Talking with my mentor was a great way to take advantage of life’s opportunities. In our one on one conversation, Dr.Oas gave detailed stories about his past and given me advice about the lab and the world. Unlike what most interviewees would do, Dr.Oas let me borrow a textbook, and requests to see him again to discuss parts of it. I see this as another opportunity to become more acquainted with him and to gain more insight on the subject at hand.
Dr.Oas at first wanted to be a scientist in high school in South Western Michigan. His grandfather influenced him at first to become an oceanographer, but had no strong feelings at the time. However, he had to write an English paper about careers which was due at the time the very next day. Oas got a decent grade on the paper which caused his dad to send him to the University of Michigan for his undergraduate degree. In his freshman year, Dr.Oas took chemistry, biology, foreign language and engineering classes which influenced him to be a chemical oceanographer. By junior year, Oas knew he wanted to be into chemistry and went into an undergraduate lab involving marine organic geochemistry in which he analysed soil, sediment, water and animal samples for the presence of naturally occurring hydrocarbons (no functional groups) in each of these. Senior year, Oas looked at master’s programs while in an animal physiology lab.
Oas officially became a biochemist at Florida State University where he was going for his master’s degree. His projects were still in chemical oceanography (organic geo-chem lab) in which he used gas chromatography to study how organisms change their fatty acid composition for temperature changes. Further into his master’s program, Oas was more interested in the biochemical factors of single celled organisms more so over oceanography, so he dropped his organic geo-chem lab and shifted over completely to biochemistry.
Dr.Oas obtained his PhD at the University of Oregon and took training programs that combined chemistry and biology. He worked a lot with solid state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) throughout his PhD career. He graduated in 1986, and went to MIT for his post-doctorate and continued with solid state NMR, but still had an interest in biochemistry. Eventually, Oas was told by his superiors that he could not do both solid-state NMR and biochemistry at the same time. Oas ultimately decided to go into a protein folding biochemical lab which used chemically synthesised peptides using a chemical called BBTI. He published a paper in his second year of his post doctorate, which enabled him to gave talks at national conventions. In 1989, Oas took faculty positions in biochemistry around the world and finally in 1990, Dr.Oas came to Duke University in the Nanaline building and started Oas lab.
Some elements of advice he put emphasis on were to make useful protocols including drawing concept maps, to associate complex ideologies to simple analogies and to have imagination while thinking about experiments. I hope to have more talks in the future including this upcoming discussion with the textbook he gave me!
