From art to proteomics:
a path to science

Jenn Abelin is now a group leader at Neon Therapeutics working toward developing personalized cancer vaccines, but growing up in Connecticut, she didn’t want to do science at all. She wanted to do art.

Jenn Abelin’s lab generates data to help decode rules for how human leukocyte antigens present peptides.

“In high school,” she said, “most of the classes I took were writing, reading, art and math.”

Looking back on these choices, she sees an emerging interest in recognizing patterns. But she got her initial push toward science from her grandmother, who encouraged her to study something more practical than art.

She picked a random class at Guilford College about ancient medicine; that set off a chain of events and introduced her to many role models and mentors in science who encouraged her. She took organic chemistry taught by her undergraduate advisor Anne Glenn and loved the idea that just memorizing facts and spitting them back out wasn’t going to cut it. She saw there was real creative thinking and problem solving in science.

Before she knew it, she was majoring in biology and chemistry and doing proteomics research. She went on to pursue her Ph.D. at the University of Virginia mentored by Donald Hunt and Jeffrey Shabanowitz, studying cancer with mass spectrometry-based proteomics. As a postdoctoral researcher at the Broad Institute, she was mentored by Steven Carr, Nir Hacohen and Catherine Wu.

Now as a leader of a research lab doing groundbreaking work, Abelin says the best part of her job is getting to work on basic science that directly impacts people’s lives for the better.

Outside the lab, she believes it’s important to share her path. She wants young people to know that to be a successful and happy scientist, you don’t have to start as a genius baby doing calculus in your high chair. When she was a kid, she was “likely eating dirt,” she said, and doing other average kid stuff.

“I hope to be able to do mentoring in the future,” she said. “I’ve had the most amazing mentors during my career, and I hope to continue that.”

Abelin is one of four young investigators chosen by the editorial team of the journal Molecular & Cellular Proteomics to present their research at the ASBMB annual meeting.