Leland P. Vickers grew up on the east coast of the United States, with time spent in Delaware, Florida, New Jersey, New Hampshire, and Maryland. His family moved frequent­ly, but he was able to complete all four years of high school in Wicomico County, Maryland. He completed a bachelor’s degree in chemistry at Harding College in Arkansas. This was a predominantly undergraduate school, but he was able to conduct a small research project related to reaction kinetics for a Diels-Alder mechanism.

Following the completion of his bachelor’s degree, he decided to move back closer to home for grad­uate school. At this point in time Vickers knew he wanted to study biochemistry, with an emphasis on physical chemistry and mathemat­ics, but he was not aware of the existence of the field of biophys­ics. “I visited and interviewed with two graduate programs, and then decided to enroll in the biochemis­try PhD program at the University of Virginia, located in the School of Medicine,” he shares. “Arriving on the grounds in July 1972, I was welcomed into a department culture that was heavily invested in biophysical research.”

The department was about evenly divided between research programs in lipids and membranes and programs in proteins and enzymes. Vickers was accepted into the research group of Gary K. Ackers. Ackers was a past president of the Bio­physical Society, as was the department chair, Tom Thompson. “Through their encouragement, I joined the Biophysical Soci­ety as a student member in 1972. Yes, that means that this year is my 51st year as a Society member!” The Ackers group worked closely with the research group of Rodney L. Biltonen, and Vickers and the other graduate students benefitted from shared journal clubs and research discussion meetings, par­ticularly focused on microcalorimetry and the thermodynam­ics of binding reactions and conformational transitions. Early in his second year of graduate school, with the encourage­ment of Ackers, Vickers decided to move his degree program into the Interdisciplinary Program in Biophysics. He defended his dissertation and completed all the requirements for a PhD in biophysics in February 1976.

Vickers remarks, “One thing that I greatly appreciated about the guidance from Ackers was that he always encouraged his students to read and think very widely. Graduate school was best used as a time to learn in a variety of areas. Of course, one must be focused on a specific research project for the dissertation, but not to the exclusion of other interests. Fortu­nately, I was able to leave Ackers’ group with publications from my dissertation, but also with two small notes that were published in related areas.” Ackers encouraged his students to attend scientific meetings and present their research findings. He particularly encouraged attendance at Biophysical Society meetings, and he was able to find travel funds for many of the graduate students to attend each year.

Following completion of his PhD, Vickers started a three-year National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley, in the research group of Howard K. Schachman. He moved from working on one large, multi-subunit enzyme in the Ackers laboratory to a different allosteric enzyme in the Schachman group.

Vickers spent those years learning new techniques and applying familiar techniques to new questions, and he recalls that the late 1970s were great years to be in the Bay Area to hear the latest research results, news, and seminars by all the people visiting from week to week. “It was sometimes diffi­cult to find the time to work in my own laboratory space on my own projects. Schachman had made a personal decision many years earlier to put his available time and energy into supporting the American Society of Biological Chemists (now the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biolo­gy), even though his research was predominantly biophysical in focus. However, he encouraged me to continue attending Biophysical Society meetings and participating in this society,” he explains.

At the end of the fellowship, Vickers accepted a tenure-track position in the Department of Chemistry at Georgia State University. His research focused on the thermodynamics of conformational transitions in large allosteric enzymes and relied primarily on microcalorimetry. After six years as an as­sistant professor, Vickers decided to make a change in career direction and he accepted a research position with a large veterinary pharmaceutical company that had a major drug development project for a recombinant protein—that was recombinant porcine somatropin (growth hormone for swine).

Over his subsequent career of more than 30 years, Vickers worked in research management, quality management, and regulatory affairs for three different veterinary drug compa­nies, usually referred to as “animal health companies.” “The breadth of my education has paid many dividends, partic­ularly in the later years in regulatory affairs. I was handling and submitting the various sections of a new drug dossier for Food and Drug Administration approval, and this includ­ed effectiveness data, safety data, environmental impact data, manufacturing information, quality control and quality assurance data, and human food safety data for those drugs being given to food animals. Being able to understand and discuss all of these packages with the regulatory authorities was critical to moving the new drugs to an earliest approval.” He retired in 2017 from the Bayer Animal Health US division of the German parent corporation.

Asked what advice he might have for current biophysics students who are considering a career in the pharmaceutical industry, Vickers responded: “I would advise you to broaden your interests and your experiences as much as is possible. A PhD program must be focused in order to complete it in a reasonable time; however, you should take the opportunity to interact with colleagues in various related fields of research. Read. Ask questions. Don’t hesitate to add your comments to a discussion outside your expertise area, particularly if some result does not make sense to you. Biophysics teaches a very broad approach to problem solving and you can have valuable inputs to many questions and problems.”