefully. Find a balance with activities that keep you physically and mentally healthy, spending time outdoors or with friends and family, which will help you keep things in perspective during the inevitable ups and downs of research and of life.”