by Pernilla Wittung-Stafshede

 

Ivet Bahar was the first in her family to attend college. After training in chemical engineering, she started an academic career in Turkey, her home country, and continued in the United States, where she moved her research program in 2001. Dr. Bahar pioneered the use of elastic network models in computational biophysics, which has become an established tool to compute protein dynamics; she is a prolific and impactful scholar, an esteemed mentor, and a leader at her institution and nationally. She is the founding and current chair of the Department of Computational and Systems Biology at University of Pittsburgh, where she launched an innovative graduate program that united two rivals: the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. She credits her highly successful position in academia to her persistence and fearlessness, sometimes with the benefit of having an outsider’s perspective.

Ivet Bahar was born in 1957 in Istanbul, Turkey. In high school she excelled in physics and therefore it was a natural progression for her to study science in university. She was intrigued by computers and the only place to study computer science was the chemical engineering program, so she pursued this at Bogazici University in Istanbul. She graduated in 1980 by which time she had her two children. She earned a Masters degree at the same university and then in 1983 moved to Istanbul Technical University to pursue her PhD in Physical Chemistry focused on polymer physics research. In 1986, she was awarded her PhD and was immediately recruited as an Assistant Professor at her undergraduate university, Bogazici University. The following year Ivet won a UNESCO Fellowship, which marked the beginning of annual travels to the US. Because of the high interest in polymers for the rubber industry at that time, she went to Akron University, which is one of the best places for polymer science in the US, where she studied for five consecutive summers. As she became increasingly interested in the biological aspects of polymeric ensembles she begun studies in this area at the NIH (National Cancer Institute), where she did summer research for nine years 1992- 2001. Her family accompanied her in her US travels and when her children were young they attended many summer camps in Akron and near Bethesda.

In parallel with these mini sabbaticals in the US, Ivet advanced in the ranks at Bogazici University such that she became the director of a Polymer Research Center (PRC), and in 1993, she was promoted to full professor. Despite a relaxed research environment in Turkey, Ivet was pushing herself to succeed and her efforts paid off. In 1997, she published an original paper in Folding & Design that became broadly recognized in the field of biophysics. In this joint paper with Atilgan and Erman, she outlined a new theory termed ”the Gaussian Network Model,” which laid the foundations of widely used computational method for studying the structural basis of biomolecular dynamics and function. This was followed by another seminal study, on the anisotropic network model published in Biophysical Journal in 2001, which are still her most cited papers. While spending her summer doing research at NIH in 2000, she was recruited to a senior position at the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt), and she joined the faculty in 2001. Although she had proved that she could be productive in Turkey, the conditions for doing research were much better in the US; also by then her children were studying in the US, making the move easier. Looking back these years later, Ivet is happy with her decision to move to the US.

Ivet joined Pitt with the goal of establishing a research center in computational biology and bioinformatics. At the time she felt like—and was—an outsider, and in retrospect, perhaps a bit naïve in considering the challenges of her new position. She had no experience competing for NIH funding, or with the many demands experienced by faculty in a medical school. She simply trusted that she could learn the ropes and succeed in building a friendly and inclusive research environment, similar to the PRC she left in Istanbul (now led by Dr. Turkan Haliloglu - her first PhD student and the Chair of Chemical Engineering Department at Bogazici University). This confidence helped her to persist and eventually launch in 2005 a joint PhD program in Computational Biology between the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), with Robert Murphy at CMU as founding co-director. Being an outsider, she did not consider the ingrained rivalries, which presumably helped to jump start this initiative that leveraged for the first time the complementary strengths of the two universities. The program has been continually funded (first by HHMI, and then by NIH) since its inception.

Ivet’s confidence and persistence have helped her as the leader of several prominent NIH-funded initiatives, such as the MMBioS (the National Center for Multiscale Modeling of Biological Systems) which was founded in 2012. Since 2005, Ivet has been professor, John K Vries Chair, and Founding Chair of the Department of Computational Biology, which in 2010 expanded its scope and size to become the Department of Computational and Systems Biology.

Her research focuses on developing and using theory and computations to understand the structural dynamics of biomolecules and the roles of molecular motions in the context of their interactions and activities in the cell. The aim is both to develop new computational technologies and simulate signaling and regulation events at molecular-to-cellular scale that may aid in discovering new drugs or therapeutic strategies against neurobiological disorders for example. Ivet normally has a research group not larger than 10-12 students and postdocs, as she wants to be able to interact closely with each member of her lab. She believes that the most rewarding aspect of her job as faculty is to see her students grow intellectually and become scientists.

Ivet has had several female doctoral students even though women are underrepresented in her area of research. Ivet’s message to young women aspiring to have scientific careers is to be brave and to take risks. Women (as well as men) can do whatever they want but she says that they should not ‘wait’ and hope for the best time, as there may never be one, but just seize the day and do it. Ivet believes it is important to have an active life outside of the lab and she has always played the piano for leisure and enjoys biking and swimming. For a person like Ivet who does not take no for an answer and has a lot of energy and enthusiasm, the future clearly holds more successes.