Sally Pias grew up in a rural mountain community in south­ern New Mexico that originated as a tuberculosis colony and expanded into a farming and ranching community. She first developed an interest in scientific inquiry through participa­tion in science fairs as a child. As a sixth grader, Pias conducted a Mendelian mouse-breeding study, working under the men­torship of a PhD scientist who was a friend of her family. “My competitive side led me to aspire to more sophisticated research questions and techniques,” she shares. “I became more and more serious as I aspired to earn the opportunity to participate in the International Science and Engineering Fair and, just as importantly, to travel to various cities for the competition.”

By high school, she had advanced to studying the effects of a noxious weed on pregnant rats, working with her father’s mentor, a biochemist and toxicologist. The goal was practical: characterizing and mitigating the weed’s toxicity to grazing cattle. “These mentored projects—and the science fair com­petitions and associated community—gave me meaningful research experience, fed my curiosity, and taught me how exciting original research can be,” she recalls.

Pias’s route to becoming a biophysicist was anything but linear. Although her educational background might seem like a patchwork of disparate interests—religion, chemistry, Bengali language, and Sanskrit—each thread has contributed to the interdisciplinary scholar she is today.

At Emory University, she double majored in religion and chemistry while also studying and tutoring German. After completing her bachelor’s degree, she spent two years in Bangladesh as a Peace Corps volunteer, teaching English language and training teachers. She learned to speak Ben­gali during that time and later studied Sanskrit at Emory when she returned for a master’s degree, combining study of religious texts in original languages with ethnographic and historical studies.

Eventually, Pias found her way to doctoral study in chemistry at New Mexico State University, focusing on structural biology of cell signaling molecules involved in cell migration and me­tastasis. During her PhD program, she developed a significant interest in molecular dynamics simulation, using computa­tional approaches to refine experimentally solved protein structures. She continued this computational focus during her postdoctoral training under Carlos Simmerling at Stony Brook University, working on enhanced sampling methods for studying large-scale conformational changes in proteins, with dynamics around the “wide-open” state of HIV protease as a model system.

Since 2012, Pias has been a faculty member in chemistry at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (New Mexico Tech), where she earned tenure in 2018 and served as department chair during the challenging years of 2020–2023, spanning the COVID-19 pandemic.

Her current research focus emerged from a conversation with a senior colleague during her first week as a faculty member. The colleague approached her with both a funding opportu­nity and a curiosity question about oxygen effects on oil-wa­ter emulsions. “We continued the conversation over several weeks, exchanging papers and ideas that led me to inquire how oxygen moves from its point of release in capillaries to sites of consumption within mitochondria,” she explains.

This inquiry led Pias to explore membrane compositional effects on molecular oxygen transport—work that addresses fundamental questions about cell survival and death. Describ­ing her specialization, she states, “I work to clarify biophysical mechanisms of critical transport processes that impact cell survival and cell death.”

A pivotal moment came when she presented early work at a Bioenergetics Gordon Research Conference, where she met colleagues studying an ATP synthase “leak channel.”

This encounter sparked what would become a primary re­search focus: using molecular dynamics simulations to explain and predict the structural and physical basis of charge leakage and gating behavior in this channel. She maintains a second­ary interest in oxygen transport, particularly factors affecting diffusion rates through tissue and subcellular oxygen avail­ability.

Working at a primarily undergraduate institution presents unique challenges. Pias describes “managing the complexity of my job” as one of her biggest career challenges. Faculty at small institutions like New Mexico Tech carry large service loads while teaching and conducting research. “We are en­couraged and expected to develop robust, externally funded research programs involving both graduate and undergradu­ate students, while also teaching several courses per year and fulfilling significant service and leadership responsibilities,” she notes.

Despite these demands, Pias has found profound rewards in her work. “I truly enjoy advising students and watching them grow, both professionally and personally,” she says. Beyond mentorship, she finds fulfillment in “tackling difficult scientific puzzles and persisting with them until the pieces begin to fall into place. The joy of insight and discovery is intoxicating.”

Pias has found an intellectual and social home in the Biophys­ical Society, which she describes as “an unusually welcoming professional and social environment. I feel appreciated as an individual and as a scientist.” She has become involved in the leadership of the Bioenergetics, Mitochondria, and Metab­olism Subgroup as well as the Committee for Professional Opportunities for Women.

What draws her to biophysics is its inherently collaborative nature. “I love that biophysics brings together people with distinct and complementary perspectives and areas of train­ing,” she explains. “I can engage in dialogue with biologists, physicists, chemists, and others. The strength of the Society is in its range and variety of experience and perspective.”

This appreciation for interdisciplinarity stems naturally from her own cross-disciplinary training. She shares that the Soci­ety “has helped shape my identity as a biophysicist—in ad­dition to being a chemist/biochemist. The broader and more cross-cutting orientation of biophysics suits my perspective as a scholar trained across several fields.”

For young scientists entering the field, Pias emphasizes the importance of community and intellectual humility. She rec­ommends attending Biophysical Society meetings regularly and finding connections within Subgroups or affinity groups. “The social connections are just as important as the scientific ones, and in fact they can go hand in hand,” she advises.

Her guidance reflects hard-won wisdom about interdisci­plinary work. She advises, “Don’t be afraid to be wrong, but be aware and open about this possibility. (Be vulnerable and also humble.) Acknowledge that people with different train­ing will have different, and also valid, interpretations and assumptions.” She notes that these diverse perspectives “do not negate or necessarily contradict your own perspective but may require effort to understand—and to recognize in what sense they are valid and where the gaps are.”

Looking to the future, Pias sees biophysics moving toward bridging the scale gap between organ-level physiology and molecular-level structure and function. Her own work con­tinues to focus on molecular processes modulating cell death and survival, and she intends to persist “until the field breaks through barriers of explanation, prediction, and imagination.”

When she’s not working, Pias spends time with her two children—one just starting college, the other beginning high school—and enjoys reading historical fiction, listening to podcasts, studying languages, and learning martial arts. If she weren’t a biophysicist, she thinks she would be a professor of comparative religion or a psychologist, reflecting her enduring fascination with “historical perspectives on human behavior” and “contemporary study of motivations and causes underly­ing human emotions and behavior.”