Interview with 2024 SDB Elizabeth D. Hay New Investigator Award recipient Daniel Dickinson
10/22/2024
The 2024 recipient of the Society for Developmental Biology Elizabeth D. Hay New Investigator Award is Daniel Dickinson. Dickinson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular Biosciences at the University of Texas at Austin. His contributions to the field of developmental biology include one of the first implementations of CRISPR in C. elegans and novel methods to quantify protein interactions in vivo – tools his group uses to study how cells establish polarity during development.
In a March interview, Dickinson cited an early interest in the logic of biology; he was fascinated by the connections between genes, information, and function. Interest in the fundamental building blocks of life led him to study biochemistry in college before shifting toward crystallography, structural biology, and eventually cell biology for his graduate degree.
During his graduate career, Dickinson leaned more into cell biology, aiming to study molecular interactions within an organism as opposed to in isolation. As he moved onto his postdoc, he found a mentor in Bob Goldstein with similar interests but with the embryological and cellular expertise he needed. In Dickinson’s efforts to measure protein dynamics in vivo, he sought a way to fluorescently tag endogenous proteins. The first CRISPR paper had just been released, and he jumped at the opportunity to implement this new technology. Dickinson’s career took off. He utilized the method to tag and study the behavior of endogenous proteins. In doing so Dickinson helped establish the use of CRISPR in C. elegans, a contribution to the field of development that was borne from his focus on in vivo protein dynamics.
When asked how he would advise trainees several years away from his position, he said “I was incredibly well positioned … but you have to be able to take big swings.”
He also said it is important to think deeply about your experiments. “What would be the perfect experiment? And if I can’t do that, why?” He emphasized the importance of thinking about the questions being asked, and slowing down: “Don’t just think of the experiment you can do and [then] do it; [ask] what experiment should you do?”
This mindset led Dickinson to develop new imaging technologies that are improving our understanding of in vivo molecular dynamics. Throughout his research career, Dickinson has tried to understand how proteins behave within a cell and developed new methods to do so. During his postdoc with Bob Goldstein, he began to put together a tool, single-cell single-molecule pull-down (sc-SiMPull), that would allow single molecule measurements from a freshly lysed cell, making it feasible to study molecular dynamics within cells.
Dickinson’s fundamental interest in biology stems from its logical flow of information to function, and that perspective drives him to investigate how individual components make a cell a cell. In particular, Dickinson uses the tools he develops to study the molecular dynamics of cell polarization. Recently, his group used single-molecule counting of molecules on the plasma membrane of living cells to identify a size threshold for the transport of PAR-3 complexes that establish the anterior-posterior axis of C. elegans embryos. The experiments show that PAR-3 monomers and dimers diffuse randomly, while trimers and larger complexes bind to the cell membrane and are transported along the actomyosin cortex.
Beyond research, Dickinson has proven himself to be a committed mentor. Dickinson shared his mentoring philosophy in which he emphasized giving his students ownership. “I want to know what makes this person tick, and then we find an overlap between the lab’s goals and [their] goals.”
Dickinson said having a lot of freedom to pursue his interests in his postdoc informed his approach to mentorship. “If it all goes right, their part takes over, they go someplace that I wouldn’t have thought to go. That’s when I know I’ve really done my job well, when people start suggesting lines of experimentation that I never would have thought of.”
Dickinson’s future research goals are rooted in his fundamental interest in the building blocks of cells. He wants to understand how developmental pathways control cell behavior, and how a pathway can be repurposed across cell types. More broadly, he wants to expand the application of the single cell in vivo biochemical imaging technique he’s developed. His lab is continuing to study cell polarization using this imaging method, but is hoping to apply the method to other signaling cascades.
Dickinson expressed his gratitude to the SDB community. He appreciates the society’s wide view of developmental biology and credits the healthy community SDB has fostered to its openness to new ideas and researchers. Dickinson initially saw himself, trained as a structural biologist, as an outsider to SDB. But he found the society welcomed him under the umbrella of developmental biology, and both he and the community are more enriched for it.
Last Updated 10/22/2024
