This article is part of a larger project by The Michigan Daily to examine University of Michigan research trends by analyzing academic paper citations. The Michigan Daily spoke with Gabriel Nuñez, Paul de Kruif Endowed Professor of Academic Pathology and one of the top ten most cited researchers connected to the University, to discuss his career and research. Read the other stories here.
As a professor of pathology at the University of Michigan, Gabriel Nuñez’s life is dedicated to research on microbes and diseases. But as a young student in Seville, Spain, Nuñez almost found himself staring down the barrel of a camera rather than the optical lens of a microscope. In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Nuñez said his love for science in high school competed with another interest: filmmaking.
“I was very interested in two things at the time,” Nuñez said. “I was interested in filmmaking. I was making films, but also I was interested in biology and medicine. So in the end, I decided to go to medicine. I think my parents were very happy about that decision.”
After committing to study biology, Nuñez hoped to complete research in the United States and spent time outside of Spain to prepare for the transition. He said his life took yet again another turn after he was offered a job over a meal in Italy.
“I wanted to come to the U.S. to do research, so I was preparing for that,” Nuñez said. “I was going to England to learn the language and so forth in the summertime. Then one day, I was in a meeting in Rome. I was 22 years old, or 23 years old, and I was offered a position to come to the United States by a professor in a restaurant. They told me, ‘You want to come to join my laboratory?’ And I look at it three months later — I was in the U.S.”
After coming to the U.S., Nuñez decided to stay. After completing research at both the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and Washington University in St. Louis, Nuñez was recruited to the University of Michigan as an assistant professor in 1991. After spending more than three decades at the institution, Nuñez said he owed his career path to forming connections with his peers.
“Imagine being in a restaurant in Rome, and someone sitting near you offers you a position,” Nuñez said. “I always say, ‘You don’t play, you don’t win.’ You have to connect with people. Then it’s a statistical game. The more networking you do, more opportunities appear. If you stay at home all day long, nothing’s gonna happen.”
Nuñez’s pathology-based laboratory is dedicated to the defense and disease mechanisms of microbes, microscopic organisms like bacteria that cannot be seen with the naked eye. While microbes often have a negative reputation as pathogens, Nuñez said the human microbiota, the collection of all microorganisms in the body, also plays an essential role in maintaining health and preventing disease.
“Generally speaking, we cannot live without microbes,” Nuñez said. “I’m interested also not only in the pathogens (and) how will the body defend against those pathogens … but also, how do we communicate how these microbiota help us to protect us from infection and other things?”
In his time as a researcher, Nuñez has collected nearly 170,000 citations on Google Scholar as of publication. Nuñez attributed this number to carefully recruiting students to his lab, noting he has trained 65 postdocs of numerous nationalities and unique backgrounds. He described how, although he serves as a mentor to his postdocs, their personal experiences often contribute to his own knowledge as a researcher.
“The human component in your laboratory is essential,” Nuñez said. “You teach them, you train them, but also you learn from them — they’re exceptional, you learn from them. Sometimes they come with different backgrounds, and you sort of learn that from them. So that’s very, very important.”
The professor also said billions of years of cell evolution have led to very complex problems in his field. Nuñez said encouraging his team to take bold and unbiased approaches to their work to answer these questions often led to new discoveries that were exceptionally cited by other researchers.
“Life is very wise and complex, because of millions of years of evolution,” Nuñez said. “So how do we crack those secrets to understand how the cells function? … You take innovative approaches, and (when) you take unbiased approaches, sometimes you find things that you were not expecting. They are unknown, and then they make a highly cited paper because it’s something new.”
Recruiting postdoc Naohiro Inohara to his laboratory helped lead Nuñez’s team to their most impactful discovery. Nuñez said Inohara discovered a family of sensors within the cell called Nod-like receptors, which detect pathogens within the body and led to numerous additional discoveries in the field.
“That (discovery) opened a new field in immunology,” Nuñez said. “These are sensors in the cytosol. They can sense bacteria. … At that time, the only receptors we knew were outside the surface to recognize bacteria. These were inside of the cell. And we discovered here, in Michigan, Nod1 and Nod2, the two first members of the family.”
Much of Nuñez’s work also looks at Crohn’s disease, a chronic inflammatory bowel disease that leads to inflammation in the digestive tract. Only a few years after the initial discovery of the NLR family, his laboratory found that mutations in the Nod2 receptor could lead to Crohn’s disease, suggesting it is a genetic disorder.
Because of the nature of scientific research, Nuñez’s work is often collaborative. Before choosing to work with another researcher, Nuñez said he reads other publications and weighs his options before entering into a new partnership.
“When I try to set up a collaboration, I do my homework,” Nuñez said. “I find out ‘what kind of person is this?’ before I actually contact them. Because when you start a collaboration, (if) you make the wrong collaboration, you lose a lot of time. So you want to make sure you increase your chances that it will be a productive collaboration, someone that will be helpful, that will be ethical, that will be collaborative.”
Nuñez now spends his days spread across three continents, living in Europe for the winter, teaching at the University during the school year and mentoring young professors in Osaka, Japan for six weeks at a time.
Despite his quantitative successes as a researcher, from his many citations to his important discoveries, Nuñez recognizes his legacy as a mentor as the most important achievement in his career. He referred to his former trainees and the students they now mentor as professors as his network of “academic grandchildren” and said seeing their work made him proud.
“When you see them doing well and publishing group papers, that makes me so happy, particularly when you’re at the end of your scientific academic career,” Nuñez said. “It is at the end of my career, and I basically want to devote it to mentoring. So I’m mentoring people in Spain, I mentor in Japan and I’m mentoring people here. … I think I can give knowledge and advice to young scientists that may benefit from that, to almost nurture the next generation of research.”
Daily News Editor Marissa Corsi can be reached atmacorsi@umich.edu.
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