This Fulbright scholar wants to find ways to prevent or slow the spread of cancer – News@Northeastern

Studying a laminated poster of a human cell diagram on the wall of his fifth-grade classroom, with its kaleidoscope-colored blobs and globules the names and functions of which he barely understood, a young Jake Potts found his gaze wandering to the image of the endoplasmic reticulum.

He remembered observing from a birds-eye view the circular grooves of the membrane system bore a striking resemblance to an orchestra. Only later in life did Potts come to understand how pivotal the moment was, epiphanizing, A seed of synesthesia between biology and music took root in my soul.

That was nearly a decade ago. Today, Potts is a bioengineering student at Northeastern on the path to earning a doctoral degree in genetics. He plays solo and chamber violin in chamber ensembles at Northeastern, and teaches violin to the Roxbury Youth Orchestra.

In his third year of genetics research and eleventh playing violin, Potts continues to feel the harmony of these dual identities coalesce. In the lab, he is a composer, wielding his creativity to write new phrases in genetic code. And in a string ensemble, he recalls the memory of a cell diagram. The conductor becomes the nucleus who commands the musicians on the periphery to translate his gestures, similar to the function of ribosomes.

As a researcher at Northeastern, Potts has applied his analytical and engineering mindset to the study of genetics and disease in the classroom and in the lab, helping to develop better cancer detection methods from improved computational image processing. Along the way, he has cultivated strong chemistry and biology skills required to work in gene editing.

Potts participated in a Dialogue of Civilizations program in Chile, where he acquired and analyzed samples of microbes from the Atacama Desert to discover new mechanisms of antibiotics. He also completed a semester abroad at Sorbonne University in Paris, where he applied bioengineering concepts to optimize a protocol to study DNA repair in tardigrades.

Potts has been awarded a Fulbright scholarship, a prestigious award that provides grants for research projects or English teaching assistant programs. He says he will use the scholarship to return to the Sorbonne to try to determine how certain cancerous mutations happen as DNA is misrepaired, a process that occurs when, say, radiation or harsh chemicals break the two strands of our DNA, and our cells respond by trying to repair this damage. His research could result in therapeutic strategies to prevent or slow the progression of cancer.

I really took to not only all the fascinating gene-editing work they were doing there [at the Sorbonne], but the sense of camaraderie and candor I felt with them, and thats what I have to look forward to, Potts says.

Timothy Lannin, an assistant teaching professor of bioengineering at Northeastern who has taught three of Pottss courses, including his capstone, where Potts is helping to develop a tool to investigate the mechanical properties of lung tissue, lauded Potts as a superlative student and researcher.

I must admit that conversations with Jacob have been so stimulating that Ive missed my train to continue talking, Lannin says. He has synthesized knowledge from his other courses to teach me things I didnt know about cellular engineering.

Potts says he was proud and elated to have been chosen for the Fulbright. Past winners have included former United States Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, author Jonathan Franzen, and soprano Renee Fleming.

It felt like validation of how I chose to approach genetics research, he says. I decided early on here at Northeastern that by working in various labs and thus putting myself into more environments where I have to learn, Id gain a broader exposure to techniques and ideas, and challenge myself to be more creative. The result of that is the project proposal, which I used concepts from different lab experiences to come up with. Now that the idea is there, I get to see if it works.

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This Fulbright scholar wants to find ways to prevent or slow the spread of cancer - News@Northeastern