Natalie Ahn

"I grew up on U.S. military bases in Korea and Japan. My father emigrated from Korea and worked at the U.S. embassies in Seoul and Tokyo. My mother was a finance clerk at the embassy. I have one brother who’s an engineer and builds airplanes."

"I was always interested in science. When John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth, I remember riding my tricycle and thinking that I too wanted to be an astronaut. Later, when I became an assistant professor at the University of Colorado, three of my first lab members had segued into biochemistry after first starting in aerospace engineering. So I appreciate how NASA and other big-science efforts promote science by inspiring kids."

"After finishing a high school degree overseas, I majored in chemistry at the University of Washington in Seattle and did undergraduate research in X-ray crystallography with the late Lyle Jensen and protein hydrodynamics with David Teller. I obtained my Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, where I studied enzymology with Judith Klinman. Judith is an incredibly deep thinker as well as a generous and courageous individual who continues to be one of my greatest inspirations."

"My first postdoctoral job was with Christoph de Haën at the University of Washington, where I studied hormone receptor binding. Christoph was unable to renew his funding and had to close his lab, and that’s how I learned about the importance of grants! He ended up great anyway, eventually becoming director of preclinical research at Bracco and director of the Milano Research Center. I then moved to the lab of the late Edwin Krebs for a second postdoc, where I was among the first to describe MAP kinases and MAP kinase kinases. That started my career in signal transduction."

"I still work on MAP kinase and other signaling pathways. When I started at the University of Colorado, I began applying the new technology of protein mass spectrometry to address questions in signaling. This was done in collaboration with my late partner, Katheryn Resing. My lab’s applications of proteomics to signal transduction have led to broad discoveries, ranging from new mechanisms for cell regulation to mechanisms for allosteric control of MAP kinases."

"I attended the ASBMB annual meeting during my graduate studies, and it was at this meeting that I gave my first public research talk and got to meet the leaders in enzymology. That was a spectacular experience. When at the end of my first postdoc I had no way to pay for an accepted manuscript, the Journal of Biological Chemistry generously waived page charges, allowing me to publish. Since then, I’ve helped organize symposia at the annual meeting and served on the ASBMB Council. It was the support by the ASBMB during the crucial early years of my career that engendered my long-lasting love for this society."

"I try to be involved in every aspect of my lab, but I let my students and postdocs — currently eight in all — work independently enough to discover their strengths, while following behind to support them. That’s not too different from the way I view leadership elsewhere, where my instinct is to try to solve the most important problems and avoid fixing what’s not broken."

"I’m not a flashy or provocative person, although I am unafraid of taking a stand when it’s important. As president, I plan to focus on gaps and weaknesses at the ASBMB and the detailed steps needed to address them."

"Right now, we have three priorities. First is to recapture the annual meeting’s reputation as a must-attend event. Second is to expand our visibility and membership, especially among young investigators. Third is to restore the prominence and stature of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, where we’ve been fortunate to appoint Lila Gierasch as editor-in-chief and Fred Guengerich as deputy editor."

"The ASBMB has profoundly influenced discovery, and the importance of BMB in our current era is growing, not shrinking. This is obvious just by looking at the approximately one-third of human open reading frames and majority of noncoding RNAs whose functions are unknown and the overwhelming numbers of new regulatory connections generated from large-scale studies. Our discipline is the cornerstone of what’s needed to discover the functions of new molecules and mechanisms underlying their connectios."