Finding Answers in Extremes

Gabrielle Illava is no stranger to pressure. The postdoctoral fellow in the Biophysics Initiative within the Department of Physics began her higher education journey as a single mom at Tompkins Cortland Community College near Ithaca, New York.

Illava made a name for herself through her work ethic and was encouraged to participate in an immersive summer research partnership with Cornell University. There, Illava fell in love with the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS) — a device that looks like it came from "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids."

"This huge machine accelerates particles and bends them with magnets so they emit radiation in X-ray beams," said Illava, now a National Science Foundation postdoctoral researcher based at Carnegie Mellon University. "The CHESS lab facilitates experiments along the beamline of those emitted X-rays."

She transferred into Cornell and completed her undergraduate work while developing new research techniques using the beamline to fabricate graphene-based X-ray windows.

Illava's mother moved in with her to provide childcare as Illava entered a Ph.D. program at Princeton in chemistry and chemical biology, performing anaerobic experiments on oxygen-sensitive proteins. A year later, Illava's mentor was recruited by Cornell, and moved her entire lab to Ithaca, including Illava, her son, and her mother.

As she manipulated proteins along the synchrotron beamline, Illava became involved with research efforts to study proteins under conditions that are found deep underground and underwater.

"Approximately sixty percent of the earth's biomass exists under tremendous pressure, and we don't have the techniques to study them. These organisms have incredibly interesting chemical mechanisms for survival, and we are missing out on so much information!"

Illava learned how researchers use ultra high-pressure liquid chromatography to mimic the environments deep below the Earth's surface where many, many organisms somehow survive.

Back in Ithaca, Illava's mother died suddenly due to a stroke, and Illava had to face a decision: leave school with her master's degree and pursue other work, or figure out how to meet the demands of graduate school while parenting a middle schooler.

"I'm a scientist," Illava said. "I need to do science." She broke her life down into categories and made strategic decisions about where to fall short. "I had to decide, was I going to miss dinner with my son? Skip studying for an exam? Miss work in the lab? I had to intentionally choose what I could get done and where I would fall short."

Illava valued her mentors at Cornell, who allowed her the flexibility necessary to complete her doctorate. In finding a postdoctoral program, Illava sought the same atmosphere. She connected with Carnegie Mellon University Assistant Professor Fangwei Si, immediately seeing a home for herself in the Si Lab.

"We study life sciences. Life is complicated and we need to value that," he said.

Si, a faculty member in the Department of Physics, has brought together a diverse team with backgrounds in physics, computational analysis, biology, chemistry and engineering to explore how life emerges from non-living matter.

Si said he considers bacteria to exist at the border between non-living matter and living organisms. His team studies how bacteria perform under extreme conditions. Si looked at bacterial behavior in heat, cold, starvation environments, and Illava proposed adding the dimension of pressure to their experiments.

Illava will be using hydrostatic pressure, simulating the environment of the deep ocean, to examine how these bacteria optimize, both individually and as parts of larger communities.

"My project aims to study how cell systems respond to stress and extreme physical conditions," Illava said. "This hasn't been studied using time-resolved single cell fluorescence microscopy before," Illava said. She said she feels the symbiotic link between phages and bacteria could help society better understand the rules of life.

The NSF agrees. From among ~14,000 applicants, they awarded Illava a three-year postdoctoral research fellowship in biology to continue her work at Carnegie Mellon.