Six new chemistry profs scooped by the U of A

Dr. Robert Campbell, a new professor in the University of Alberta Department of Chemistry, spent one of his first days on the job at home, waiting for the moving van that carried his furniture from San Diego. Two days earlier, Campbell completed the long drive from his old home in California to his new one in Edmonton. "I've never owned a house before," he said, "so this is all new to me."

Campbell is the last of six new additions to the Department of Chemistry to arrive in Edmonton, five of whom have come to the U of A after working in the United States. According to department chair Dr. Martin Cowie, "this is unprecedented for the department - we've never made six hires at once...We didn't set out to do six hires; this wasn't the plan, but some opportunities came up that we just couldn't say no to."

What attracted the department to Campbell was his interdisciplinary work that connects chemistry to cell biology. "This is really a new approach to chemistry, because he's almost as much a biologist as a chemist," Cowie said. "He doesn't really fit within the classical picture of a chemistry department, which is what we wanted when we hired him."

Campbell engineers proteins that he says work as intra-molecular "tools". Some of these proteins, for instance, are special because, unlike any of the proteins in, say, a human cell, these protein tools can fluoresce, allowing them to be used as markers of certain conditions in a cell. "This is incredibly sensitive - you can even look at a single molecule, in the extreme case, using florescence, because human cells are not fluorescent; people are not fluorescent," he said.

Of the new hires, five, including Campbell, have been lured from positions in the United States. Dr. Todd Lowary, who had been working at Ohio State University in carbohydrate chemistry, turned down an offer from the University of Toronto to come to the Alberta Ingenuity Centre for Carbohydrate Science. He'll be taking over the position left by Dr. Ole Hindsgaul, a well-respected researcher in the same field, who has left the U of A to assume a prestigious chair in Denmark.

"I'm trying to inhibit the biosynthesis of carbohydrates in living systems, which could then be used as new ways of treating diseases, particularly tuberculosis, with some interest in cancer as well," Lowary said.

As well, the husband-and-wife team of Dr. Jillian Buriak and Dr. Hicham Fenniri came from Purdue University to help steer the National Research Council's fledgling National Institute for Nanotechnology.

Dr. Alexander Brown is also joining the department. Brown is a theoretical chemist who has just completed post-doctoral work at Emory University.

Finally, Dr. Yunjie Xu, the only hire from within both Canada and the U.S., becomes a tenure-track professor with the help of a University Faculty Award from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. Xu is the wife of distinguished U of A chemist Wolfgang Jäger, and, as Cowie said, "we wanted to get more women on staff - this was before we'd even hired Jillian - and we hadn't been successful, period. So we looked at using this UFA award, advertised it, and Yunjie was definitely the best candidate."

When all is said and done, these professors bring not only their own expertise and the research dollars that follow them here, they also open new research possibilities for graduate students and post-doctoral researchers at the U of A, Cowie said.