Profile of Steve Granick

PROFILE PROFILE Profile of Steve Granick Sandeep Ravindran, Science Writer Steve Granick says a simple underlying principle—the Granick’s latest scientific endeavor, described in desire for an interesting life with meaningful human re- his Inaugural Article (1), resulted in a surprising discov- lations—has guided his career. During undergraduate ery about how enzymes move, despite his laboratory study at Princeton University, Granick majored in sociol- never having worked on enzymes before. “Looking ogy, mainly because he was interested in literature, hu- back on it, nothing had changed,” says Granick. manities, and social sciences. He took just one obligatory “The actual world doesn’t know the difference be- science class—introductory physics—and found it so dry tween physics, chemistry, and social science; these that he never took another one. Despite his initial lack of distinctions are artificial,” he says. “I turned a taste interest in science, Granick would go on to have a dis- for exploration into a career in science, finding ways tinguished scientific career, eventually becoming direc- to avoid pigeonholing the lab’s research.” tor of the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) Center for Soft and Living Matter in Ulsan, South Korea, as well as being Late Pivot to Natural Science elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2015. Granick dropped out of college after his junior year as an “To me, research is like traveling the world. Some undergraduate at Princeton University. “I bummed people like to visit a different country every few years, around the [United States] taking odd jobs for three and I feel that way about scientific problems,” said years,” he says. “One of those jobs turned out to be ...in Granick. Working across disciplines, Granick’s wide- an oil field,” says Granick. “They were desperate for ranging interests have led him to address the chemis- workers, so you would show up and you would see this try and physics of everyday life, especially complex lighted derrick in the distance at night—they called it the fluids, colloids, polymers, lipids, thin films, and biomate- Christmas tree—and if you had two hands and two feet, rials. “It’s all over the place,” they would hire you. That was my introduction to lab work, Granick says. But he also says anditturnsoutIenjoyedit.” there is a simple, unifying Granick enjoyed this peripatetic phase so much theme underlying the research that he became inspired to begin intellectual wan- pursued in his interdisciplinary dering with a similar spirit: he took some science laboratory: “To understand classes. “As a nondegree student, I took classes in a everyday life.” state where I could do that inexpensively: Wisconsin,” “What ties it together is that he says. “I was intrigued, and decided to do some the rules of complicated sys- more,” says Granick. He completed the requirements tems with interactions are not for a bachelor’s degree in sociology by correspon- so different in all those different dence, and became a chemistry graduate student at systems, and also I love having the University of Wisconsin. “By chance I found a great coworkers who are curious about physical chemist, John Ferry, and he became my PhD the world,” Granick says. Teach- advisor,” he says. “It’s not that I found his scientific ing and mentoring young scien- problems more interesting than others, but I thought to tists is central to Granick’swork. myself, from this guy I could learn a lot,” says Granick. “I enjoy seeing people live up to When he decided to pursue a postdoctoral posi- their potential,” he says. “Some- tion, Granick wrote to Pierre-Gilles de Gennes at the times you feel that, because they Collège de France, who would go on to win the Nobel were encouraged at a formative Prize in Physics 10 years later. “He turned out to be the time in their lives, they take a right person at the right time,” says Granick. “He was a new path, and then go forth maverick, known for discovering new fields of study to and make contributions to the which physics could contribute.” Granick had studied Steve Granick. Image Courtesy of Steve world that might not have polymers and macromolecules as a doctoral student, Granick. happened otherwise.” but under de Gennes’ influence he became interested Published under the PNAS license. This is a Profile of a member of the National Academy of Sciences to accompany the member’sInauguralArticleonpage14inissue 1ofvolume115. 