Kevin K Caldwell

Synapses: The brain’s tiny communication centers
 

As a child, I loved popcorn. This was long before microwaves, so popcorn had to be cooked on the stove. My parents would allow me to stand on a chair and pop the popcorn. I think that this was probably the start of my love for chemistry: heat + kernels of popcorn yield popped popcorn! When I was about 9 or 10 years old, my parents bought me a chemistry set. I don’t recall if I asked for it or whether they just bought it for me. I didn’t always follow the directions, and would sometimes mix different chemicals just to see what happened. Fortunately, there weren’t any dangerous chemicals in the set and I survived these early experiments without any scars.
 
In high school, one of my favorite classes was chemistry. I didn’t really like biology because we had to learn about plants. Plants bored me. Now, I like to garden and I’m fascinated by plants, but not then. In high school I also really liked math and to play the alto saxophone. I attended college at the University of Kansas. When I started college, I thought that I wanted to be a chemical or petroleum engineer. But in my freshman year, I enrolled in college calculus, and by the end of the year, I decided that I had taken enough math courses for one lifetime! I started to look for another career. I continued to take chemistry classes (organic chemistry was probably the hardest class that I ever took!) and discovered biochemistry, the chemistry of biological systems. Financial concerns started to weigh on me and I needed to identify a career quickly. My father was a pharmacist, so I decided to apply for pharmacy school, thinking that maybe I could work in his store. Fortunately, I was accepted to pharmacy school; unfortunately, my father lost his business because grocery stores and large chains could sell to their customers for cheaper that he could buy the medications. But then in pharmacy school, I realized that I really was not interested in being a pharmacist anyway. One of my favorite classes was pharmacology, the study of how the body interacts with drugs. One day after class, I approached the professor (Dr. Richard Tessel) and asked him if I could schedule an appointment to talk to him about working in his lab. Though that was over 30 years ago, I still remember when I first walked into his lab and then into his office. Dr. Tessel’s laboratory studied drug abuse. I really liked the work and the people that I met there. I decided that I should pursue a career in research, and applied to graduate school. Dr. Tessel helped me to identify pharmacology programs. I started graduate school at the University of Missouri, but transferred to the University of Colorado after one year.
 
My graduate work was on how information is transferred from the outside of a cell to the inside, an area of research termed “signal transduction.” It combined my interests in biochemistry and pharmacology. Two professors were very important mentors, Dr. Adron Harris and Dr. Dermot Cooper. After graduate school, I got a position as a postdoctoral fellow at Washington University in St. Louis, MO, in the laboratory of Dr. Philip Majerus. Here I got a greater depth of training in signal transduction.
 
I moved to New Mexico in 1993. Since that time I have continued to be fascinated by research. My current research focuses on signal transduction mechanisms underlying learning and memory. I have developed a great interest in teaching, and realize how important dedicated teachers are to their students.