David Lawrenc, PhD — 'They Just Didn't Know What to Make of Me'
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David Lawrenc, PhD — 'They Just Didn't Know What to Make of Me'
“They Just Didn’t Know What to Make of Me”
Lawrence works at the interface between chemistry and biology, but he didn’t take the most direct route to get there. He started out as a math major at the University of California-Irvine, but switched to biology when he felt that the math courses beyond calculus were too abstract for his taste.
A course in organic chemistry whetted his appetite for chemical biology.
“Organic chemistry was so easy and so exciting,” he says. “Organic chemists are architects and engineers who design and manipulate nature at the molecular level. You can do whatever you want to make new forms of matter. What gets more exciting than that?”
He credits his undergraduate adviser, Hal Moore, with driving home the importance of the correlation between biology and chemistry.
“Hal once said to me, ‘If my colleagues over in the Department of Biology knew a little bit more chemistry, they could really do great things.’” Lawrence says. “That comment really struck me. It just made a tremendous impression upon me.”
Lawrence’s interest in biology made him a bit of an oddity in the chemistry department at the State University of New York at Buffalo, his first stop after his postdoctoral fellowship.
“It was a very traditional chemistry department at the time,” he says. “My work was very biological relative to everyone else’s in the department. I made things called peptides.
“They just didn’t know what to make of me. My primary saving grace was that I got my PhD in the area of organic synthesis. I knew all the standard ‘organic name reactions’, so I was considered an OK guy. But I also did some really bizarre things in terms of research and published in some bizarre places that chemists ordinarily didn’t publish in, such as the Journal of Biological Chemistry. I look back upon this now and it’s amusing. Times have really changed.”
Lawrence says the department was nonetheless very supportive, and he rose to full professor before moving on to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University. There, he enjoyed a collaborative atmosphere and an opportunity to work more closely with colleagues from the biology side.
Not surprisingly, when UNC came calling, it took a campus-wide effort to convince Lawrence that he would have a similarly collaborative environment in Chapel Hill. Aside from his endowed professorship in the School of Pharmacy, Lawrence has a salaried joint appointment in the Department of Chemistry and nonsalaried joint appointments in the Department of Pharmacology and at Lineberger.
Even Mother Nature lent a hand in bringing Lawrence to UNC. On his second campus visit, in early January 2007, he was treated to a rare sight in Chapel Hill—a light flurry that turned out to be the only snow in the area that winter.
“I had already mentioned to my two younger children, who are twelve and fourteen, that there was a possibility that we might move to Chapel Hill,” he says. “Not surprisingly, they said, ‘No way, we don’t want to move.’ I asked for reasons why, and in addition to leaving their friends behind, they both agreed that the absence of snow days would be a real negative.
“When I got here in January, it must’ve been sixty-five degrees out and it was absolutely beautiful. My idea of a winter day! However, when I got up the next morning, I looked outside and there was snow on the ground. All the schools in the area were canceled. Of course, it was only half an inch, but that was all it took. I was able to report back that there would, in fact, be snow days.”