Yamini Dalal was raised in a family of physicians and teachers who exposed her to science very early on. “As a kid, I devoured Michael Crichton novels, Scientific American, the British Encyclopedia, and my father’s copy of Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine, especially the chapter on disorders caused by chromosomal abnormalities,” she shares. “I’ve always wanted to know how things work at the deepest possible level. The crave to understand mechanism led me to my recent interest in using biophysical tools to complement biochemical skills that I acquired in graduate school.”
Yamini Dalal’s father was a neurologist and professor, her mother is a general physician, an aunt is a gynecologist and professor, and another aunt was a high school teacher. Dalal herself developed an interest in her area of specialization, chromatin structure and epigenetics, very early on in her education, and as she learned more, her curiosity only grew. “A chapter on chromosome abnormalities in the book Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine caught my imagination when I was very young, maybe 12 or 13,” she says. She attended a lecture on chromosome structure as an undergraduate at St. Xavier’s University, and she was further drawn in. “The first time I saw an electron microscopy image of chromatin, I was hooked forever. I wanted to figure out how these tiny little 10-nanometer beads dictate the astonishing beauty and diversity in complex life forms all around us. Even now, in the lab, I get a thrill from seeing chromatin.”
She picked up a few skills as a high school student that have served her well since — Dalal’s earliest job was grading math and English exams for her aunt, and she tutored other students in school who were struggling to keep up. “It was a great experience, figuring out ways to fully understand something well enough to explain it others,” she says. “It held me in good stead when I was a graduate teaching assistant.”
She attended Greenlawns High School, which follows the challenging Indian Certificate of Secondary Education curriculum, then went on to pursue her bachelor’s degree in biochemistry and life sciences at St. Xavier’s University, one of the oldest colleges under the University of Bombay umbrella. After completing her degree in 1995, she moved to the United States to undertake PhD studies at Purdue University in the lab of Arnold Stein. There, she used classical chromatin biochemistry tools to understand how DNA sequence motifs and linker histones can shape the chromatin structure in silico, in vitro, and in vivo.
Dalal moved to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center for a postdoctoral fellowship in 2003. There she worked on chromatin and centromeres with Steve Henikoff, after meeting him at a Keystone Conference. “What I remember though is not the meeting itself but spending time chatting with her while waiting for our flights at the airport. Yamini was keen to know more about centromeres, their special chromatin and the interesting way that they evolved, and I was interested in her chromatin biochemistry perspective,” Henikoff shares. “Yamini joined my lab as a postdoc and got her start in the centromere field while complementing her biochemistry expertise with in vivo approaches. After she began her own lab we kept in touch by e-mail and at chromatin or centromere meetings, although we haven’t worked together on projects since she left. However, Yamini’s influence lingered on after she left the lab. For example, when she convinced me that we should try atomic force microscopy, which we found to be excellent advice.”
Now Dalal is a senior investigator and group director in the intramural research program at the Center for Cancer Research at NCI/NIH in Bethesda. “We work on three major projects: understanding how the chromatin structure of centromeres contributes to its essential and conserved function; dissecting how subtle variations in mechanical properties can alter the properties of the chromatin fiber and downstream function; and figuring out why specific chromatin features are altered in cancer cells, and whether and how they contribute to disease progression,” she explains. “My lab has found it insightful to probe chromatin function using combinatorial methods, including biochemistry, genomics, molecular biology, and computational approaches.”
Mary Pitman, a predoctoral fellow in her lab, shares her impressions of Dalal’s leadership style, saying, “I think as a researcher, Yamini has to be able to keep track of and lead a very multidisciplinary effort. Lab meetings in the Dalal lab span hardcore bioinformatics, cell biology, molecular dynamics and theory, and biochemical assays. Yamini's strength in that setting is that she is always engaged, energetic, and is able to see the larger picture while developing a surprising amount of knowledge about all of the research techniques employed in her lab. But I think, as a personality she balances her fast thinking and very active engagement in scientific discussions with a laid back and jovial attitude which is a difficult balance to strike.”
Dalal’s colleague at NCI/NIH, Dan Larson, has not collaborated directly with her, but says “I quite enjoy my discussions with her. She is a rigorous scientist with a long history in the chromatin field. She always makes time for scientific conversations. I would say her most memorable, or for me her most defining quality, is her good natured tenacity in scientific debate.”
Her favorite thing about biophysics is “the elegance and simplicity that it brings to complicated biological questions,” she says. “With the amazing tools that are constantly being invented by engineers and biophysicists, the sky is the limit. I don’t think there is any part of the biology nano-world that we will not be able to tackle over the next 20 years.”
“Over the years,” Dalal shares, “I have admired colleagues past and present, especially those who came from non-science backgrounds, or who were the first in their families to go to college while working two jobs. These colleagues have succeeded by sheer dint of will, effort, perseverance, and grit, and they have done beautiful science. That’s what I love best about science — that it is egalitarian, not aristocratic. It’s not about pedigree, it’s about accomplishments. The breakthroughs can come from anywhere — or anyone.”
The discovery process can be a slow one, which is a difficult truth for any curious scientist. Dalal says that her biggest challenge has been “coming to grips with the reality that it takes years for experimental work to catch up with intuitive leaps that turn out right sometimes, but just as often turn out wrong. It can be frustrating to have to wait months or years to get to the answer. But it does have the benefit of keeping one going!”
She hopes to contribute knowledge to the future of the field, but also to lead by example in “making science a more welcoming place for others from diverse backgrounds and skill sets, but united by a common passion to really chase the hard questions,” she shares. “I hope that well-trained scientists from my lab will go out there and break new ground and make even more critical discoveries.”
Being relatively new to the biophysics community, Dalal has found the Biophysical Society helpful in meeting people who work in diverse topics, learning about new tools, and reading literature beyond the scope of her own work that reminds her of the larger picture. She has been excited about “meeting scientists whose work I’ve admired and read for years, learning about the chromatin biophysics community, and having two graduate students who taught me a little bit about real physics!”
She advises trainees to follow their true interests. “Take the time to figure out what those are, because it will motivate you throughout your life. In the meantime, acquiring skills is its own reward — learn a skill and own it!” she says. “Finally, have a sense of integrity about who you are. I like a quote from the poem Invictus by William Ernest Henley, which gets this point across far more elegantly ‘I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.’”