Lalima K. Madan
Medical University of South Carolina

Editor, Proteins
Biophysical Journal

At a cocktail party of non-scientists, how would you explain what you do?

I study how proteins “change their mind.” Proteins are the molecular machines that run everything in your body: they carry oxygen, fight infections, and send signals between cells. But here’s the thing: most proteins don’t just sit there passively waiting to be switched on or off. They’re constantly shifting shape, subtly, in ways that change what they do and how well they do it. My lab uses computer simulations to watch these shape changes in slow motion: think of it like having a super-powered microscope that can see individual atoms moving. We’re trying to figure out the hidden rules that govern these shape changes, because when those rules go wrong, you get diseases like cancer.

Who would you like to sit next to at a dinner party (scientist or not)?

Marie Curie, without a question. She is the only person in history to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, Physics and Chemistry, at a time when women in her home country of Poland weren’t even permitted to attend university. She found a way anyway. I’d want to ask her what it felt like to do world-changing work and still have to fight to be seen. As a woman in science myself, her story is my deepest inspiration. Her grit, her refusal to be diminished, fuels me every day—and I know I am not alone in that. Countless women in science carry her story forward into every lab, every lecture hall, every room where we are still, sometimes, the only one who looks like us. I think the conversation would last well past dessert!