Professor Alison Smith has been a Fellow of Corpus for almost 40 years. Now retired from her position as a professorial Fellow and Head of the Department of Plant Sciences, she has become a Life Fellow of the College. But her research into innovative biotechnology will continue, with some exciting prospects ahead.

Alison was the first in her family to attend university, at
a time when even the brightest young female students were not encouraged to pursue science. She attended a girls’ grammar school in Buckinghamshire where — despite the emphasis on becoming ‘young ladies’ — her interest in science was supported, and she went on to the University of Bristol to study for a BSc. She says, “The science teachers at my school were great. Because there were no boys, you couldn’t be put off doing science because of them. My interests have always been in chemistry and biology.”

These interests have been driven by her curiosity about the basic (if fiendishly complex) processes of life. “Life appears to contradict the second law of thermodynamics, which is that everything gets simpler as entropy increases. Living organisms do that by taking energy from the environment and using it to build up more complicated things. That energy allows cells to build up complex molecules, which is metabolism. And then it arranges those molecules into structures within the cell, and then cells into tissues, tissues into organs, organs into organisms. Without being able to do that first step, which is called energy transduction, then you would not be able to fight against entropy.”

In Bristol, she studied mammalian and bacterial biochemistry but decided to do research in plant biochemistry because of the great breadth of metabolism. She came to Darwin College Cambridge for an MPhil in 1978, followed by a PhD. Although the perception is that there were few female scientists in Cambridge at the time, Alison found many women in the Department of Biochemistry, and there were also plenty of postgraduate women at Darwin. And, she observes, “I didn’t know any different.”

Even with a PhD in Biochemistry, her path to becoming a working scientist was not completely straightforward. Alison spent a year in London working in scientific publishing (“the early 80s were great time to be living in London”) before applying for postdoc jobs in Cambridge in the emerging field of molecular biology. She took a position in the lab of Dr John Gray in the Department of Botany (now Plant Sciences), where she met Professor Christopher Howe, now a Corpus Fellow. “This was one of the first labs in the world studying plant molecular biology using recently developed microscopic and genetic techniques. Chris taught me a lot about those techniques, and it was such fun to be in a lab with lots of other people who were doing the same.” At this time Alison started to look at chloroplasts, organelles in plant cells that photosynthesize, turning light into sugars and other molecules.

A Career... and Corpus

Alison had done some supervisions during her PhD and she very much enjoyed the ‘instant buzz’ of teaching. After a year picking up lecturing duties for John Gray during his sabbatical, Alison applied for ‘New Blood’ Lectureships around the country. She accepted a position in Cambridge at the Department of Botany as a Demonstrator in 1984, essentially a temporary Lecturer position with a focus on teaching – and colleges came calling.

“I was overwhelmed with offers of a Fellowship because many colleges had recently gone co-educational and were looking for women, especially scientists.” She settled on Corpus and was quickly made Science Admissions Tutor, a position for which she says she was ‘completely unprepared’. She filled that role for four years, then became a Tutor and Director of Studies in Biology, which she carried out for many years, enjoying seeing students through their undergraduate journeys, and then for many into exciting careers.

With her own lab and teaching responsibilities, Alison progressed through the Cambridge academic ranks despite not ‘having a plan’, was promoted to Professor in 2007 and eventually became Head of the Department of Plant Sciences in 2017. “At that time the academic career path involved
a lot of teaching. If you had time, you could do some research.” Alison believes that the current system has reversed, rewarding research over teaching. “Nowadays they appoint people who are very good at research. By the time they have a full teaching load, it is hard for them to become immersed in teaching and develop new teaching methods, as I was able to.”

That’s one reason why Alison, along with Fellow Dr Jenny Zhang, has started a mentoring group at Corpus for female Fellows and postgraduate students to tackle the particular challenges of being a female academic. “I am keen on mentoring because I think it’s really difficult now for junior academics. Even before I was Head of Department, I really did make an effort to see whether I could give the junior staff any advice. My experience means I understand the system and I’ve seen it evolve. Young academics are expected to do research, to teach, to be administrators; they’re supposed to be strategic and do public outreach. It’s a lot to juggle.”

Although teaching was a priority for Alison through much of her career, her research into the energy transduction of photosynthesis led her to focus on the biochemistry of microalgae, which she calls “little round green things with no morphological features to distinguish them from one another”. Despite their lack of individual personality, microalgae are photosynthetic powerhouses and 20 years ago there was great interest in their potential as biofuels. That promise failed to materialise due to issues of scalability. She says, “There was no agronomy for algae. We don’t know how to grow it like wheat or oilseed rape.” But Alison realised there were other metabolic products in algae that could potentially be exploited.

For over a decade, her research group has worked at the Algal Innovation Centre in Cambridge on tackling this opportunity, particularly the production of high-value compounds such as vitamins, lipids and diterpenoids. One method uses genetic engineering, inserting specific plant genes into the algal genome, where they then instruct the algae to produce a molecule of interest; essentially the algae become tiny biological factories. Other research focuses on cofactor metabolism, where algae are naturally able to interact with bacteria to accrue molecules such as vitamins. In research recently highlighted in the media, Alison’s group showed that algae can accumulate vitamin B12 from bacteria in their surroundings. They identified the form of the vitamin that
can be absorbed by humans, and hope that this could be manufactured as supplements to address vitamin B12 deficiency in those who don’t get sufficient amounts of the vitamin, such as vegans and others following plant-based diets.

Although technically in retirement from the University, Alison continues to bridge research and commercialisation in this field. How that develops remains to be seen. She says, “There are lots of people interested in our skills, in our facilities and our services. To expand the sector we need new products, whether high-value compounds such as therapeutics, pigments and antioxidants, or sources of protein. And they need to be produced in a sustainable way; that’s the promise and the power of using photosynthetic organisms like algae. There are lots of elements we have to join up. But I think we have the know-how and the resources to make a real difference in this sector.”

The women (and men) of Corpus will continue to benefit from Alison’s experience. Although she didn’t set out with a plan to be the ground-breaking female academic she has become, Alison has a wealth of insight as a teacher, a scientist, and a woman — and the generosity to share it.