Mt. Pleasant native named an investigator by Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Mt. Pleasant native David Savage was named an investigator by The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) on Sept. 23.

HHMI is the nation’s largest biomedical research foundation. Savage and 33 other American scientists were named investigators out of a pool of more than 800 eligible applicants.

For Savage, who is a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, this is a tremendous honor.

“It’s a huge honor,” he said. “I’m still stunned. There are only about 250 or so investigators in the entire United States. At Cal, there’s perhaps 20 at our University. In the whole state of Iowa, there are two investigators. It’s very prestigious, and I’m still shocked. It allows you to do things you could never do before. Essentially it’s like a small business. You’re continually hustling for grants, and you never have time to make long-term plans. This is a way to attack long-term problems.”

Each investigator receives roughly $9 million over seven years. The money is renewable, pending a review of the researcher’s work.

Savage would remain in his position at Berkeley, but instead, his salary would be paid by HHMI.

He says that this is an excellent opportunity to do research that you would not be able to achieve with other grants.

“The Howard Hughes is sort of a long term, and large dollar amount, where they basically fund you for seven years to do whatever you want,” Savage said. “It’s a very unique opportunity where you can go after high risk, high reward science that isn’t easy to do in the normal timeline of a grant, which might be one, two, or three years. You can do the high-risk stuff and have the financial resources to do it.”

Savage plans to dedicate his research to boosting crop yields.

He has spent much of the last decade studying what makes cyanobacteria efficient at condensing carbon dioxide molecules into separate compartments called carboxysomes used in photosynthesis.

His work is now focusing on this idea but with crop plants. He hopes to find a way to amplify their photosynthetic abilities, making them more productive. This could make farming more efficient. Farmers would be able to harvest more crops using a smaller amount of land. Savage called it regenerative agriculture.

Ultimately, his work is dedicated to improving photosynthetic carbon dioxide assimilation in plants.

He has one example related to Iowa.

“Topsoil in Iowa has been heavily heavily depleted in the last 100 years of intensive agriculture,” Savage said. “In most cases, most fields have probably lost 50% of their topsoil in farming started. There are way’s that we might be able to replenish the topsoil that would be of benefit to the farmer and, more broadly, to the environment. Really excited about that kind of work. The HHMI funding allows me to do that in a way I could never think about before.”

Savage attributes his interest in science to his family and time spent at Mt. Pleasant Community High School.

He grew up on his family’s 350-acre farm. He continues to help manage the farm to this day.

His father was a doctor for over 40 years. During his time in Mt. Pleasant, he started to really take an interest in chemistry and computer science.

Following high school, Savage attended a smaller school in southern Minnesota called Gustavus Adolphus College. He thought about going into medical school but decided that he enjoyed the computer side of things. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry and minored in Computer Science. For Savage, the two went hand in hand as computers allowed researchers to do more extensive research and make discovery’s in the scientific field that were never possible.

After completing his degree at Gustavus Adolphus, he attended the University of California San Francisco (UCSF). He earned his Ph.D. in biophysics in 2007. He also met his future wife, who is also a scientific researcher in tuberculosis.

With interest in biophysics and biochemistry, Savage and his wife moved to Boston, where he taught at Harvard Medical School from 2007 to 2011.

For Savage, the most rewarding part of his job is both teaching and research.

“I really enjoy teaching undergraduates,” he said. “The thing I like about Cal is even though most professors are very busy they take things very seriously. I enjoy that. I teach several hundred kids a year, and many of them go on to medical school or do a Ph.D. That’s really great to hear, especially for them to keep in touch with me. I think one thing that motivates me is I’m concerned with environmental and economic issues related to agriculture and climate change. For me, what keeps me going is that it’s a unique time in which those problems can be addressed by new technology. Creating that or at least laying the foundation for someone to create it farther down the line is a rewarding feeling.”

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