Faculty Spotlight | Lukasz Bugaj, Ph.D.
Lukasz Bugaj is an Assistant Professor of Bioengineering in the Department of Bioengineering
Q. How long have you been at Penn?
I started January 2018.
Q. Where were you before you came to Penn?
I did my undergrad at Johns Hopkins and was at Berkeley for my Ph.D. and UCSF for my postdoc.
Q. What brought you to Penn?
Penn has a real interest in the basic sciences and implements a good relationship between bioengineering and medicine. And Penn has a strong bioengineering department.
Q. How did you first become interested in science?
I watched Bill Nye the Science Guy as a kid and I have always been curious.
Q. What brought you into your field?
I originally meant to pursue physics. In undergrad my academic advisor was Artin Shoukas, who was studying ground-based models of how spaceflight and zero-gravity affect the circulatory system. I got involved with Dr. Shoukas’s lab, which was jointly run with Dr. Dan Berkowitz. The science was a great combination of my two passions: aerospace and biology. In the end, my interests turned more towards biology since there’s just so much more to explore, so much that we don’t yet understand. At Berkeley I joined Dave Schaffer’s lab. My graduate dissertation focused on developing methods to control cell signals with light and using these methods to study cell fate decisions in differentiating neural stem cells.
Q. What is your research focused on and what questions are you trying to answer with your research?
Our lab studies the mechanisms that govern essential cell decisions like growth, differentiation, and death. We specialize in optogenetic technologies, which let us control cellular events in real-time using light. Our fundamental goal is to understand: how do cell signals control cell decisions?
Q. What is optogenetics?
Optogenetics is a set of tools that lets you use light to control some process in a cell. My work has been focused mostly on using optogenetics to control cell signaling pathways. But, really, today you could probably control any arbitrary cell behavior with light. You could also control multiple events in the same cell using different colors of light. By using light as an inducer, we have very good control over the location, duration, and strength of different reactions in living cell. We can use these features to study how cells interpret important signals and their changes through time and space.
Q. Did you develop a device to study this?
Yes. Since this is a relatively new field, the right tools don’t always exist yet, so you often have to build your own. During my postdoc at UCSF, I developed the optoPlate-96, which is an LED-based device that allows you to shine light on individual wells of microwell plates. This effectively lets you scale down and multiplex optogenetic experiments, where instead of one individual experiment, you can do 96 or 384 experiments at the same time. These devices have really expanded the types of experiments we can do, and the experiments are faster and more reproducible.
Q. Why is your research important?
At a basic level, we study how cell signaling controls cell behavior. This is important because there are many instances when we’d want to control how cells behave, from differentiating stem cells for regenerative medicine, to slowing down the growth and spread of cancer cells, to instructing engineered immune cells how to attack a cancer. Our use of optogenetics allows us to understand aspects of cell signaling that have been traditionally hard to study, like how the dynamics or strength of individual signals can dictate cell behaviors. Cell signaling networks are notoriously complex, interconnected, and difficult to understand. Optogenetic tools offer us a precise scalpel with which to dissect this complexity in the hopes of understanding the fundamental rules that drive cell decisions.
Q. How do you like to spend your time outside of Penn?
I like playing tennis, skiing, hiking, cooking, and playing with my kids.
Q. What is a fun fact about you?
I’m originally from Poland, and I was on the crew team for four years in undergrad.
Q. Do you have any advice for current or prospective students or postdocs?
I’ve learned that everyone has their own path to success. If you ask 5 different people how to succeed, you’ll get 5 different—sometimes conflicting—answers. It’s actually quite liberating. So do your best and don’t take any one person’s opinion too seriously. Even your own.