Samuel Cho, Associate Professor of Physics and Computer Science at Wake Forest University, moved around a lot as a child, spending his longest stretches in one place in rural and suburban Maryland. His parents each emigrated from South Korea separately, then met and married in the United States before having Cho and his brother.
“Growing up, I always thought my upbringing was pretty unique, but there was recently a movie called Minari about a Korean-American family in rural America that won the Golden Globe Best Picture Award. When the trailer first came out, I thought maybe someone out there owed my family royalties,” Samuel Cho jokes. “It turns out that the movie was not all that similar to my own life, so I’m not expecting a fat check anytime soon.”
His father was a construction worker. “Many times, when we drove through Tysons Corner, Virginia, my father pointed out a few high-rise buildings that he and his older brother helped build in some capacity,” he shares. Cho’s mother was a nurse, though he says, “I think it’s fair to say that she always dreamed of doing something else. In particular, she really wanted to be a naval engineer because she was excellent at math throughout her schooling. She was my first real inspiration for math.” While his parents were working, he was cared for by his grandmother. “She raised four children, including my mother, on her own after her husband passed away from cancer. She supported her children by making and selling the most delicious ‘dduk,’ a traditional Korean type of rice cakes, so I suppose there was a good bit of chemistry there,” he continues. “My family has always had an abundance of encouragement and support even when I struggle to explain what I do in science. I later learned that a supportive family is a great buffer for ‘imposter syndrome,’ which is pretty common in science.”
One of his earliest science memories was weekly trips to the local planetarium in Frederick, Maryland with his father and brother “to see the planets in our solar system in their grand show,” he says. “For some reason, even though we kept seeing the same exact show every time, we never got bored.” He also recalls many excellent science teachers including his high school physics teacher Mrs. Deslattes, “who helped me get college credit via her Advanced Placement course right before she retired,” he shares. “Unfortunately, I lost touch with her, which is really too bad because I know she would have been super proud to see that I ended up as a physics professor.”
In college at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Cho’s major advisor was former Biophysical Society (BPS) president Dorothy Beckett. “I was a biochemistry major, and I had just declared a computer science major, too. She asked me why I was taking computer science courses, and I simply responded: ‘for fun.’ She asked me if I ever thought about doing research and suggested that I check out Alex Mackerell at University of Maryland School of Pharmacy, and that’s how I started doing computational biophysics—a subject I didn’t even know existed,” he says. “I still continue to see Dorothy at the BPS meetings. When she introduces me, she—rightfully!—claims credit for getting me started in biophysics.”
Cho sought out Mackerell at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy on Beckett’s suggestion and had a fruitful and inspiring research experience in his lab. Shortly after graduating, Cho married his wife Sandra, and they moved together across the country to La Jolla, California. He entered a chemistry PhD program at the University of California, San Diego. “I did research with Peter Wolynes on protein folding, binding, and aggregation using mostly coarse-grained models based on the Energy Landscape Theory, and we wrote several papers with José Onuchic and Elizabeth Komives,” he relates.
“In addition to being a great scientist of the highest caliber, Peter has an amazing sense of humor. I now repeat a good number of his jokes in my own lectures. Also, many of my papers continue to have ‘Easter eggs’ in them, and that was largely because of Peter who encouraged it,” he says. “In fact, one of our papers has a quote from one of the Dirty Harry movies that somehow got through the editors. We were not always successful getting our Easter eggs past the editors, but it was always fun trying.”
He also enjoyed working with Yaakov Levy, then a postdoc with Wolynes and Onuchic, and Diego Ferreiro, then a postdoc with Wolynes and Komives. “One of my proudest accomplishments as a graduate student during that time, which I still cite on my CV, is a university-wide Graduate TA Excellence Award thanks to my experience in Katja Lindenberg’s Physical Chemistry class,” he explains. “Not everyone knows that she holds a very high bar for teaching because of her impressive research and service accomplishments, and I’m glad that I was able to learn how to teach from her example.”
After his graduate studies, he started looking into postdoctoral opportunities. “When it came time to move on, I was looking at potential postdoctoral advisors, and I remember noticing that Dave Thirumalai at University of Maryland, College Park was not only doing great work on RNA folding (in addition to protein folding and aggregation, polymer physics, glass transitions, etc.), he had an amazing alumni list of former postdocs and graduate students who became professors. I emailed him, he said yes, and my wife and I were back to the East Coast,” Cho says. “One of the secrets to Dave’s success was the fact that he often took his graduate students and postdocs to lunch when he was in town. Much of that time was also just shooting the breeze about what was going on in our lives or fierce but friendly political debates. After lunch is when the science really started in earnest. I did not realize it at the time, but it is important to build these soft skills and encourage comradery in a research group. It became much easier to ask group members for help or offer it when appropriate.”
While he was in Thirumalai’s lab, they wrote “several great papers including a coarse-grained MD simulation of RNA pseudoknot folding where we predicted the folding rate, and it was later confirmed by experiment. We collaborated with Eda Koculi and Sarah Woodson of Johns Hopkins University to describe an RNA that forms secondary and tertiary structure concurrently, unlike most RNA that form secondary structure before tertiary structures,” he says. “We also wrote a paper on TMAO interactions with proteins in collaboration with John Straub, Boston University. This was also the time when GPUs started to become very popular for high-performance computing, and we started a collaboration with Amitabh Vashney of University of Maryland Department of Computer Science to see whether it would be feasible to perform MD simulations in GPUs, and the answer turned out to be yes.”
Cho is now at Wake Forest University, a primarily undergraduate institution with graduate programs. He has a unique joint appointment in the Departments of Physics and Computer Science. He is an associate professor and serves as the Graduate Director of the Computer Science Department’s MS degree program.
“My research group developed coarse-grained MD simulation software that was optimized for the GPU using new parallel algorithms, and we applied it to protein-nanoparticle assembly, a first in the field. We have also studied tRNA folding mechanisms that are parallel and sometimes involve nonproductive intermediate states,” he explains. “In a recent paper, we modeled DNA and RNA G-quadruplexes that are important for ribosome assembly, and we believe that they could be important anticancer targets.”
“I think the best advice I can give to those just starting their careers is to actively search out and attend free food events. This sounds like a joke—and it is, sort of—but it turned out to be one of my most valuable scientific strategies,” he shares. “Most free food events tend to be well organized (which is why they can afford the free food in the first place). Also, great scientists of all stripes cannot easily pass up free food, so it is a good opportunity to interact with your colleagues. Finally, food seems to be one of the few things in the world that binds people of so many different backgrounds together. While we may not all eat the same types of food, all of us eat, and everyone is happy to share a meal with others. There’s never a better time to talk about science.”