SciLink Blog

Brad Langhorst, 33, grew up in Denver, Colorado where his father worked for General Motors as an Engineer. During his junior year in high school, Brad’s father was transferred to Michigan where there was a gym requirement. Having played sports in high school, he had no gym credits and he didn’t want to spend his entire senior year in gym shorts. Cleverly, Dr. Langhorst looked for alternatives and found the School Year Abroad program in Barcelona, Spain that would allow him to finish high school and experience more of the world. After winning an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy, Brad thought the curve-balls were behind him. But, in a strange twist of events, he lost his appointment due to a medical disqualification. Scrambling for another option, Brad applied and was accepted to Johns Hopkins University. After spending some time there Brad decided the famous JHU “pressure cooker” wasn’t for him and transferred to The University of Connecticut where he worked at the National Analytical Ultracentrifugation Facility. After UConn, Brad heard about the human genome project and thought “if I don’t participate in this it would be like living in the 60’s but not going to Woodstock”. He joined the genome project at the Whitehead Institute Center for Genome Research and deferred his grad school aspirations. After his stint at Whitehead working on gene-disease association studies he started a Ph.D. program at the University of New Hampshire to work in Tom Laue’s lab. To balance his long-term scientific goals with some more immediate impact on the world, Brad and some friends started CoopMetrics while in graduate school. By applying scientific data reduction and analysis techniques to financial data, CoopMetrics has been able to provide cooperatives of local businesses with analytical tools to help them compete with chains. Having just finished his doctorate and with CoopMetrics large enough to sustain its growth without his day-to-day input, Brad has begun his search for the next curve.

We had a chance to ask Dr. Langhorst a bit out his work and future as a newly minted Ph.D. in an economic downturn:

What interests you in Science?

While the first large scale step in understanding how life works is the genome project, as Eric Lander says: It’s just a parts list. Interactions between proteins and other molecules, as the major effectors of biology must be understood in detail if we are to move from tinkering to engineering. Projects like UniProt, HUGE and PRIDE are building the catalog of proteins and their interactions but don’t address the details of the interactions. The Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics collects structural information about proteins in the Protein Data Bank. Understanding the energetics of a molecular interaction under specific conditions is an inherently low-throughput endeavour but it is required if we are to tell the difference between interactions that effect change and those that are a result of happenstance. Only detailed studies of the individual interactions can provide sufficient detail to draw these important distinctions. If we can connect the large scale efforts mentioned above with the individual experiments on protein interactions performed in labs all over the world, we’ll be able to construct a valuable resource to allow someone to understand the entire network of interactions that takes place when Molecule X interacts with a protein. PANDaS (Protein Association Network Data Server) is the result of my dissertation work collecting Analytical Ultracentrifuge data and analyses, it is a first step toward my long term vision of understanding the entire network of important protein interactions in enough detail to make predictions.

What did you learn were your strengths in grad school?

Early in grad school, my family called me “5 projects”; I like to work in parallel to hedge against bad ideas, but at some point you have to focus on one to make real progress. In graduate school, I learned how to strike a balance between keeping options open and diving into the most promising option.

What are you looking for in your next career move?

I’d like to work with people doing large scale data discovery and integration. My dissertation work involved aggregating protein association studies and storing/analyzing them in a database. I’d like to use the analytical and informatics skills I honed in grad school in a new area during this next step. This was one of my main reasons for joining SciLink - to identify potential collaborators and/or employers who share my interest in understanding biology with enough depth to make intelligent interventions. I loved working at Whitehead where there was a collection of smart people with varied experience and interest working toward roughly the same goal. I’d like to find a similar experience.

So is that your dream scenario then?

My dream job would allow me to extend my dissertation work from Analytical Ultracentrifugation to other solution techniques like Surface Plasmon Resonance, Light Scattering, Calorimetry or Electrophoresis. I’ve built a framework tools to collect data and analyses but this is too big a project to complete on my own. I hope I can find a group of like-minded people who can fill in the gaps in my expertise benefit from my experience.

I guess you could call what you’d like to build the “Protopedia”?

I hadn’t thought of it that way but the idea is a lot like Wikipedia in that it concentrates the efforts of many scientists to build something valuable.

Who should reach out to you in SciLink?

I just finished my Ph.D. so I’m looking for opportunities where I can utilize my analytical and computation skills. Collaborators, recruiters in both academia and the pharmaceutical industry are welcome but I’m interested in connecting with anyone who shares my interest in understanding protein interactions.