The benefits of being an open-minded skeptic

A common thread in Jacob Rowe’s academic path has been the development of strong scientific principles coupled with a creative flair and open-mindedness.

A B.S. in chemistry from East Carolina University garnered Rowe a toolkit of knowledge but little research experience. A subsequent M.S. at the University of North Carolina Wilmington under the watchful eye of Ying Wang was his introduction to research and where he developed his scientific fundamentals.

Jacob Rowe

Switching to molecular and cellular pharmacology in pursuit of a Ph.D. at the University of Miami landed Rowe in the lab of Dan Isom, a former fine arts major and practicing pharmacologist and biophysicist.

“Dan has always been good at the innovation side of things,” Rowe said. “He likes to stay with the latest and greatest techniques.”

In Isom’s lab, Rowe was encouraged to develop his more creative instincts. “There’s a lot of value in being creative in science,” he said. “You can really expand the type of scientist you are.”

Rowe discovered that a creative flair could function well with the skepticism of a scientist when he began pursuing the concept of proton sensing in G protein–coupled receptors, or GPCRs. Driven by a hypothesis developed with the help of Isom’s informatics platform pHinder (pronounced “finder”), Rowe was tasked with identifying whether a buried cluster of charged residues functioned as a proton sensor for a particular group of GPCRs.

This went against some previously published data suggesting extracellular histidines performed this role. Rowe was skeptical of both, pushing himself tirelessly to confirm beyond a doubt that the lab had, in fact, uncovered a novel mechanism for proton sensing in GPCRs.

“The hypothesis just held up all the way through,” he said. “I learned to believe in the power of computational biology.”