Chemists amid coronavirus five years on: Krystle McLaughlin

When Covid-19 hit in early 2020, protein x-ray crystallographer Krystle McLaughlin, an assistant chemistry professor at Vassar College in New York, US, felt overwhelmed and ‘extra behind’. She had taken parental leave after having a baby the previous summer, delaying her sabbatical to January 2020. Covid-19 then meant she had to cancel a summer research programme since her planned work couldn’t be done remotely. Four years later she is back on track and has just submitted her tenure package.

Back in 2020, McLaughlin had no students in her lab and was essentially home-schooling her six-year-old daughter while also attending to a new infant. When Vassar’s administration stepped in and offered junior faculty an option to extend their tenure clock by one year without penalty to January 2025, she accepted. In addition, she was granted a teaching course release in spring 2021, which freed her to write up her research for publication.

‘I think these things really helped … if I didn’t take that tenure extension, there is no way I would have been able to apply for tenure a year ago,’ McLaughlin says. She published several papers last year, which were all included in her tenure packet.

‘Cryo-EM is the future’

Her career has also been furthered by a $100,000 (£79,000) Cottrell Scholar Award that she won in 2022 from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, which funded her education proposal to develop a protein x-ray crystallography-focused biochemistry lab. That award is allowing her lab to branch out into cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM).

‘Cryo-EM is the future, and the system we work on is, I think, not as amenable to crystallography – it’s just a bigger complex picture,’ she says. McLaughlin’s research focuses on the biochemical and biophysical study of proteins from various microbial systems like gut microbes and antibiotic resistance transfer in Staphylococcus and Salmonella bacteria.

The Cottrell grant also allowed McLaughlin to create a new research course called Protein Crystallography, and much of the work that she has published recently has come from that class.

No longer lost in translation

Meanwhile, there are important vestiges from the pandemic in her classroom. ‘I still record all of my lectures on Zoom and post them online, and from an inclusive, universal design perspective that is really good,’ McLaughlin says. And instead of marking up a blackboard during class she writes on an iPad and projects that material, which is then made available to all her students. This is particularly useful for her students with accommodations who might need a notetaker.

‘There is nothing lost in translation, they have what I wrote down and can rewatch my lectures,’ she explains. ‘It also really helps if students get sick and can watch any lecture they missed, and I have recordings of my lectures so can just post those if I end up sick.’

In the lab, however, there haven’t really been any long-standing changes. During the pandemic’s height, McLaughlin had rearranged the layout of her lab, for example moving lab bench spaces to ensure social distancing. But the original configuration has returned, and the lab is back to its pre-pandemic size of six undergraduate students.

Since the pandemic, McLaughlin notes, students are coming to Vassar as freshmen with significant variation in their readiness for chemistry and other disciplines. ‘Before Covid, they did arrive with different levels of preparedness, but it was not all over the place like now, depending on whether they took chemistry in high school [in person or] only online.’

She is involved in the Vassar chemistry department’s effort to create a placement test that should be available in autumn. They are also trying to add a short chemistry lab skills course to the syllabus to supplement students’ general chemistry knowledge and experience.

Scientific conferences have ramped back up

As Covid began easing, and daycare was available once more, McLaughlin and her husband were able to focus fully on work again. Now, their eldest is in middle school and their youngest in kindergarten. Both parents are in the office five days a week, and scientific conferences have ramped back up. They have hired at-home part-time childcare for the mornings, and have afterschool care elsewhere.

‘If we did not have this person in the mornings, we could probably [afford to] go on a vacation, but my whole life is less stressful because we have this help,’ McLaughlin states. ‘For now, we want to keep it.’