Interview with Professor Cynthia J. Burrows, 2022 Founders Award Winner, American Chemical Society Division of Chemical Toxicology

Prof. Cindy Burrows is the winner of this year’s Founders award. This award aims to recognize researchers for their excellence in chemical toxicology research. Dr. Burrows accepted the award at the Fall ACS meeting of 2022 in Chicago and delivered an intriguing talk on the potential role of 8-oxo-dG (OG) as an epigenetic modification (see Figure 1 for a photo of the speakers at the Founders Award ceremony). Until recently, OG has been considered exclusively an oxidative guanine damage, but Dr. Burrows’ work has shown that OG can alter transcription levels when present in potential G-quadruplex sequences in gene promoters via base excision repair. AP endonuclease I (APE1, also known as ref-1), an important DNA repair enzyme in humans, is central to this process. She also highlighted that, besides DNA modifications, protein modifications under oxidative conditions may influence transcriptional modulation as well. She discussed how APE1 can be oxidized at its cysteine residues, causing tighter binding with abasic sites in a G-quadruplex but reduced catalytic activity of the protein.

Figure 1.

Speakers at the Founders Award ceremony of the 2022 Fall ACS meeting in Chicago. From left to right: Chuan He, Aaron Fleming, Cynthia Burrows, Natalia Tretyakova, and Sheila David.

Dr. Burrows received her PhD in physical organic chemistry at Cornell University with Prof. Barry Carpenter, who is considered “one of the smartest people on the planet with extremely high quality of work” in Dr. Burrows’ opinion. She then spent two years at Université Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg as a postdoctoral researcher with Nobel laureate Jean-Marie Lehn. When asked about her time in Strasbourg, she describes the lab as a “diverse and international place”, where she had lots of fun. She took French 101 in graduate school to prepare for her upcoming trip to France but struggled somewhat in the beginning with daily conversations and finding an apartment. Dr. Burrows is particularly inspired by Prof. Lehn’s dedication to science and his breadth of knowledge in music (piano and organ) and art.

After her time in Strasbourg, Dr. Burrows started her independent career and was promoted to full professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1992. Following this, she moved to the University of Utah in 1995, where she is currently a Distinguished Professor of Chemistry. Dr. Burrows is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2009) and the National Academy of Sciences (2014). Her contributions to the DNA toxicology field have also been recognized by numerous awards, including the Cope Scholar Award, the James Flack Norris Award in Physical Organic Chemistry, the Willard Gibbs Award, the Rosenblatt Prize, and, very recently, the Linus Pauling Medal Award. Over her academic career of more than four decades, Dr. Burrows has published over 250 scientific papers and has mentored over 50 PhDs and over 20 postdocs. Despite this long list of accomplishments, Dr. Burrows says that she “still feels very much in the middle of her career”.

This project highlighted in her award talk, however, is just one of the many groundbreaking research contributions in her career. Trained as a physical organic chemist, she made successful transitions to other realms of chemistry over the past 35 years, including catalysis, DNA damage and repair, sequencing, epigenetics, and many others. When asked what the keys to these successful transitions are, she says that her desire to try something new has always been the driving force. Dr. Burrows also credits her many friends in the scientific community for her ability to expand into different branches of chemistry. She said, “Find collaborators who are friends. It’s easy to write to somebody across the world to ask for help, but you don’t advance your thinking on the topic unless you sit down and talk about it. The people you talk to the most are the people who are your friends or who will become your friends. If you find someone with a background very complementary to your own, then that can move you into a new direction.” Dr. Burrows also recognizes that her main “label” would not be organic chemistry despite it being her PhD work, but she mentioned that the training in organic chemistry has been very “foundational” to her because she treats biopolymers, such as DNA or RNA, as organic molecules.

Alongside her excellent career in research, Dr. Burrows has been heavily involved in editorial work over the past two decades. She was an Associate Editor for Organic Letters (1999–2002) and Senior Editor for The Journal of Organic Chemistry (2001–2013) before becoming the Editor-in-Chief for Accounts of Chemical Research in 2014. When asked what brought her into editorial work, she said her colleague Dale Poulter and Editor-in-Chief at the time, Amos Smith, convinced her to join the team of Organic Letters. She enjoys the idea of supporting nonprofit organizations for publication and has brought new ideas to Accounts of Chemical Research over the past 9 years as the Editor-in-Chief. When asked how she has been able to strike good work/life balance with so many tasks on hand, she said “one thing that helps a lot is to live in Utah. You don’t have to go very far to get away from work! But we also hire good people to help.” Dr. Burrows grew up in the Western United States, so outdoor activities such as hiking and skiing have always been a big part of her time off. This summer, she and her husband took an exciting hiking trip in Slovenia, which was a new experience for her.

Throughout her career, Dr. Burrows is always involved in promoting diversity in science. She and Dr. Shelley Minteer cofounded the Curie Club to ensure equal opportunities for underrepresented groups in science, as well as to honor Marie Curie, who was the first female Nobel laureate and the first person in history to win two Nobel Prizes. She added, “Students see a diverse set of professors, who are not just called Anderson (Dr. Burrows’ husband, who is also a Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at Utah) or Burrows, and that is good!” Dr. Burrows was the only woman at the chemistry department of Stony Brook when she first joined, which was very typical back then. But time has changed and now she “has lost count of how many female faculty members are in our department (Utah)”.

At the end of the interview, Dr. Burrows reflected on the collaborative nature of the community and said, “One thing that graduate students and postdocs may not realize is how global and interconnected our community is. It truly is a small world, even though I haven’t met everyone out there. I feel like many of my best friends don’t live here in Utah and the things that we really have in common is the science. There is intrinsic value in formal collaborations and informal friendships.” Congratulations, Dr. Burrows, on the Founders Award and a wonderful career!