Max Baymiller, PhD

Dr. Max Baymiller is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Human Genetics at the University of Michigan. He describes his broad scientific curiosity as a fantastic ability to let himself be fascinated by specific RNAs while also feeling great excitement about discussing science in general. For example, his favorite RNAs are the tRNA(Leu) family, because “they handle the most abundant amino acid in the proteome, and in the process have to read both the most common and rarest codons in the genome”. Moreover, as his participation in over 50 science outreach events during the past 10 years shows, he also deeply enjoys science communication. He states, “my absolute favorite piece of this career, in the lab or outside of it, is talking through ideas in science with other people.” What makes outreach so rewarding for Max is “getting to watch [people understand the scientific concept], get excited about it, and contribute their own thoughts.”

After earning his Bachelor’s in Biology from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, Max pursued his PhD at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, studying the alternative splicing of aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases with Dr. Susan Martinis. It required a lot of efforts for Max to adapt to moving from New Mexico to Illinois. As he explains, “coming from rural New Mexico to a big research institution for graduate school was a huge adjustment for me. Couple that transition with trying to get an independent research project off the ground, and being surrounded by lots of extremely successful and intelligent people to compare myself against. It was very stressful and, at times discouraging. To complete my PhD, I had to learn self-love, tenacity, and how to live in a healthy way for myself both mentally and physically.”

During his training, Max has been captivated by the complexity of an mRNA’s ‘life cycle’ and how it is subjected to so many regulatory checkpoints. “So much modification, trafficking, quality control, interaction with a myriad of partners and processes, all to carefully determine how this message goes through the essential final step in gene expression - translation”, he highlights. In Dr. Stephanie Moon’s lab, Max is currently trying to address a challenging new aspect in that that life cycle: whether phase separation into structures like stress granules has a role in regulating the fate and expression of an mRNA. By using single molecule and gene editing tools, he expects to unveil the interplay between mRNA localization, translation, and phase separation during cellular stress. He recognizes that his project is challenging, but the importance of structures like stress granules for degenerative diseases such as ALS and others pushes him to test this intriguing hypothesis.

“I still try to follow [Carl Sagan’s] example of being awed by the big picture of science in my everyday life as well as my research work. After being in the lab for a while, sometimes you can get out of touch with things and it becomes just a job. Sagan was so good at taking a step back and appreciating the beauty of it all, and communicating that to others. I find that when I do that I’m always grateful and motivated to be a scientist.”

Max was initially caught by movies of single fluorescent mRNAs that Dr. Moon showed during her presentation at the 2020 meeting of the RNA Society. He recalls: “I thought that following individual mRNAs translating in the cell was the coolest thing ever, and I exchanged some emails with her after the meeting with questions about it all. Then when I was looking for a postdoc two years later I was still excited about that science, and also found an awesome and supportive lab environment that left no question in my mind that I should come here!”

When asked about his biggest inspiration, Max mentions without hesitation the astronomer and science communicator Carl Sagan. Being a fan of Sagan as a teenager left a mark on Max that influences him even today during his daily work as a researcher: “I still try to follow his example of being awed by the big picture of science in my everyday life as well as my research work. After being in the lab for a while, sometimes you can get out of touch with things and it becomes just a job. Sagan was so good at taking a step back and appreciating the beauty of it all, and communicating that to others. I find that when I do that I’m always grateful and motivated to be a scientist.”

As a part of the NIH Postdoctoral Fellowship awarded to Max to conduct his postdoctoral research, he benefits from the Institutional Research and Academic Career Development (IRACDA) program. This program provides training in mentoring and education skills, particularly to those from underrepresented groups in science. Max values the possibility he had to teach at a local school and supervise undergraduate students. He is profoundly committed to work for the equality of opportunities in science: “This program, and other things I’ve done like it, have been amazing preparation for a career as an academic faculty. I want to be able to provide the highest quality training to those I work with and make science more accessible to all. And it turns out that doing that well takes a lot of practice!” 

Max is grateful for the support he received during his education and career by his mentors. With a vast experience in teaching, when asked what advice he would give to starting graduate students, he suggests balancing expectations: “I always tell new grad students to go easy on themselves. We all got to this advanced stage of academia by being motivated and intense, but I think it’s easy to take [that intensity] too far. For instance, we can get very attached to expectations of what our research careers and achievements should be, and then be very disappointed when we don’t fulfil a huge unrealistic standard we’ve set for ourselves. I think that happens to many trainees.”

Max’s favorite RNA journal article is the 2021 paper by Matheny T, Van Treeck B, Huynh TN, et al. “RNA Partitioning into Stress Granules Is Based on the Summation of Multiple Interactions”. Max highlights from this work that “it has a really simple but powerful set of experiments that shapes a lot of how I think about what mRNAs are in stress granules and why”.

You can contact Max at @maxbaymiller to help him dive more often into his Twitter account to avoid using it “just for finding cool papers that I open in another tab for 3 months and never end up reading”.