Andrew Feig’s first exposure to scientific research came at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Medicine, where he worked after school for a physician-scientist, Robert Seeger. Feig’s job was to build a database to track neuroblastoma patients enrolled in national clinical trials. The system correlated the lab results and various clinical outcomes across the national study. This allowed him to become familiar with the research going on in the laboratory and the tests being performed at different points along the therapeutic timeline.
“During the summers, when I could work full time, I volunteered to do bench work alongside my database responsibilities,” Feig said. He learned how to grow cells in culture and perform immunohistology studies, eventually developing antibodies to study a cancer-related gene called “N-myc.” The work helped him understand how lab science could connect to real patient outcomes and gave him an early taste of research.
Feig grew up in Los Angeles, near UCLA’s campus in Westwood. His father was a pediatric hematologist and his mother a special education teacher. After high school, he went on to study chemistry at Yale University. During college, he returned to UCLA each summer to work in the lab of David Sigman studying chemical nucleases, derivatives of the o-phenanthroline-copper system that Sigman had invented, and this work was far more biochemical and biophysical than his earlier lab work.
His undergraduate senior thesis research at Yale with Bob Crabtree sparked an interest in bioinorganic chemistry, designing and synthesizing model systems for nickel hydrogenases. That led him to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned his PhD in chemistry in 1995, working with Steve Lippard on synthesizing new model systems for non-heme iron enzymes such as methane monooxygenase and the kinetics of their reaction with dioxygen. Feig says, “Those five years of work ultimately taught us about the many reasons small molecule catalysts of that time failed to convert alkanes to alcohols. I helped catalog many of the side reactions they were prone to undergo. This variety of training experiences made me a bit of a tool collector, which has continued throughout my career. I have always been willing to learn about and try new techniques that might add to our ability to solve a problem in the systems we studied.”
His graduate training gave him a strong foundation in chemistry, but Feig’s next step took him in a new direction. He joined Olke Uhlenbeck’s lab at the University of Colorado Boulder as a postdoc, where he learned to work with RNA and to study the activity of ribozymes. He recalls, “My letter to Olke was the one and only postdoc application that I submitted. The independent proposal I wrote as a second-year graduate student, to study the role of metal ions in RNA catalysis, was largely based on Olke’s pioneering work with the hammerhead ribozyme. As I approached graduation, what I had proposed to do still had not been done. I wrote to him and asked if I could join his lab to work on it, and I never looked back. During that period, Colorado was a hub for RNA science, and the biochemistry, biophysics, and molecular biology of RNA was all around us. It was a great place to be immersed in the field, and as someone transitioning from chemistry to biophysics, it was a fantastic experience that changed the trajectory of my career and where I made a collection of lifelong friends and colleagues.”
Feig became particularly interested in biomolecules with metastable folds during his postdoctoral work while studying RNA catalysis and the role metal ions played in both folding and catalysis. He explains, “The small ribozymes underwent large-scale rearrangements to achieve their catalytic confirmations. Similarly, large molecular machines like the ribosome or the spliceosome would interconvert between various conformations to catalyze specific steps in their respective processes. I had been taught the lock-and-key formalism for biological kinetics, and these systems clearly did something far more complex that was fascinating, so I sought out systems that were tractable but required these large movements to carry out their biological function.”
Feig joined the faculty of Indiana University, Bloomington in 1999 and moved from there in 2006 to Wayne State University, where over the years he was promoted to full professor and served four years as associate dean of the graduate school.
Over the years, his research relied on a wide mix of methods—chemical, biochemical, computational—often in collaboration with other labs. Feig said these partnerships were some of the most rewarding parts of running a lab.
In 2019, after nearly two decades in academia, Feig made a major career change. He left his faculty position to join Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA), a foundation that had supported his research from early on. He states, “I was funded by RCSA across much of my academic career, starting with my Cottrell Scholar Award in 2002, and this became a career-spanning relationship with the foundation and members of the Cottrell Scholar community. When I was approached about joining RCSA, it was an opportunity I could not pass up as it had been so influential in the way I taught, mentored students, and pursued science. Positions like the one I currently have do not open up frequently, so the likelihood of it becoming available again during my career was small. Thus, it was a ‘now-or-never’ moment.” Now a Senior Program Director at RCSA, Feig helps design and run programs that support early-career scientists and foster interdisciplinary research.
The main program he oversees is called “Scialog” (short for “science + dialog”). He shares, “For each initiative (we typically run four to six themes concurrently on different topics), we curate a cohort of about 50 participants (fellows) interested in the problem on the table who represent the different disciplinary areas and scientific approaches needed to address it. Over 2.5 days, the fellows undergo a structured set of conversations and meetings that help them get to know each other, build trust, and learn from each other, culminating in the writing and submitting of short research proposals by small teams of scientists who have not worked together previously. These proposals get reviewed rapidly, and the best of these high-risk/high-reward projects receive funding in the form of a seed grant to launch the collaboration and test the idea. There is a lot more that goes into this as we curate the interactions throughout the meeting on the basis of data we collect about the fellows and their connectivity to the other participants, and over the three years of the typical Scialog initiative, we monitor the evolution of this network of scientists and how well they coalesce into a coherent community across their disciplinary breadth.”
Although he’s no longer in the lab, Feig still studies science in a different way. He and colleagues have been working with applied mathematicians to study quantitatively the social dynamics at Scialog conferences and how they support the formation of new collaborations, the decisions of who chooses to work with whom at Scialog, and how the interactions at the meeting foreshadow the future success of the team. “We use this work to further refine how we structure our meetings and manage the relationships with our Scialog fellows,” he says. “I also get to live vicariously off the science being done in the labs of our grantees and seeing the fields evolve as a result of the network of scientists whom we connect through our work.”
Feig says that one of the biggest challenges he’s faced over the course of his career was managing the ups and downs that come with research funding. “There was a time when we had a gap in support,” he says. “Trying to keep things going and support my trainees during that time was really hard.” He also pointed out the difficulty of balancing two careers within one family—something he says isn’t a one-time decision but an ongoing conversation.
Looking ahead, Feig sees scientific research becoming even more collaborative and interdisciplinary. “The days of a single principal investigator solving a really big problem alone are fading,” he asserts. “The most important science will come from teams that include biophysicists, chemists, physicists, engineers, mathematicians, and disease experts—whatever the problem requires. Learning to work well with colleagues who have a wide range of expertise and experiences is critical and should be an important component of training the next generation of scientists.”
Feig has long been active in the Biophysical Society, and the Annual Meeting has played different roles at different stages of his career. As a trainee, it was a place to learn about new techniques and areas of research. Later, it became a venue to meet collaborators. Now, as a funder, it helps him stay connected to scientists in the field and identify promising new directions the foundation may wish to support. He is currently an associate editor for The Biophysicist and a member of the Education Committee.
Outside of work, Feig enjoys cooking and spending time outdoors with his wife. “There’s a saying that you shouldn’t trust a chemist who can’t cook,” he jokes. “The process of cooking—following a protocol, adjusting as needed—is a lot like learning to run an experiment.” He’s also an avid hiker and cyclist, taking full advantage of the outdoor opportunities in and around Tucson, Arizona, where he’s based.
Feig encourages early career scientists to stay open to new opportunities, even ones that might seem uncertain at first. “Sometimes a big opportunity only comes along once,” he declares. “You have to be willing to step out of your comfort zone. Science is always changing, and we need to be willing to change with it.”