When Phoebe Hsieh, PhD, a postdoctoral research fellow at Fred Hutch Cancer Center, hits the job market later this year, she’ll bring more than her credentials and experience to the table.
She’ll bring five years of funding from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation to help become a principal investigator in charge of her own lab.
Hsieh recently received the Postdoc-to-Faculty Transition Award from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. The award, which helps young scientists start an independent cystic fibrosis research program, includes $80,000 for salary support and $30,000 for research in the final two years.
Hsieh will look for job possibilities at home in Taiwan as well as in the U.S.
“I’m really grateful to have this funding,” Hsieh said. “If things work well, hopefully I will have my own lab by the summer of next year.”
Cystic fibrosis is a genetic disease that clogs the lungs, pancreas and other organs with thick mucus, making them more susceptible to multiple microbial infections.
Hsieh received a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Award from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation in 2021 when she joined Fred Hutch.
Hsieh’s research in Fred Hutch’s Malik Lab and the University of Washington’s Dandekar Lab focuses on how two microbial organisms — a fungus and a bacterium — compete for survival in the airways of people with cystic fibrosis.
She helped forge a collaboration between the two labs, shepherding the project the way a principal investigator would.
“In most respects, she has been the PI for the project, from conception to execution to publication,” said her mentor, Fred Hutch microbiologist and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator Harmit Malik, PhD.
Bacteria attack fungi in various ways, but Hsieh wanted to know more about how fungi keep bacteria in check.
She is the lead author of a study published last month in PLOS Biology that identifies magnesium, an essential mineral for many cellular processes, as a key prize in the fungal-bacterial battle.
She discovered that a fungus snarfs up magnesium, a mineral that a species of bacteria needs for maintaining strong cellular walls.
In response, certain genetic mutations help the bacterium adapt to lower magnesium levels.
But those adaptations also make the bacterium less vulnerable to an antibiotic that destroys the bacterium’s cell walls by displacing magnesium.
Antibiotic resistance typically develops when bacteria survive exposure to an antibiotic and pass on the genes that helped it escape to new generations.
Hsieh discovered that the resistance is a temporary condition resulting from the fight with fungi over magnesium. The resistance can be reversed by either adding magnesium so there’s enough to go around or by removing the fungus.
“This opens a new window for us to understand what those new mutations actually do and why they are so distinct from the canonical mutations we know cause antibiotic resistance,” Hsieh said.
The path from postdoc to principal investigator has grown narrower and more competitive in recent years.
In the early 1960s, about 60 percent of life science PhDs achieved tenure within 10 years of graduation. But by 2021, only 3.5 percent of biology PhD students working at universities reached that goal, according to a National Science Foundation survey cited in a 2023 Stat News report.
Postdoctoral researchers hired at Fred Hutch typically spend a few years obtaining additional experience after earning their PhDs before venturing out into the job market.
They are essential to the research mission and Fred Hutch competes with other institutions to hire the best. The Basic Sciences Division will host a three-day symposium in September for prospective postdocs to learn more about opportunities at Fred Hutch.
Of the 68 postdocs who left Fred Hutch in 2022 to launch their careers in science, 62 percent moved on to research jobs in academia, for-profit companies, nonprofit organizations and government.
Just 15 percent of Fred Hutch postdocs in 2022 were hired in tenure-track academic positions – the traditional route to becoming a principal investigator in charge of a lab.
The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation award makes that journey easier.
“Launching thriving independent research labs in academia has become a more and more daunting prospect,” Malik said. “Not only is the project a validation of the foundation 's hope and confidence in the merit of Phoebe's research program, but the financial boost that this award provides will enable her to be bolder in launching her independent research program and recruiting equally bold members to her future lab.”
John Higgins, a staff writer at Fred Hutch Cancer Center, was an education reporter at The Seattle Times and the Akron Beacon Journal. He was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, where he studied the emerging science of teaching. Reach him at jhiggin2@fredhutch.org.
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