By Nina Huang
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
Melody Campbell, PhD
Growing up, Dr. Melody Campbell, 38, was part of the Campbell Quartet. Little did she know, she’d embark on a career to lead a lab that’s one of the only electron microscopy labs studying integrins in the world.
Musical beginnings
Campbell grew up in Okemos, Michigan, a suburb of Lansing. Both of her parents were musicians. Her dad was an organist at their church and taught music theory at Michigan State University. Her mom was a piano teacher.
“It was a good childhood, there was a focus on music as well as academics, but music always came first,” Campbell said.
She’s one of four kids and their dad arranged music for her and her siblings as the Campbell Quartet; two siblings played violin, one played viola, and another played cello.
Although Campbell still really enjoys music and visual arts, she knew early on that it would be very difficult to create a career in music. She started out as a music history major and played in her campus orchestra throughout her undergraduate years, but knew career prospects were limited.
She was never one of the kids who knew what she wanted to do because she had a variety of interests and enjoyed pursuing a lot of different things.
Getting interested in science
But she realized that she enjoyed being in the lab. Campbell had one of the most defining moments in her career when she got hands-on experience working with a great principal investigator and postdoctoral researcher.
“They trusted me enough to be able to try and learn how to be a scientist and make some mistakes and actually develop in that way,” Campbell said.
Her summer after freshman year, she was initially hired to wash glassware at one of the labs. She got really efficient at that and the team asked, ‘Why don’t you start some experiments?’
“That was really important and meaningful, and I’ve always been appreciative of the chance to do that because that really threw a lot of doors open down the line,” she said.
In 2010 at the University of Michigan, Campbell decided to conduct structural biology research because it had a visual aspect that connected to her interests and background in arts. She received her bachelor’s in biochemistry in 2010.
At one point in her career, Campbell seriously considered pharmacy school and even got accepted, but the head of the lab called her into the office and told her that she would make a great scientist.
Campbell was offered a job to work full-time in a lab in Florida for a year. It sounded like a fun adventure so she moved there.
The following year, she went to Scripps Research Institute, where she obtained her PhD in Biophysics in 2016, and then spent her postdoc at University of California, San Francisco before moving to Seattle for her faculty position in July of 2020.
Joining the world-class Fred Hutch Cancer Center
“We were very fortunate to recruit Melody to the Basic Sciences Division at Fred Hutch. She is a fantastic scientist who is studying an important fundamental biological process that also has implications for disease. In addition, she was the founder and director of our cryoEM facility that has catalyzed many new directions in structural biology at Fred Hutch. She is also well known for her commitment to mentoring and fostering the next generation of scientists and it will be exciting to see how her program develops in the future,” Sue Biggins, PhD, director of the Basic Sciences Division at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, shared over email.
A big reason why she decided to work at Fred Hutch was Biggins, in addition to the amazing community and people.
“She manages a lab and has her family, does research, but she’s so available if I have questions or concerns about research. She’s always really available,” Campbell said of Biggins.
Campbell looks up to a lot of the female scientists who have pioneered being in academia. She noted that it has been a very male-dominated career for a really long time.
Her former advisor, Bridget Carragher, is an inspirational figure for her. Carragher was really hands-on and Campbell was impressed by how she juggled family, work, and research.
Women like Kerriger, Biggins, and Linda Buck, whose lab is right next to Campbell’s, had to tolerate a lot more a decade ago.
“They withstood all of those difficulties, but also made science more accessible to women now,” Campbell said.
Campbell’s research
Structural biology is what she does now. It’s the term used to describe how proteins and viruses look, how they interact with each other, and how the surface of the cells look. It’s the study of the three-dimensional structure and movement of biological molecules.
Campbell engages in cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM), which uses powerful microscopes to visualize individual proteins or two different proteins.
Assistant Professor Melody Campbell prepares a sample in the Shared Resources Cryo-EM Lab, February 19, 2021, at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington.
The specific proteins that she studies are integrins.
If you have problems with this protein, it can lead to blood clotting disorders or autoimmune diseases. There are a lot of proteins on the white blood cells that’s important for immunity.
“We’re one step back in that we’re mostly working on understanding how integrins work on healthy cells (healthy contexts) in order to understand what goes wrong during cancer, what goes wrong during autoimmune disease. You have to know what you’re trying to fix it back to, and understand how things look when they’re going well. These integrin proteins are associated with certain inflammatory diseases. If the integrins aren’t working properly, or there are too many of them on certain cells, that causes inflammation,” she explained.
Campbell received the Association of Women in Science Seattle chapter’s 2023 award for Early Career Achievement in STEM.
Her lab is one of the very few labs in the world using electron microscopy (EM) to study integrins.
Melody Campbell in the Campbell Lab at the Fred Hutch Cancer Center, August 6, 2024, in Seattle, Washington.
She explained that electron microscopes for this specific biological application are relatively rare. The 2017 Nobel Prize was awarded to the development of electron microscopy and there have been a lot of developments since then that made it a lot more useful.
Prior to 2017, she said that you could only get fuzzy pictures of the proteins and you couldn’t understand what was going on. A new type of camera came out when she started her PhD, and that has enabled scientists to get clearer and higher resolution photos of proteins to the extent that you can see individual water molecules.
Campbell has a really great lab and works with amazing team members. She works with one technician, two postdoctoral researchers, and three graduate students in her lab.
She explained that as a principal investigator, it’s one part science and another part mentorship and teaching the next generation of scientists.
“One of the most rewarding things is seeing them grow as scientists and they all have individual scientific projects and just seeing their individuality come out in different directions, but they are personally interested in certain aspects and have made new discoveries/achievements based on that,” she explained.
One of the challenges of academic research science is that sometimes, things just don’t go as planned, and it’s not always your fault, Campbell said.
“Sometimes you come up with a hypothesis and it’s based on things that are published in literature. It’s a logical hypothesis and it’s just wrong. You do a lot of experiments and spend a lot of time, but at the end, you don’t have anything to show for. It can be difficult to stay motivated during those times. It’s difficult to detach those failures with feeling like you did something wrong and staying motivated through tough times can generally be a big challenge,” she shared.
In those moments, Campbell just doesn’t give up. She takes time to take a step back and read more in the literature, or think more creatively and outside of the box, try a different experiment, and keep troubleshooting until she gets to a true answer or to something that works.
Though Campbell is still in the early stages of her career and up for promotion this summer, she’s very happy with her current professional position.
“I always have a lot of fun processing data, collecting thousands of images and feeding them through the algorithm, and making decisions on how to interpret data and choose proteins. I think it’s really fun, and it’s always really rewarding to get a structure where you can see exactly where molecules are in relation to each other. It’s a lot of work but if it’s fun, it doesn’t quite feel like work,” Campbell said.
Nina can be reached at newstips@nwasianweekly.com.