[No. 233] Mao Oide

Thank you for the opportunity to contribute to the Keio University alumni relay. I graduated from the Department of Physics in 2015. I continued at Keio until I obtained my doctoral degree, and I am currently working as a researcher at the Institute for Protein Research, Osaka University.

I think it was just before my third year of high school that I first thought about studying physics. Like many others who chose this department, I was attracted to physics as a discipline that can provide simple and beautiful explanations for the phenomena of this world. However, at the time I decided to enter Keio, I hadn't thought about it very deeply; it was more like, "Physics is interesting, so the Department of Physics should be fine." Once I entered and took lectures, physics was indeed interesting, and also recommended by a senior at the student dormitory where I lived at the time, so I decided on the Department of Physics immediately when choosing a major and moved on to my second year. As an aside, this student dormitory was quite an intense place looking back—it was a self-governing dorm, three people to a room across different grades, and a historic building that had even been used by the GHQ. Personally, it was a very enjoyable four years, and I am still close with the people I lived with, but for various reasons, I cannot write about those memories here. How should I put it... guys in a men's dorm just do a lot of stupid things.

Returning to the story of my three years in the Department of Physics, to be honest, I was not a very serious student until my third year. Sorry, I was posturing. I was a quite unfaithful student. I enjoyed the lectures themselves (within the range I could understand at the time), but I didn't put much effort into my studies and was in a state where I was just barely managing to advance to the next grade. The turning point was the laboratory assignment. As a third-year undergraduate, I thought audaciously for someone with poor grades that I wanted to go somewhere I was interested in, so I applied for the Biophysics Laboratory led by Professor Masayoshi Nakasako. This was because I found it interesting to put biological phenomena on the table of physics in a lecture by Professor Nakasako that I took in the fall semester of that year. Well, I was lucky enough to be assigned to the Nakasako Lab as I wished, but what awaited me was the price of two years of laziness. I was scolded many times for being unstudied in various matters, but thanks to Professor Nakasako's persistent guidance, I was somehow able to start my research.

In the laboratory, from my undergraduate to master's years, I was engaged in the analysis of protein structures and structural changes using X-ray scattering. Furthermore, from the latter half of the master's program through the doctoral program, I also worked on high-resolution structural and dynamic analysis using cryo-electron microscopy. At that time, a breakthrough had just occurred in cryo-electron microscopy that enabled high-resolution structural analysis of proteins, and Professor Nakasako, who was quick to notice this, suggested it to me. I remember clearly that when I was in the first year of my doctorate, the developers of cryo-electron microscopy won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and I truly felt that I was learning cutting-edge technology. Also, from my perspective, Professor Nakasako placed great importance on creating new equipment and techniques. Perhaps influenced by that attitude, my research naturally settled in the direction of creating new methods for protein dynamic analysis. The six years at the Nakasako Lab were very stimulating, and in addition to my own research, I gained various experiences such as X-ray imaging experiments at synchrotron radiation facilities. The laboratory members were all unique, and it was a very enjoyable lab life.

After obtaining my doctoral degree, I went to RIKEN as a postdoc to incorporate computer-based protein dynamics simulation into my research. This is a career path I probably wouldn't have imagined in my third year of undergraduate studies, but it seems I really like research. And as I mentioned at the beginning, I am currently continuing my research at Osaka University. Here, while actually operating the cryo-electron microscope myself to perform structural analysis, I am working to establish my own protein dynamics analysis method that combines experiments and simulations. I aim to be a researcher who "does both experiments and method development," but I constantly feel my own immaturity. That being said, I am researching every day with excitement about what I will be able to see and what I will be able to know in the future.

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