Get to know more about Dr. Baskin's work and career in this exclusive interview.
ACS Chemical Biology and the ACS Division of Biological Chemistry are proud to announce Dr. Jeremy Baskin of Cornell University as the recipient of the 2024 ACS Chemical Biology Young Investigator Award. This award honors the contributions of an early-career individual who is doing outstanding work in chemical biology. Dr. Baskin will present the ACS Chemical Biology Young Investigator Lecture during ACS Spring 2025 on Wednesday, March 26 from 2:00 PM - 4:50 PM in the San Diego Convention Center.
Jeremy M. Baskin is Associate Professor, Nancy and Peter Meinig Family Investigator in the Life Sciences, and Director of the Chemistry–Biology Interface Program at Cornell University, with appointments in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and the Weill Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology. He was born and raised in Montreal, Canada and received his undergraduate education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a major in Chemistry and minors in Biology and Music. Jeremy carried out Ph.D. studies supported by NDSEG and NSF graduate fellowships in Carolyn Bertozzi’s group at the University of California, Berkeley, focusing on development of bioorthogonal chemistries. Jeremy received postdoctoral training in cell biology as a Jane Coffin Childs fellow at Yale University with Pietro De Camilli.
Research in the Baskin lab centers on the chemical biology and cell biology of lipid signaling, with a focus both on development of tools for imaging and editing cellular lipids and elucidation of mechanisms underlying physiological and pathological lipid metabolism and signaling events. Jeremy has been the recipient of numerous awards, including Beckman Young Investigator, Sloan Research Fellowship, NSF CAREER, ACS Young Academic Investigator, ASBMB Walter A. Shaw Young Investigator in Lipid Research, and ICBS Young Chemical Biologist Award.
Get to Know More About Jeremy Baskin
What does this award mean to you?
It is a tremendous honor to receive this award. ACS Chemical Biology is probably my favorite journal; in every issue there are always several papers that capture my interest, and I have been proud to publish in the journal for many years (including my first paper as a graduate student, which appeared in Volume 1!) and serve the journal in various capacities over the intervening years. So, it really is special to receive recognition from the journal for the body of work coming from my lab, which was made possible, above all, by the brilliance, creativity, and dedication of the many outstanding students and postdocs who have worked with me over the past nine years. As ACS Chemical Biology approaches its 20-year anniversary, I look forward to its continuing to play a central role in the chemical biology community for years to come.
How would you describe your research to someone outside your field?
Lipids are one of the fundamental building blocks of life, alongside proteins, nucleic acids, glycans, hydrophilic metabolites, and ions. What makes lipid special—being the hydrophobic products of metabolism—also makes them challenging to study. Simply put, we are in the business of making lipids a more tractable class of biological molecules to study, so we can understand how they direct signaling, affect cellular metabolism, interact with proteins, and influence membrane behavior. To accomplish these goals, we are developing chemical tools for imaging where lipids are biosynthesized and the dynamics of how they are transported from one membrane to another in the cell. We are also developing “membrane editors”, which are light-controlled lipid-modifying enzymes that allow us to add or delete specific lipids from membranes and therefore understand how cells adapt to these targeted changes—a membrane-centric analogy to site-directed mutagenesis. Further, we are harnessing photocrosslinking, chemoproteomics, and proximity labeling to define the protein interactomes of many lipids. Overall, these chemical strategies are enabling us to define new biological functions for a variety of lipids.
What do you think is the biggest challenge currently in your area of research?
Lipids are the collection of all the hydrophobic metabolites in our cells, and this biophysical definition underscores the central challenge associated with studying these molecules. As metabolites, they cannot be as easily tagged with genetically encoded probes as, say, proteins. As hydrophobic molecules, they typically self-assemble into structures (membranes, lipid droplets, lipoprotein particles) that are challenging to manipulate and get a handle on. And there are thousands of different lipids! “Why” is sometimes a dangerous question to ask in biology—we typically get the most mileage out of bearing down on “How,” but the “Why” questions are often the ones that motivate us. For lipids, some of them might be “Why are there so many different lipids in cells?” “Why do eukaryotic cells expend so much energy establishing a highly non-equilibrium situation where each organelle membrane has a different lipid composition from another and lipids are constantly being transported from one membrane to another?” Getting access to experimental approaches that allow us to visualize and manipulate lipids so we can observe how cells control the lipid levels and localizations of lipids in space and time is the first step toward being able to understand why cells have so many lipids and what their numerous biological functions are in signaling, metabolism, and other aspects of cell biology and pathology.
What is next in your research?
We continue to operate in many parallel tracks. There are certain lipids for which good imaging and editing tools are still lacking, and we are very much active in the tools development space to plug those holes. At the same time, we are laser-focused on our long-term mission to reveal new biological functions of lipids and understand the logic of how cells regulate lipid metabolism and transport. We are uncovering new molecular and cellular mechanisms that underlie specific lipid–protein interactions and developing quantitative models of specific branches of lipid metabolism and transport that are driven by a number of poorly understood enzymes and transporters. Overall, this interplay between tools development and biological application propels us forward toward our long-term goals of deciphering the complexity of cellular lipids and membranes.
What would your advice be to someone just starting out in the field?
This may sound glib, but honestly, I would try to imagine where the field should be in 5 or 10 or 20 years and put yourself on a trajectory to get there a little sooner than everyone else. It’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future, as Yogi Berra (or perhaps Niels Bohr) once said, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. The other piece of advice is that in science, as in many other pursuits, one typically gets more recognition for finishing things rather than starting them, so having a concrete plan designed to exploit one’s competitive advantages—innate skills and talents, constellation of training, professional circumstances, and ideas (probably in that order)—is also a key piece of the puzzle.
