The University of Saskatchewan’s College of Medicine recently named Dr. Linda Chelico (PhD) as the new head of the Department of Biochemistry, Microbiology and Immunology.
Chelico, who is originally from Melfort, was named July 1 replacing Dr. Bill Roesler (PhD), who led the department for 13 years and was honoured to be selected.
“It is an honour, actually, to be in this role because I’m voted in by my own peers in my department. So it’s quite an honour that they believe in me,” Chelico said.
Chelico is a virologist, biochemist and cancer biologist and has been a University of Saskatchewan (USask) faculty member since 2009.
She finished her undergraduate and graduate studies at USask, before completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Southern California.
Chelico explained that her role will include overseeing graduate and undergraduate programs
“I guess my primary roles are mentoring faculty and just kind of overseeing the people that are maybe doing some of the work on the committees for our programs,” Chelico said.
She will also be doing outreach communications about the department, which she said are typical duties for university faculty.
“We always take part in administration and research and teaching, so I’m also leading all those things,” Chelico said.
Chelico was brought up in Melfort, where her parents ran a restaurant and lounge. She attended USask and began studying agriculture and eventually took a PhD in applied microbiology in 1999. At the University of Southern California she researched APOBEC proteins and made several novel contributions to their study.
In 2009, she moved back to take up a full-time position at the College of Medicine.
Chelico agreed that her journey in education was interesting to go from studying agriculture to a department head in the College of Medicine.
“I was working with someone in agriculture on kind of more fundamental rather than applied research. So the jump to medicine wasn’t that great in the sense that I was working with the kind of atypical faculty that maybe wasn’t doing the typical, really agriculturally related research,” Chelico said.
She explained that it was a journey because at each stop at a lab or location there was a different focus and more research experience.
“It looked a little bit unfocused, I think for a while, but it all came together very well and in addition to being the department head and still running my research program and training graduate students and things. Yeah. So I’ll be keeping that going as well,” Chelico said.
Chelico’s lab has two main projects—investigating the human proteins that can restrict HIV replication and examining the origins of mutations in cancer cells. These projects are unified by the protein family her lab studies.
These proteins purposefully induce mutations in DNA as part of the human immune response and can have beneficial or detrimental effects. Chelico was the first to purify and characterize multiple proteins from this newly discovered family and her expertise in this area receives international attention.
Chelico said that she did not expect her education journey to have a stop as a department head after graduating from Melfort and Unit Comprehensive Collegiate (MUCC). She explained that her initial interest in the subject did come from a research project in Grade 12.
“I got interested in bacteria and what they do in the soil. That’s why I ended up going into agriculture. But then I was also toying with the idea of maybe being a physician and infectious diseases,” Chelico said.
Chelico said that she did not enter University with a plan but it gradually evolved over time. She initially wanted to work in the agriculture industry.
“. But then the last summer of my undergraduate degree, I got at research experience in a lab. And that’s when I decided that I wanted to go kind of thee full way and get my PhD and actually become a researcher and not and not go to industry,” Chelico said.
Her own experience makes her aware of what other current undergraduates and graduates are experiencing and this leads to more communication of experiences available.
“I’m going to try to really communicate those (experiences) as department heads so people get more access to that information early and they can make the best decision of where they see themselves,” Chelico said.
Chelico said that her decisions were late but worked out. She is the first person in her family to go the route that she has chosen.
“So there wasn’t really any blueprint,” she said.
Chelico explained that most professional programs do have a defined blueprint.
But scientists don’t have that at all. So you kind of have to learn as you go along. But and now I think we’re getting better at communicating expectations,” Chelico said.
She said that one goal of her department is also about communication. Chelico explained that the department has not been active on social media but she will use it as a tool to reach out to prospective students, graduate students, alumni, people who want research experience, and the community.
“So hopefully you’ll be seeing a lot more of us then in the future,” Chelico said.
In a release when the College appointed her, she noted her excitement.
“I am excited to lead the department and to launch new initiatives aimed at accelerating our faculty members’ research programs. I look forward to collaborating with college and university leaders to develop innovative solutions for infrastructure renewal, and to strengthening partnerships with clinical faculty in the College of Medicine,” she said in the release.
Michael.oleksyn@paherald.sk.ca
