From left: Jones posing for a photo, holding a dish of gut bacteria, and competing. All images in story courtesy of Liz Jones
As an organic chemist at Harvard Medical School, Liz Jones loves to study how bonds are made and broken in the molecules in our bodies.
She manipulates those bonds when building molecular probes to study the gut microbiome and developing potential new drugs to treat microbiome-related illnesses.
She also forges bonds among people, both as a scientist and as an Ultimate Frisbee coach.
“I’m super drawn to team environments,” said Jones, research fellow in biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS.
“I get a lot of satisfaction from reaching goals and being successful, but it means so much more when you get to share that with people,” she said. “The same goes for failures. It feels a lot better to have humans to share that experience with.”
The “why” of the world
Science seemed a natural fit for someone with Jones’ curiosity about why and how things happen.
Jones said she was drawn to the intersection of chemistry and biology because it’s one of the smallest scales people can study.
“I’m sure you could argue that physics is the next scale down, but that was more math than I wanted to do,” she joked.
Learning how chemical reactions happen scratches that itch to know. So does revealing how chemistry can impact biological function — finding ways to use chemistry to deepen humanity’s understanding of life and to treat disease.
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“If you don’t fundamentally understand how something is happening in the body or why a disease is progressing in a particular way, you’re never going to develop exactly the right kinds of therapies,” she said.
Jones enjoys trying to answer such fundamental questions in the lab of Sloan Devlin. The group focuses on exploring how human gut bacteria make a variety of substances called metabolites as well as on how those bacteria undergo or trigger biochemical transformations in the body.
Jones helps design small molecules the team can use as tools to study individual metabolites and biochemical reactions. She may also help develop the most promising molecules into drug candidates.
One of her current projects centers on fine-tuning a molecular tool to study why a gut bacterial enzyme performs a particular chemical transformation to human bile acids that renders those acids more likely to cause tissue damage and disease.
“Why would microbes need to do this?” she and her colleagues want to know. “Is it for their benefit? Is it for the host’s benefit or harm?”
The goal is to have the molecular tool prevent the bacteria from doing the transformation in a rodent model so the team can learn what happens in the gut and liver. Such insights would help researchers better understand the gut microbiome’s role in gastrointestinal and liver health and disease.
If preventing the bile acid transformation proves beneficial, Jones might find herself further tweaking the molecule to make it as good a candidate as possible for development as a human medicine.
Straddling two worlds
Jones’ eagerness to connect fundamental science with medicine is reflected in a career path that spans academia and industry.
As an undergraduate in medicinal chemistry at Northeastern University, she participated in a co-op program that involved six-month internships in industry. Her master’s degree at Northeastern, also in medicinal chemistry, featured research in an academic lab on tropical diseases. She then served as a medicinal chemist for three years at Ensemble Therapeutics before earning a PhD in synthetic chemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Jones shares the story behind one of her science-related tattoos, a celebration of having earned her PhD. Read the transcript | Related story: Written in the Skin
Jones joined the Devlin lab in June 2022. Part of what attracted her was the group’s team science approach, reflected in its interdisciplinary and collaborative nature.
“We have nine full-time trainees right now and something like 16 active collaborations with other labs and hospitals,” she said. “The breadth of projects and science you get exposed to is unbelievable.”
By approaching scientific questions from multiple perspectives, the lab can tackle complex projects and fulfill Jones’ desire to delve into the why and the how of the science. She revels in the teaching and learning opportunities afforded by her labmates’ varied expertise.
“I get to apply my organic chemistry experience and teach it to other trainees in the lab, and I get to learn from them about the microbiology that I’m interested in, like working with bacteria and anaerobic environments,” she said.
Coaching, from the sports field to the scientific field
Jones grew up playing team sports. She started playing Ultimate Frisbee in college and continued for a decade after, including competing in one of the two U.S. semiprofessional leagues for women and nonbinary athletes. The league started in 2018 but paused when the pandemic hit in 2020.
Her time for Frisbee training fell after college as her scientific training needs increased. Not wanting to lose touch with the sport, Jones turned to coaching. She served as a selection coach for the most recent cycle of the U.S. women’s national under-20 team and is an assistant coach for a Boston men’s club team called Big Wrench.
Jones fell in love with the leadership aspect of coaching a team, helping people improve and meet their goals.
“The impact that has on you is indescribable,” she said. “I really like giving people the tools to help them get better at something, whether it’s throwing a forehand or mastering a technical subject in the chemistry lab.”
Coaching clued her in to how much she liked teaching and mentoring in her professional life. It all coalesced in a “lightbulb moment” at Georgia Tech when she became a teaching assistant.
“I realized it was the confluence of all the things I like,” she recalled. “Helping people set goals and achieve them in a team environment.”
Jones liked teaching so much, in fact, that she took on a minor in higher education while pursuing her PhD. As with science, she enjoyed delving into the why of pedagogy: how people learn, what the best practices are for teaching and mentoring, how to get the most from people you’re trying to teach and work with.
Jones proved adept. At Georgia Tech she was named graduate student teaching assistant of the year in 2021 and graduate student instructor of the year in 2022.
Representation matters
Jones believes part of her responsibility as a mentor is to provide more diverse representation for future scientists. That includes not just recruiting but retaining researchers from different backgrounds and life experiences who can be visible and accessible to students, trainees, and junior faculty, she said.
“Academia is still very exclusionary and there’s a real lack of representation, especially as you move up the ranks,” she said. “One reason that’s a problem is that research shows people sometimes need to see themselves in roles in order to think it’s possible.”
Jones, who is openly queer, points to Carolyn Bertozzi, the first openly gay Nobel laureate in chemistry and one of the prize’s few female recipients, as a role model. Jones admires Bertozzi’s science and her fierce dedication to diversity and inclusion initiatives in chemistry.
“I’ve never been taught by an openly queer person,” Jones said. “I got here eventually, but it’s a lot easier to have people in leadership positions who share a part of your identity that’s not well represented in academia. Just by their existence it can make you feel more included and like you belong a lot more.”
Opportunities to teach and mentor helped convince Jones to stay in academia. In addition to teaching her peers at HMS and exploring other options for mentorship in the community, she is active in postdoc unionizing efforts, and she plans to apply team leadership skills as a faculty member someday.
“When you’re a lab head, you’re a manager,” she said. “If you do it the right way, you can put people on a totally different path to success. You can help open doors for them they didn’t think were possible. You can get them to levels scientifically they didn’t think they could achieve.”