1400–1402 | PNAS | February 13, 2018 | vol. 115 | no. 7 www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1800048115 Downloaded by guest on September 24, 2021 in studying surfaces and interfaces outside the high- and what are the mechanisms,” he says. For exam- vacuum environment in which they had traditionally ple, Granick and his colleagues used single-molecule been studied. fluorescence imaging to elucidate correlations be- Granick’s postdoctoral work led him to a fac- tween neighboring actin biofilaments and colloids ulty position at the University of Illinois at Urbana– rather than take the conventional mean-field ap- Champaign in 1985. By the time he retired from the proach (7, 8). University of Illinois, Granick’s affiliations had ex- Granick avoids heavily populated fields. “Our work panded to include Professor of Materials Science naturally falls in the cracks between disciplines. This and Engineering, Professor of Physics and Bio- gives us tremendous freedom to do things at our own physics, Professor of Chemistry, and Professor of pace, without feeling like we’re competing to do to- Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. “With day what someone might publish tomorrow,” says the passage of time my interests, which had been Granick. “I do my best to find, as coworkers, people so unorthodox ... became more accepted,” says who see the value of curiosity-driven research. There Granick. are too many others who look to cure cancer or solve the energy problem in the span of one postdoc or one Thinking Like a Molecule PhD thesis.” Interdisciplinary in character, Granick’s research has In 2014, after 30 years at the University of Illinois, led to discoveries in physics, materials science, engi- Granick became the founding director of the IBS neering, and chemistry. He works at the interface of Center for Soft and Living Matter, a blue-sky research these areas, especially as they apply to soft materials center that is part of the IBS in South Korea. “It’s and molecular interactions. “Every time I work on a the Korean version of a Max Planck Institute,” says new problem, I find I fall in love with it,” he says. Granick. “We invest in long-term research. Among “The goal of my lab’s research is to think like a scientists there’s great hunger for a place like this, molecule, to learn to second-guess what a molecule where you’re encouraged to follow your curiosity, would decide to do when confronted by external where you choose problems because you think they constraints in its complex environment,” says Granick. might make a difference rather than because you can “After we formulate the problem, measurements get a grant to support them,” he says. The multidis- made with an open mind lead to interesting sur- ciplinary approach that Granick enjoys at the IBS is prises.” Early in his career, this took the form of using exemplified by his Inaugural Article (1). the frequency dependence of linear viscoelasticity to study fundamental questions of friction and lubrica- Discovery About How Enzymes Move tion; Granick describes this work as foreshadowing Granick’s Inaugural Article (1) was the result of trying present-day interests in confined systems within and to resolve a mystery about how enzymes move. Re- outside of equilibrium physics. searchers elsewhere had discovered that enzymes “We found that when liquids are molecularly thin, appear to display enhanced diffusion when they cat- confined in one or more directions to the space of a alyze chemical reactions. “It didn’t make sense; how few molecules, they behave unlike any expected can diffusion change?” Granick wondered. macroscopic liquid, which raised many questions,” Granick was puzzling over these results when a says Granick (2). The advent of single-molecule tech- theorist colleague, Tsvi Tlusty, came to his office and niques broadened the scope of what was possible. He shared an unusual prediction. He suggested that the pioneered studies of polymer surface diffusion, water enzymes might be undergoing antichemotaxis, and hydrophobicity, and Janus colloids (3–5). Those that it should be observable. “I went to my postdoc, everyday-life questions and their sometimes-simple Ah-Young Jee, and tried to convince her that it was solutions have challenged the physics textbooks worth checking,” says Granick. “She went to a pro- when it comes to Brownian motion, framed new dis- fessor who is expert on microfluidics, and she hap- cussion around hydrophobicity, and created self- pened to have exactly the right kind of microfluidics assembling colloidal spheres that have the ability to that we needed,” he says. form useful self-assembled structures with collective “Within 48 hours, this postdoc actually got the behavior (4, 6, 7). Granick’s is a varied research port- preliminary result showing antichemotaxis, and we folio, which is just how he likes it. quantified this,” says Granick. “To me it encapsulates Granick sees the embrace of new technology as what we can do in this Korean setting that wouldn’t key to making scientific headway. “We can never be have been possible in most other places,” he says. as smart as the giants of the past, but the world of “We had the instrument, we had the theorist, we had technology has marched on, so we can measure the microfluidics person, we had the gifted postdoc, things they wouldn’t have imagined,” says Granick.

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