In less than a week, Jonathan Bourne will achieve a milestone he's dedicated the last eight years to achieving: graduating Weill Cornell Medical College with a doctorate in physiology, biophysics and systems biology from the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences.
Bourne, 29, from Greater Rochester, N.Y., has made an indelible mark on Weill Cornell. Since the start of his doctorate program in 2005, he's published five completed manuscripts, one provisional and one completed patent application, and seven abstracts at national meetings. He has garnered four awards — including a 2009 American Society of Mechanical Engineer's doctoral student award and a Young Investigator Award at the 2012 New York City Musculoskeletal Symposium — and emerged as a community leader.
For these accomplishments, Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences will recognize Bourne as the 2013 Distinguished Graduate Student Commencement Speaker. We caught up with Bourne to get his thoughts on his upcoming speech May 30 at Carnegie Hall, his time pursuing a doctorate at Weill Cornell and what's next in his career.
Q. What does it mean to you to be the 2013 Distinguished Graduate Student Commencement Speaker?
I was speechless when I was first asked. It's just a huge honor and it's a very, very nice recognition, but I was surprised by it. I would not have thought I would be the one speaking, so it was very much a surprise and I'm so honored.
Q. Any chance you can give us a sneak peak of what you're going to say?
I really want to say thank you to friends, family, mentors, faculty. There's just a long list of people that I would not be here without. I know that's very similar for my friends, colleagues and other graduates. If you ever see the end of a movie, there's the credit list and nobody stays through that, so a long list of 'thank you's and names won't work for a speech. I'm still stuck in the slightly shocked and 'OK, wow,' phase. I know there are a number of people I want to acknowledge, and that's as far as I've gotten so far.
Q. After eight years at Weill Cornell, can you even fathom that you're graduating?
No, it's a little surreal. It's bittersweet to be coming to the end of what has been a really, really great journey. I'm excited at the same time and happy to be able to continue on with it. Maybe we don't say this enough, but I want to express thanks and appreciation to all the people who have been involved in our training and education and helping and just to be a part of the research endeavors. As I come toward this point, it's a bit of point for reflection; I'm really lucky and really blessed to have had the opportunity to be here. It's been a really great time.
Q. What was it like living in New York City?
When I came down to interview here was actually my first time being in New York City. A friend gave me some advice when I came down here. She said, 'Don't forget to look up. The buildings are amazing, the architecture is amazing. Don't forget to look up and take in the world around you.' It was a bit overwhelming. The first time I went back to Rochester I was downtown and I was like, 'The buildings look really, really tiny. Is this really downtown?' At home we can hear cows mooing at night; I'm not quite in Rochester itself. And now having come to the city and then go back home, it's very, very surreal.
Q. When did you get your first inkling that you were interested in science?
Probably chasing bugs around the backyard? I remember as a kid, fairly young, my parents taking me fossil hunting. My dad was a geological engineer by training and mom a teacher, and so both parents encouraged me to ask questions about the world around me; to be curious. So, there was always that encouragement and opportunity to learn more about science and history. I remember, fairly early on, maybe first or second grade, one of the books I loved was about underwater archeology and marine biology, and when I was a bit older we visited Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute [in Massachusetts]. I also had a great pediatrician growing up who always encouraged me and said that, 'If you are interested in science, biology, medicine, pursue those things.' I remember asking how organ systems work and bothering her during office visits, bouncing funny ideas, like can you make a liquid Band-Aid. I actually remember talking to her about that as a kid and now it's a product on the market. Not something I was involved in, but thinking aloud and seeing the science the goes behind it come to be is pretty exciting. So, I think it was opportunities like that growing up, asking about the natural world, how things worked, that always encouraged me to consider science.
Q. How did that childhood fascination become a career?
It's funny. Thinking back, I actually remember science all the way to grade school and having some interesting experiences. So, I've been very lucky throughout. I've had great mentors, great teachers, people who were always willing to invest a little extra time into students who were interested. Starting out, even as early as grade school, I was always asking why. How do things work? My science teachers encouraged me to pursue scientific programs and extracurricular activities in applied math and science. In high school I had the opportunity to take part in advanced placement science programs before I went to college, which gave me a nice, strong background.
I went to the University of Rochester for biomedical engineering because the idea of solving problems always resonated, but I very quickly decided that I didn't want to pursue engineering quite at that stage. A lot of engineering blends with math, physics and basic science. You get into a number of degree areas. So, I took the opportunity, after seeing what private school bills cost, to look at some of the SUNY [State University of New York] schools in the area. It was a very natural fit to look at SUNY Geneseo. They had a very good science and physics program and a biophysics program that really kind of hit the areas I wanted to cover. I wanted to be able to continue on for graduate school because I knew, even at that stage, that graduate scientific training was necessary to be able to continue in the field. SUNY Geneseo's biophysics program had that interdisciplinary area of physics and quantitative biology with training in chemistry and other areas of biology you need to have a broad background to continue on and even keep the door open if I wanted to return to biomedical engineering.
