Today we’d like to introduce you to Thomas Martinez.
Thomas, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I grew up in the San Fernando Valley and am a child of immigrants. Since I was a child, I have always been fascinated by how things work, especially the human body. What makes us different as people but also so similar? Why are some people rarely sick, but others suffer from chronic diseases? The more I learned about atoms, genes, and anatomy, the more questions I had. By the time I was in high school, I decided I would be a biochemist. In hindsight, this was a very ambitious goal and not one I actually understood how to accomplish. I just knew that being a scientist meant being able to conduct experiments to answer my questions and that first, I’d at least need to go to college. Neither of my parents nor anyone else in my family had gone to college at the time, but my older brother had just blazed that path, and I knew I could, too. Through hard work and some luck, I was accepted into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There I majored in biological engineering and had my real first taste of what it’s like to be a researcher. It’s also where I first realized that there were lots of different ways to be a professional researcher. I could stay in academia or work in industry at biotech or pharmaceutical companies, and in each environment, I could potentially be a staff researcher or a group leader. I knew I wanted to be a group leader one day so I could tackle my own questions, so that meant continuing my education. For the next step, I moved back to the LA area, attended the California Institute of Technology, and earned my PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics. During that time, the path finally became clearer. I wanted to stay in academia and run my own research group, which meant becoming a professor. This required more training still, so I moved to La Jolla to conduct postdoctoral research at the Salk Institute. There I built up my skills, demonstrated more independence as a researcher, and found the research niche that I wanted to devote the next stage of my career to. This experience enabled me to apply for professorships at research universities, and I accepted my current faculty position in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at UC Irvine. Here, I run my own research group in the Cancer Research Institute.
We all face challenges, but looking back, would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
From outside, the road looks smooth. I went straight from high school to college to graduate school to my postdoctoral fellowship to my faculty position without any gaps or breaks. During those years, however, I faced a lot of rejection, self-doubt, and personal issues like most students and 20-somethings. Early on in grad school, my dad lost his job. My mom deals with chronic illness, so he was the only one working, and this was a very stressful time. I was ready to leave grad school with just a master’s degree so I could work to support my family, but luckily, I was able to help him find a new job. Since then, my mother’s illness has worsened, and my father went through health issues, bringing new challenges and considerations as to whether I should continue sacrificing my earning potential by pursuing a career in academia instead of taking on a more lucrative industry position. Science is also notoriously difficult, and reaching each next step of an academic career path is extremely competitive. I ended up spending 6 years as a postdoctoral fellow, a bit longer than average, to build up my CV and make sure I would be competitive on the faculty job market. When I finally felt I was ready, it was fall 2020 at the height of COVID and many universities and departments had hiring freezes. This meant fewer positions were available, and so the odds were extra long. All in all, I know I’ve been extremely fortunate and privileged to train in the lab and universities/institutes I did and have the support I did from my friends and family, but every new leap required pushing down feelings that I had done enough, that I was at my limit, that people that look like me from where I’m from are not meant to make it this far, much less in one generation.
Thanks – so, what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I’m an Assistant Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. In my lab, we are investigating a new class of small genes in our genome that had been overlooked until recently. Most of our genes provide codes to build the proteins in our cells that make life possible. These proteins provide structure for cells, act as signals to communicate with other cells and tissues, carry out the metabolic processes to produce energy; almost everything that’s required to allow cells to multiply and carry out their specific tasks. So, with that in mind, it makes sense that if we ever hope to understand everything about how life works, particularly at a molecular level, we need to know exactly how many protein-coding genes there are in our genome and what they all do. We don’t have the exact number yet, but based on current estimates, there are roughly 10,000 or so of these additional small gene regions that encode smaller proteins we call microproteins. Because of their small size and generally being “turned on” at lower levels compared to larger known genes, they were missed until newer technologies became sensitive enough to detect them. My group at UC Irvine and others are now studying them to see what these microproteins encoded by small genes can do, and so far, many appear to function in diverse aspects of biology. We, therefore, think that some of these microproteins will be implicated in various diseases and could even serve as targets for new therapeutic approaches.
What does success mean to you?
The simplest thing I can hope for when my time is done is that I don’t have any major regrets. My family matters more to me than anything, so I do my best to always keep time for them. I know I would regret missing those day-to-day moments later. I also don’t want to feel like I get so focused on accolades that I don’t enjoy what I do. I, like most people, have metrics in my job that others use to define my success, so those matter also, but not in the grand scheme of things. As much as possible, I try to take care of the “career” aspects of my job so I can hopefully enjoy the thing that really matters: answering the questions that are most interesting to me. This is all easier said than done, though. It can be hard sometimes not to care too much about metrics.
Another way I think about success is by how many people in the next generations I help to build careers in STEM. I have had many inspiring teachers and mentors in my life that helped me believe in myself to get this far, and I stay involved with outreach programs to make sure I’m holding a ladder out for those after me. We participate in programs that bring high school and undergraduate students into my lab to get hands-on experience, and I also regularly talk to students about applying to college and graduate school. Taking on a career in any STEM field is difficult enough without needing to navigate the complex applications and sometimes hidden criteria admissions committees are looking for on your own.
Image Credits
Steve Zylius
UCI
