Catch up on the LAS Research Highlights podcast and to know our LAS faculty, their backgrounds and current research initiatives with Genia Olesnicky, Ph.D., Professor of biology and Associate Dean of Research. Learn more about the podcast here and enjoy other episodes here.
This episode’s guest is James Kovacs, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of chemistry, who shares how his path changed from music to chemistry and molecular biology, what his current research entails and the challenges accompanying it.
Find the full episode and transcript here, and check out the episode highlights below.
Summary
Like many students just starting at university, James Kovacs, Ph.D., pivoted sharply from his original college plans to pursue a much different field.
“I started my undergrad as a music major,” Kovacs shared. “I still love music and continued to play all the way through undergrad and some graduate school, but I was also taking chemistry and biology courses and ultimately decided to major in molecular biology and chemistry.”
The chemistry professor attended Goshen College, in Indiana, for his undergrad, followed CU Denver where he earned his master’s in chemistry and worked in peptide research. He immediately entered his doctoral program after and received a degree in Structural Biology and Biophysics, and spoke on the opportunities the universities provided to learn about specializations outside his own.
“After my master’s, I jumped into a Ph.D. program at Anschutz Medical Campus,” said Kovacs. “My mentor there was an M.D. and taught in the medical school as division head of rheumatology. My research had almost nothing to do with rheumatology, but the exposure that we got there was awesome.”
Kovacs then entered a postdoctoral program at Harvard Medical School and pivoted towards HIV research, where he engineered potential immunogens for HIV vaccines. The platform he came up with progressed to phase 2B trials and is still being used worldwide.
Currently, Kovacs is studying the immune system and how its functions complement each other.
“To simplify it, my current research is understanding how your immune system works,” he explained. “The arm of the immune system that I’m studying, the complement system, is named that way because it complements your ‘normal’ system and what people think of as that. More specifically, the interactions that I’m trying to understand are what we need and what our body uses to bridge the immune system we’re born with to the immune system that we pick up along the way.”
“One of of the main interactions that I study is that bridge, so the building of your acquired, or adaptive, immunity,” Kovacs continued. “You know, you get sick once, and hopefully your body starts building that repertoire of antibodies and building on that. The more we understand about how our body normally does that, the more we can start to understand a lot of the autoimmune diseases.”
Kovacs also discussed the benefits working at a R2 university.
“I’m happy to be at a smaller institution,” he said. “It just means a lot more collaboration. I love the interactions with our undergrads, and getting them interested in the research is great.”