Q. Did you ever think about practicing medicine, or did you always know you were going to be a scientist?
I was lucky enough to attend a program the summer between eighth and ninth grade at the University of Rochester for community youth who thought they might be interested in medicine and biology. The program was called 'What's up Doc?' and it was a two-week summer program that aimed to provide a window into what medical school and medicine would be like. Early on in the program, though, we toured anatomy labs and saw cadavers and I quickly realized it was something I didn't think I could handle and medical school wasn't for me. It was an experience that was reinforced during one of my graduate interview experiences at another school, where they toured us through active gross anatomy labs. I was later asked in that interview why I wasn't considering M.D.-Ph.D. programs, and I could answer confidently why not, including a reference to my experience in their own anatomy labs earlier in the day.
During college, I was offered a spot in a research experience for undergraduates at Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, N.Y., where I did bioinformatics research. That experience solidified for me that I enjoyed being in a lab. I always knew I loved science, but there's a difference between enjoying science and wanting to do science, and that made it really clear. I had friends who were doing science but very quickly left, graduated and looked for other things to do. I really enjoyed what I was doing.
Q. Why did you choose Weill Cornell for your graduate studies?
Roswell Park was probably a major component as to why I first started to look at Weill Cornell. As a cancer center, Roswell Park got me interested in cancer biology, and I started to look at programs that had strong, interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary training, labs across spaces and included a strong cancer biology component. Obviously, at Weill Cornell and the tri-institutions there's a strong aspect of cancer biology going on, so that was definitely a factor as I considered graduate schools. What decided Weill Cornell for me was the opportunity to actually come here, interview and get to meet some of the faculty, the students and just seeing all the science going on here. It was almost overwhelming, but it was like, 'Wow, it's like Disneyworld.' Seeing both the educational opportunities and the scientific opportunities going on here were a major component as to why, out of all the schools I looked at, I chose to come here.
Q. What was the experience at Weill Cornell like?
It's been great. You have the four institutions [Weill Cornell, Hospital for Special Surgery, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and The Rockefeller University]; it really is a biomedical community and sort of an academic mini-campus within the Upper East Side. But at the same time, you sometimes may not realize it until you actually get here and see what's available at the four research institutions that are adjoined by walkways or simple crosswalks or tunnels — can't forget the tunnels. It's just a major, major advantage that you rarely see. It's really an excellent biomedical corridor, even in New York City. Realizing what we have here is amazing.
Q. What have you been doing here these past eight years?
As part of graduate school, early on, you start rotating with a couple of different labs. I rotated through several labs, including the laboratory of Dr. Peter Torzilli [professor of applied biomechanics in orthopedic surgery at Weill Cornell whose lab is at Hospital for Special Surgery]. In his lab, I had the opportunity to get involved in a project that ended up becoming published looking at how mechanical force changes the breakdown of soft tissue. Building from that work, we began utilizing molecular modeling to better understand the potential mechanisms involved in these observations.
Q. What was that project about?
The idea Dr. Torzilli had posed was this question that hadn't been clearly answered in the field. Collagen is the major protein in tendons and ligaments and is found all over the body — it's a structural protein. When it's mechanically-loaded, does the body somehow have a way to keep it from being degraded? It kind of makes sense. If you are walking across a bridge, you don't want to break that bridge; it's actively being used. And so we started doing quantitative studies to try to measure if there is an effective force and try to understand the atomic and single molecule level, at least computationally, doing molecular modeling, to understand how mechanical force changes protein structure of collagen. Dr. Torzilli always laughs a little. I left biomedical engineering for a biophysics program in college and yet ended up in a biomedical engineering lab. He's a bioengineer by training, so a lot of our work has been at the interface of soft tissue biomechanics and some molecular mechanics work that is still very bioengineering related. It's funny how some of those things come back around.
We've been lucky enough to have some great collaborators. I had a lot of great mentors, especially Dr. Lei Shi [assistant professor of physiology and biophysics and assistant professor of computational biophysics in the Institute for Computational Biomedicine] and Dr. Harel Weinstein [chairman of the Department of Physiology and Biophysics, the Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Physiology and Biophysics and director of the Institute for Computational Biomedicine] have both provided mentorship, guidance and input throughout the process, both formally and informally.
