Dr. Curran Oi, says Christine Queitsch, Ph.D., a Professor of Genome Sciences, 'has the courage and the intellectual capacity to think fully outside the box and try new things. Creativity and courage!'
By the time Curran Oi entered middle school, it was evident he would pursue a career in math and science. He liked solving problems.
“And later, I was really into physics,” said Oi, a post-doctoral fellow in the UW Medicine Department Genome Sciences. “You could set up a small problem and solve it. In some ways, I found it cooler than math because it can predict physical behaviors of things around you.”
“Physical behaviors” of a different kind were another passion long before he learned long division and square roots.
“I watched figure skating on TV and started jumping and spinning around the living room,” he said. “I asked my parents to sign me up for lessons at age 5, and it took off from there.”
“Took off” is an understatement. By high school, Oi was competing in the World Junior Figure Skating Championships. He traveled internationally, including to Bulgaria twice, and admits, “it was a big part of my identity in high school.”
In skating, like physics, momentum plays a significant role, representing “mass in motion,” of an object – whether an atom or an 18-year-old from Wellesley, Massachusetts. It was at that age that Oi put aside ice skates and entered MIT. He completed a Bachelor of Science degree in Nuclear Engineering with a double major in Physics in 2013.
As a teenager, Oi competed iternationally as a figure skater: 'It was a big part of my identity in high school.'
Eight years later in 2021, he finished a Ph.D. in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale. Oi spent the final 18 months before graduating at the University of Edinburgh studying alongside his advisor Lynne Regan, Ph.D.
Among his projects was developing “LIVE-PAINT,” an innovative approach to super-resolution fluorescent imaging inside live cells. Oi was the lead author on the paper, “LIVE-PAINT allows super-resolution microscopy inside living cells using reversible peptide-protein interactions,” published in 2020 in Communications Biology.
Next came Oi’s search for a post-doctoral position, leading to the UW. His advisor, Christine Queitsch, Ph.D., a Professor of Genome Sciences, explained her first – and quite favorable – impression of him.
“In our one-on-one interview, he came across as a highly knowledgeable and creative young scientist with a quiet sense of humor,” she said. “He gave a well-prepared and well-received seminar that showed him to be a careful and productive scientist. A no brainer!”
Oi said in the Zoom interview he felt connected with Queitsch and Professor Stanley Fields, Ph.D., and that the department would be a “great place to do cool science.”
That “cool science” he said, includes studying genetic mutations “in the context of a whole organism, so that developmental and tissue-specific phenotypes can be investigated.” He also continues to nurture a love for synthetic biology he developed in graduate school by working on protein and RNA design projects.
So, what are the challenges Oi faces in his research? His response likely represents similar frustrations of many researchers.
“One of the classic problems in science – and in tech development – are things not working,” he said. “There are some fields of science where you can do experiments and get positive or negative answers that are equally valid and interesting. But in building a new technology, if your efforts do not work, there usually is nothing interesting or redeeming in the failed design. In fact, I’m not sure you will ever get something to work as well as you want it to. The hardest part is just sticking with it and being adaptable.”
Queitsch believes Oi’s perseverance will serve him well in the future.
“To be successful a researcher must be patient, resilient, careful, and organized.” She said. “Curran has all these characteristics in spades. And he is kind and generous, and it's super fun to think with him about experiments or possible interpretations for his data. He is highly creative, really playful, which I find very important. He has the courage and the intellectual capacity to think fully outside the box and try new things. Creativity and courage!”
