JOHN MAGYAR

METAL WORK

This new faculty member is an expert on the bioinorganic chemistry of lead poisoning

John Magyar has always been fascinated by science. “When I was growing up, my favorite museums were Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History and the Boston Museum of Science. My parents are both chemists,” he says. “I grew up in an academic household, where my mother and father discussed chemistry at dinner. During the summer, my brothers and I went with them to chemistry conferences.”

One favorite memory is of a family outing to Purdue University in the summer of 1988, when he was 12. There, at the Biennial Conference on Chemical Education, Magyar joined his mother at a lecture by Nobel Laureate Herbert C. Brown and attended a chemistry lab for kids, where they extracted iron filings from Total cereal.

“We mushed the flakes up in water and stirred the slurry with a strong magnet. Small bits of metallic iron stuck to the magnet,” he remembers.

Years later, in his graduate work with Professor Hilary Godwin at Northwestern University, Magyar focused on another common metal—one known not for its nutritional value but for its lasting toxicity. “We elucidated the molecular mechanism of the developmental toxicity of lead,” he says. “Lead poisoning is a major public health problem, and the symptoms are well known, but we’re only beginning to understand the toxicity at a molecular level.” With Godwin and the other members of the Northwestern team, he made discoveries that contributed significantly to science’s understanding of how lead binds to sulfur-rich peptides. Their study was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

As a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology, Magyar continued to examine the structure and function of metalloproteins. Working with Professor Harry Gray, he studied the dynamics of unfolded proteins, fundamental research preparing the way for future studies of unfolded and misfolded proteins linked to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.

When Magyar arrived at Barnard this past summer, he immediately set to work on a study of how marine microorganisms take up metals and use them as vital nutrients. “Marine phytoplankton play a major role in the carbon cycle, performing roughly half of global photosynthesis. Metals such as cobalt, iron, and manganese are required for these processes, but scientists are only beginning to understand the details. One reason that it is so difficult to predict the impact of steadily rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (resulting primarily from combustion of fossil fuels) is that we don’t yet understand the detailed role of microorganisms in global biogeochemical cycles. The research that my students and I are doing at Barnard will fill in some of these essential details.”

“Barnard has been generous in providing me with what I need to get started,” he says. “And our affiliation with Columbia University and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory dramatically expands the resources and equipment we have access to.” Magyar is an experienced teacher as well as a researcher, having instructed and mentored students at Northwestern, Caltech, and Dartmouth, his undergraduate alma mater. This fall he is teaching “Introduction to Inorganic Chemistry,” a requirement for chemistry majors, and “Senior Honors Thesis,” in which he is guiding students through the formulation and completion of their advanced research projects.