Predicting how proteins will partner
Amy Keating Photo: M. Scott Brauer Growing up with a father who taught at Cornell University, and surrounded by friends whose parents were also on Cornell faculty, Amy Keating had little doubt that she would follow the same path. “It didn’t seem at all unusual that [academia] would be a career path that you might take,” Keating says. “I was pretty much on that track most of my life.”The only question: What field to pursue? Keating’s academic career has taken a winding path through math, physics and chemistry to her eventual appointment in MIT’s Department of Biology, where she recently earned tenure. Much of her research focuses on computer modeling of the interactions between proteins. Though her work may have potential applications in drug development, she’s driven by sheer interest in understanding the physical phenomena involved.“I bounced around a lot of scientific areas and they didn’t all grab me like...