2024 New Faculty

In general terms, what does your research consist of?

While many people define “metabolism” in the everyday sense as simply how fast people burn calories (and the BMI that results), this is a very simplistic definition compared to its scientific study. For scientists, metabolism is defined as the chemical processes occurring in cells to sustain life, which involves hundreds if not thousands of intertwined chemical processes. My research is focused on the development of models of these processes to better understand their biology and engineer organisms to accomplish tasks.

Metabolic models of metabolism are mathematical, network-based, and large-scale representations of the set of chemical reactions in a cell or organisms for which various types of evidence exists. These models are generally reconstructed from publicly available data, or in collaboration with “wet lab” researchers.

Model reconstruction and analysis is often accomplished using freely available programming languages and packages, or computational methods which can be coded by an individual. Many such models account for all reactions supported by their annotated genome, in which case they are said to be genome-scale models (GSM). GSMs span many levels of complexity ranging from purely stoichiometric (i.e. linear models) to metabolic networks accounting for protein synthesis (resource analysis models) to kinetic models of metabolism. These reconstructions require knowledge from several different disciplines, particularly mathematics, chemistry, biology, and computer science.

As my research focuses on methods, I have been and will continue to be engaged in highly diverse studies, as these methods can be applied to a wide variety of organisms from individual microbes up to complex organisms like humans.

Metabolic models have been applied to a wide range of applications including bioengineering (their most typical application), investigation of metabolism, and medical applications.

Examples of bioengineering include designing microbes to produce useful chemicals (ethanol, succinate, carotenoids, etc.), engineering climate-resilient crops (for food or bioenergy), or engineering host-microbiome interactions. Examples of metabolic investigation include resolution of basic metabolic questions such as atypical energy sources, metabolic reprogramming under stress, exploring understudied pathways, and multiscale elucidation of regulation. Medical applications include personalized medicine and drug repurposing.

What drew you to your field of study and to being a professor?

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been interested in being a professor.

I started my journey as an undergraduate researcher in the Chemical Engineering department at Iowa State University with Jackie Shanks, working in a “wet lab” doing bacterial transformations and analyses of their fermentation products. Since I wanted to go in a more computational route, I added a second major in mathematics and a minor in biology as an undergraduate.

When I applied to graduate school, I was only accepted at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln (UNL), by a professor specializing in the development of polymer-based ion exchange membranes of hydrogen fuel cell as vanadium ion batteries.

Even though I was passionate about bioinformatics, I accepted the position so I could get into graduate school, and promised myself I would do my best in my new field.

In this group, I became good friends with a Bangladeshi student, and joined him in playing cricket with other students at UNL. Unfortunately, this advisor ran out of research funding.

Fortunately, a new assistant professor in Chemical Engineering from Bangladesh, Rajib Saha, had joined the cricket group that very semester, specializing in metabolic modeling and computational biology. He took me on as his second student.

I can probably credit the saving of my graduate student career to the connections I made outside the lab and playing cricket.

While in Rajib’s lab, and later as a postdoctoral scholar, I took many professional opportunities to learn more about being a professor, build my professional network, and get relevant training to help me in my path to a position as a professor.

What have you learned from your work that surprised you?

Even simple models can be incredibly informative if reconstructed with care and attention to detail. Most of my modeling work to date has been using stoichiometric models, which are linear representations of metabolism, yet these have allowed me to answer a wide variety of research questions and gain great insight from data.

What’s your favorite spot on campus or in the Pullman area?

The roof of the CUB, as it gives great views of campus, Pullman, and the surrounding area. On the other hand, I’m also a foodie, and I really enjoyed the quality and diversity of restaurants available in the Pullman area and am looking forward to trying them all in the coming years.

What do you like to do when you’re not teaching or conducting research?

Being a foodie, I really enjoy cooking and visiting restaurants to try new dishes or enjoy my favorites.

I also enjoy playing story-rich video games that give the opportunity for some deep thinking and internal philosophical debates or musings, with some of my favorite being the Bioshock series, Call of Cthulhu, Observation, Prey, Tyranny, and the Talos Principle.

What advice do you have for students?

Learning is by its very nature a social activity, whether you are taking classes or conducting research. The sooner you embrace this, the more you will learn and grow as an individual in your time here at WSU.

Take the opportunity to talk to your peers about what you learn. Go to office hours and talk to your professors about subjects in class (even if you might not have any particular questions). Form study groups where you work on problems together, not just sit in silence in the same room. Take advantage of clubs, especially intellectual ones. Attend seminars and ask questions of the presenters (either right after the talk or approach them one-on-one later). If you’re doing research and get stuck, ask questions of your fellow lab mates, or even just use them as sounding board. Each social interaction helps reinforce your learning. This also comes with the added bonus of building your social and professional networks which can help with finding or advancing your career.

What do you think will make Voiland School a great place to teach, conduct research, and learn?

Every university I have attended or worked at has been a public, land-grant university, including WSU. At a university level, I strongly support the mission of land grant institutions to serve their state, and to some extend the nation as a whole, through the three-part mission of teaching, research, and service.

I also think that WSU has done a fantastic job at perpetuating two of the key historical missions of land grant universities, namely to “benefit the agricultural and mechanical arts”.

In the case of WSU, this has taken the form of strong plant science, agricultural science, and engineering programs as evidenced by its strong collaboration and reputation with the USDA (including being a top recipient of USDA funding and breaking ground on a USDA research center on campus), as well as strong, interdisciplinary engineering schools. WSU to me feels like an institution proud of fulfilling its role as a land grant institution which is continuing to build upon and innovate to deliver on its mission, and I am proud to be joining this great legacy and to do my part to advance it.

As for specifically joining the Voiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering, I think what most impressed me here was the faculty themselves. The impression I’ve had here through the interviews and what time I have spent with them is that of a culture of collegiality, investment in the success of new faculty, and world-class research.

Read more about Dr. Schroeder