Q. Did this project spawn the basis of your Ph.D. dissertation?
Yes. It's funny. In some ways, I have been lucky enough that my Ph.D. dissertation and defense just kind of ... happened in the sense that we were working on things, we got to this point where it was appropriate for my Ph.D., wrote it up and presented it. My thesis [titled 'Computational Nanomechanics of Collagen Deformation and its Effect on Enzyme Mechano-Kinetic Cleavage'] focused on trying to understand the effects of mechanical force on collagen and then doing experimental work to try and at least start to understand and test some of the computational predictions involved. We found a combination of both molecular models and some experimental results that have been kind of surprising. We found that crosslinking and mechanical force combined to actually sensitize collagen tissues to accelerate breakdown. It's somewhat counterintuitive. I made the joke, "1+1=0" in a poster. I took a bit of criticism that my math was off on that. [laughs] It ends up being that crosslinking, which is protective, and mechanical force, which is protective, both combine to basically cancel one another out. So it was very surprising, but the data is what it is.
Q. What's so significant about these findings? Do they have any real-world applications?
Coupled with the surprising or unexpected findings, based on those findings and some of the previous science known about chemical compounds and experimental drugs, we've actually proposed that the use of these compounds to treat grafts prior to surgery may have clinical benefit and we just finished a patent application on that.
Q. Do you plan to continue on with this line of research after graduation?
I'm now a postdoc in Dr. Shi's lab and we have a couple projects stemming from this research. My work has opened up a lot of interesting possibilities for continued research. So, the idea that mechanical force changes protein structure and then modifies enzyme interactions has led to some interesting questions. Does protein-protein interaction affect other proteins and how cells interact with the matrix? Can we utilize these mechanically deformed structures to design chemical probes or drug candidates? And then we have continued research on this idea that crosslinking and mechanical force combines to accelerate degradation in certain cases, so we're in the process of working on some projects that will help us understand that more clearly and understand more of the details.
Q. That's really impressive. You were juggling that Ph.D. work while in a master's program?
Yes. I've been fortunate enough that, while I was here I was able to pursue a master's in Clinical and Translational Investigation from the Clinical and Translational Science Center. A couple years into my Ph.D. program, Dr. Torzilli really encouraged me and supported me to apply for that program because a lot of orthopedic and muscular skeletal research has a strong clinical component. Often you see a number of changes and advances in the orthopedic field through clinical and translational research, and there's an active component with that, especially at Hospital for Special Surgery. There's a strong tradition of clinicians and scientists working closely, and our lab is especially close to translational research. So, when I looked at the coursework and training it looked like a logical program to try to gain some added breadth that I wouldn't get through a normal Ph.D. program alone. So I started that in 2008 and finished it off in 2012, I believe.
Q. You've also been active on campus. You co-chaired a career pathways program and co-chaired and educational outreach program. Tell us about your work with these groups.
With career pathways, we brought in speakers, often alumni, to help students understand what opportunities there are out there after graduate school. Many of us want to continue in academia but we want to make sure that people are informed about their options. The job market is very tight, so if not a job in this field, what else can I do with my Ph.D.?
Cornell Science Challenge was a program we did with a local public school to help organize and run a science fair. At the end of the six to eight week program, students would come present their work on campus and we'd take them on tours around Weill Cornell Medical College and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. I originally answered an e-mail to volunteer to be a mentor and the following year helped as a co-chair. The program unfortunately was discontinued due to revisions to the curriculum at the school. I really enjoyed working with the students as it brought back memories of science class from my own middle school experiences. I also loved the fact that we were able to offer them views into what a real-life lab looks like, rather than the images they get from popular media — CSI, the Big Bang Theory — something that I know I would have been fascinated with.
Q. Why is that kind of public outreach important?
I got involved in outreach partly because of the opportunities I had when I was growing up. It was a major influence in why I became involved in science. They really encouraged that interest, to question things — why does it work? How does it work? Feel free to ask those questions. If you tear apart the toaster, make sure you can put it back together, though. There's been a lot of concern as a country that we're falling behind in the STEM field — science, technology, engineering and mathematics. I think outreach is important not just to foster and encourage that curiosity for the people that will follow as scientists. Scientists have a responsibility not just to the ones who follow but also the general public. We need to make sure we are educating the public on what good science is, what we're doing, because it's very much funded by public funds, taxpayer dollars. If you look at things in the news, as politics start to get involved in what gets funded, we as scientists and clinicians and I think everyone in academia and involved in some capacity in science has a responsibility to help the lay population understand what we do and why it's important.
Q. Have you given any thought to your career goals? Where do you see yourself five, 10, 20 years from now?
I don't know. The education and training I received and we received here really opens a lot of doors. I really enjoy science. I really enjoy people and so I would love to have the opportunity to teach, potentially academia after postdoc and start writing grants and start to look at continued research with a teaching component. But I don't know. I'm open to solving problems, things that interest me and get me involved in science. It's hard to view one year out much less five years out. I know I'm going to be working with Lei for a while and we are pursuing some interesting questions and in the process of submitting grants, so hopefully I'll have the opportunity to continue these research projects.