LAS alum and chemistry professor receive Beckman Institute awards
The Beckman Institute recognized two community members during its annual April celebration of Arnold Beckman’s birth.
Microscopist and outreach specialist T Josek (BS, '13; MS, '15; PhD, '19, entomology; BS, '13, chemistry) won the Staff Spirit and Dedication Award; chemistry professor Jonathan V. Sweedler won the Vision and Spirit Award.
The staff award celebrates a staff member who embodies the mission and core values of the Beckman Institute and demonstrate teamwork.
The Vision and Spirit Award honors Beckman Institute Founder Arnold Beckman by recognizing a faculty member who has fostered collaboration in their research and exemplifies his vision. Beckman and his wife, Mabel, gave $40 million to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the 1980s to create the Beckman Institute.
Director Steve Maren, a professor of psychology, gave the awards Thursday, April 10. It marked the 125th anniversary of Beckman’s birth. The institute also celebrated with cupcakes.
The winners shared their thoughts on the honor.
T Josek, microscopist and outreach specialist
Josek has been working at Beckman since 2022. They began teaching users how to use electron microscopes and how to image samples. They’ve also taken on more outreach work in collaboration with the Beckman Communications office and were recently promoted. When pursuing a master’s degree and PhD in entomology, Josek also used Beckman’s Microscopy Suite to conduct research.
What does it mean to you to win this award?
Receiving this award means the world to me. I’m honored that my peers took the time to nominate me, and I’m humbled that I was selected. It’s validating to know that my community feels that I’m doing the right things here at Beckman and that my efforts haven’t gone unnoticed. I hope to keep pushing forward and doing what I can to embrace teamwork as well as the mission and core values at Beckman.
This award highlights a team player. How has teamwork helped you accomplish something in your job at Beckman?
Teamwork has been an integral part of bridging the microscopy suite, Beckman outreach and Beckman communications. We work together to show different classrooms (both within the university and K-12 classrooms outside the university) how research is done in the Microscopy Suite. We then further discuss these events/experiences and share out to the broader community. I’ve really enjoyed having kids (and adults) see the different ways you can image a sample (usually a bug) and take that information to answer questions, come up with new ideas and eventually share them.
What do you like best about working at the Beckman Institute?
The community. I really love the people I have been able to meet and work with here at Beckman. There are so many people here who have brilliant ideas and are supportive of others’ ambitions. It’s amazing to know that sometimes just by going to coffee hour, I can get help from experts outside of my field, find new music to listen to, start a new collaborative project, learn about others’ passions and occasionally…find new, whole-some material for my stand-up sets.
Jonathan Sweedler, the James R. Eiszner Family Endowed Chair in Chemistry
What does it mean to you to win this award?
My entire career has been intricately intertwined with the Beckman Institute. When considering the ideal place to start my career, I wanted a place that facilitated my research in the area of new technology for measuring chemistry in small volumes applied to neuroscience.
Given my training in chemistry, I was worried about my ability to work with neuroscientists, especially as three decades ago, such interdisciplinary research was rare. The Beckman Institute was in its second year and was still fairly empty, but its promise to enable cross-disciplinary interactions was a defining reason I decided to move to Illinois. And I found my home!
I was welcomed by the leaders of brain science on campus – who were also located at Beckman – and I have never looked back. The BI enabled and propelled the interdisciplinary aspects of my research at every stage of my career.
My research creates new chemical measurement approaches such as single cell mass spectrometry but with the driving goal of discovering novel neurochemistry. I have succeeded because of dozens of collaborations within the Beckman community.
Several notable and ongoing collaborations include Fan Lam with new mass spectrometry imaging approaches, extracellular vesicle characterization with Marni Boppart and circadian rhythm and much more with Martha Gillette!
In addition, I have led a National Institute on Drug Abuse Center of Excellence on neuroproteomics and neurometabolomics for 21 years that is centered Beckman that has collaborated with more than 20 groups across campus.
Do you have a plan for using the research funding associated with the award?
I would have answered this differently even a few months ago. Now, I am going to use these funds to help my research team deal with unexpected funding gaps.
I want to make sure that the talented researchers in my group don’t have funding issues over the next two years. Keeping a research enterprise moving forward requires stability in funding for our talented researchers!
What advice would you share for other faculty members who might want to become better interdisciplinary collaborators?
When initiating a new collaboration, the benefits for you and your group are likely obvious. Why else would you start the collaboration?
If you want a long-term collaboration, put yourself in your collaborator’s shoes and ask yourself how do your efforts help them? Does it advance their research agenda? Successful collaborations need to benefit everyone.
Perhaps as important, my most successful collaborations are fun! If you want to maintain collaborations, avoid conflicts, be flexible and give your collaborators the credit they deserve.
What else do you want people to know about this honor?
This award is a capstone for me and validates my work and efforts across dozens of collaborations and projects performed at Beckman, both completed and ongoing.
