Unraveling regulation of lipid partitioning

Good mentoring along his academic and professional journey helped shape Brandon Davies’ career as a research scientist right from the start.

“I had a really good AP Biology teacher in high school who turned me on to science,” Davies said.

His older brother Sean, a professor and researcher at Vanderbilt University, was Davies’ first career mentor. Watching his brother go through the process of attending graduate school, doing a postdoc and then getting a job showed Davies what it takes to establish a career in science and guided him along his own path.

“I was blessed with excellent mentors during my Ph.D. and postdoc,” he said. Though they each had different styles of mentoring and leadership, Davies said, they always wanted him to succeed and genuinely supported his desire to be a career scientist.

After majoring in biology and English as an undergraduate at the University of Utah, Davies earned a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied the role of two transcription factors in ergosterol synthesis. As a postdoc in the lab of Stephen Young at the University of California, Los Angeles, he simultaneously worked on two projects: the role of nuclear lamins in health and disease and the function of a protein called GPIHBP1 in the metabolism of triglyceride-rich proteins.

“Brandon was a joy to have in the group,” Young said. “He was calm, diligent, organized, honest and creative.”

Now an associate professor of biochemistry at the University of Iowa studying the regulation of lipid partitioning within the body, Davies advises budding researchers not to get discouraged with failure but to learn from their mistakes. “Look for a mentor who looks out for you,” he said.

When not in the lab, Davies enjoys mountain biking and spending time with his three children.