Student Spotlight
Miguel Campos, from Chicago, Illinois, is a member of the CLP Predoctoral Training Program working in the labs of Prof. Scheidt and Prof. Zhang. His research focuses on targeted protein degradation as a promising strategy for drug discovery, combining rigorous experimentation with mechanistic insight. Outside the lab, he enjoys superhero fandom, sports, video games, and anime.
What drew you to Northwestern University, and what made it feel like the right place for your studies?
Northwestern was immediately on my radar as soon as I started thinking about pursuing a chemistry PhD. Not only was it close to home as a native to Chicago, but I had previous research experience, where I worked under Prof. Thomson for a summer program to not only fine tune my synthetic chemistry skills but to also get a good feel for what it would be like as a graduate student at Northwestern. I had known about how well the university was ranked and regarded as a global leader in the field of chemistry, and I’m glad to report that the initial experience I had working here showed me that it did in fact live up to the expectations I had going in. The people I met were hardworking, intelligent, and perhaps most important to me, highly collaborative. As someone who was interested in fleshing out my research interests from what had strictly been synthetic and medicinal chemistry back at my undergraduate institution, I believed that Northwestern would be best able to provide the environment I needed to grow as an academic researcher. Karl and Xiaoyu have done a great job in keeping that professional optimism up thus far.
Looking back, what has been your favorite chemistry class so far, and what made it stand out?
Despite how difficult it was at times, I would have to say Prof. Scheidt’s Advanced Organic Chemistry course, CHEM 413, has been my favorite chemistry class so far, at least in grad school. As a synthetic chemist who does a lot of chemical biology in my day-to-day, Karl does a great job in making sure his students stay brushed up on the fundamentals of chemical reactivity so that when the more difficult material comes up in lecture, it’s significantly easier to digest and incorporate into our growing critical thinking capabilities as first year grad students. We also had weekly problem-solving sessions to work on packets that further challenged our ability to think outside of the box and in a way that hammered home what was taught to us in lecture. Karl made sure to host plenty of office hours before his exams, which were very popular. Overall, a class that I feel a lot of organic students in the department look fondly back on.
Is there a professor, mentor, or instructor who has made a lasting impact on your academic journey?
This may seem like a cop out answer, but I truly feel that my co-advisors Karl and Xiaoyu have been instrumental towards steering me in the right direction in grad school so far. There are, of course, difficulties with being jointly-advised, double the emails, double the meetings, etc. but my two research advisors do a phenomenal job in harnessing my growing skillsets to do research in a way that maximizes my chance of success. Whether that be applying for research grants, troubleshooting experiments, tweaking overall project direction, accessing future career prospects, Karl and Xiaoyu have this strong synergy on what they want out of me as a PhD student.
What has been the highlight of your Northwestern experience or academic career so far?
I think the highlight of my Northwestern experience so far would be when I published my first ever first-author paper earlier this year. I never had the opportunity to accomplish that milestone back at my undergraduate institution, so to be able to see my first project through from start to finish was not only rewarding in the sense of having my name out there in the field I’m working in, but it also gave me a better idea on ways to increase my research efficiency going forward, which I appreciate as a growing academic. As a first-generation student from a low income background, that moment meant a lot to me. To be someone who had difficulty navigating the college application process back in high school, seeing my work out there and seeing how far I’ve come truly made me feel like I was inching closer to achieving my end goal of becoming a professor one day.
If you were explaining your work to a non-scientist, how would you describe what you study?
I actually try to do this a lot with my parents, who don’t understand the vast majority of anything scientific I tell them, no offense to my parents. If I were to try to explain things to a non-scientist, it’d maybe go a little something like this: Human cells have a way to recycle the building blocks of what are called proteins, which help facilitate the things that our body does to keep us alive and at homeostasis. We, as chemists, can build molecules that hijack this system to do our bidding. By bringing in close proximity a protein that is responsible for “tagging” old or malfunctioning proteins for this aforementioned recycling process to a protein that has disease implications, we can trick the cell to recycle those proteins of interest using its own built-in machinery, which would then hopefully impart a downstream therapeutic effect.
Can you tell us more about the research you’re conducting in Professor Zhang’s lab, and what excites you most about it?
Right now, we’re focused on following up and/or expanding upon my first project: exploration of the underdeveloped E3 ligase DCAF16. We’re working on two projects at the moment. One involves the use of click-chemistry to discover more novel DCAF16-based degraders, with a specific focus on undruggable kinase targets. Another involves the use of a luminescent HiBiT-based high-throughput screening assay to see if we can identify DCAF16-based molecular glue degraders for the transcription factor ZNF460. The thing that excites me the most about our current work is how potentially versatile DCAF16 can prove to be in meaningfully contributing to the field of targeted protein degradation. It’s a nuclear-localized and conformationally flexible E3 ligase, which grants us a lot of leeway in making the most out this underutilized substrate recognition protein.