{"id":3978,"date":"2021-04-12T16:33:56","date_gmt":"2021-04-12T23:33:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/keck.usc.edu\/news\/usc-celebrates-robert-e-maxsons-lifetime-of-achievement-and-adventure\/"},"modified":"2024-05-30T14:57:15","modified_gmt":"2024-05-30T21:57:15","slug":"usc-celebrates-robert-e-maxsons-lifetime-of-achievement-and-adventure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/keck.usc.edu\/news\/usc-celebrates-robert-e-maxsons-lifetime-of-achievement-and-adventure\/","title":{"rendered":"USC celebrates Robert E. Maxson\u2019s lifetime of achievement and adventure"},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
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USC celebrates Robert E. Maxson\u2019s lifetime of achievement and adventure<\/h1>\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n \n
\n Cristy Lytal<\/span>\n \n April 12, 2021<\/span>\n <\/div>\n \n \n
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Robert E. Maxson (Photo by Peggy Yost)<\/figcaption>\n <\/figure>\n \n \n \n\n<\/div>\n \n\n <\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n\n \n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
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(Originally posted at USC Stem Cell<\/a>)<\/p>\n

USC Emeritus Professor\u00a0Robert E. Maxson<\/a>\u00a0has an understated explanation for why he\u2019s flown so many planes, sailed so many boats, skied so many mountains, played so many guitars, taken so many trips to Antarctica, and studied so many different aspects of developmental biology.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m drawn to things that take all my attention, and things that are demanding in a fun way,\u201d said Maxson, Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine, and Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at USC, and recipient of the 2021 USC Faculty Lifetime Achievement Award.<\/p>\n

Maxson isn\u2019t the first person in his family to excel at fun, demanding pursuits: he\u2019s the son of two professional ice skaters who traveled around the United States and Canada performing in the Ice Capades.<\/p>\n

Maxson was often on the road with his parents, and also spent time at his grandmother\u2019s house in Colorado Springs, or at his grandfather\u2019s fishing cabin near Leadville. Colorado eventually became a more permanent home when he was seven years old, and his parents retired from the Ice Capades, only to later join the production team of the Ice Follies.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had a normal suburban life,\u201d said Maxson. \u201cWe lived in a place that was literally a half a block from a pasture that turned into the front range of the Rockies, and I would spend a lot of time hiking, walking around and then up in the mountains. My mother would say, \u2018Oh, just go up there, and don\u2019t step on any rattlesnakes.\u2019 She was from Texas, and had this Texas pioneer legacy approach to things, and was very self-reliant, and she instilled that in me.\u201d<\/p>\n

A natural athlete, he played baseball, speed skated and skied. Despite these healthy doses of fresh air, Maxson was also what he considers a \u201cweird, nerdy kid.\u201d As a sixth grader, he convinced his parents to sign him up with a retired Latin and Greek teacher so he could learn to read classical literature in its untranslated glory. At the same time, he had an engineer\u2019s enthusiasm for rockets.<\/p>\n

During the summers, Maxson would relocate to the Bay Area with his parents while the Ice Follies rehearsed at the legendary Winterland Ballroom in downtown San Francisco. It was during one of these summers that Maxson began sailing a small boat up and down the San Rafael Canal.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a quote to the effect that there\u2019s nothing so wonderful as messing about in boats,\u201d said Maxson. \u201cAnd even when you don\u2019t sail, there\u2019s always something to be fixed and something to make better\u2014some re-rigging or whatever. So I just love messing about in boats.\u201d<\/p>\n

His summers in the Bay Area also introduced him to the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his bachelor\u2019s degree in 1973. Although he began college as a chemistry major, he ended up as a zoology major because, as he explained, it gave him \u201cthe greatest freedom to take different kinds of biology\u2014everything from natural history to hardcore biochemistry.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a senior, he joined the research laboratory of Shyamala Harris, who was studying steroid hormones in breast cancer. Harris\u2019 two children\u2014Maya and future U.S. Vice President Kamala\u2014would often tag along and work on their coloring books in the lab.<\/p>\n

A self-proclaimed \u201cdilettante,\u201d Maxson also delved into non-scientific subjects, including enough English and writing courses to nearly declare a minor.<\/p>\n

\u201cI met my future wife in English 1A,\u201d he said. \u201cWe had a weird romance. We were together for three years in college, and then we broke up. And then about 15 years ago, we got back together. We married other people and had kids, and then both of us were divorced, and we reconnected. It\u2019s been great.\u201d<\/p>\n

Maxson had so much fun at Berkeley that he stayed there to pursue his PhD in cell and developmental biology in the laboratory of Fred Wilt, who studied early development in sea urchins. While he was still in graduate school, he and a postdoc in a neighboring lab bought a small boat that they sailed in San Francisco Bay and offshore, eventually making a trip to Mexico and back.<\/p>\n

He did his postdoctoral training in the genetics laboratory of Larry Kedes at the Stanford University School of Medicine. True to form, Maxson found time to join the Stanford Flying Club, obtain his pilot\u2019s license, and enroll in an aerobatics course taught by a former member of the Swedish Air Force. Eventually, he had an opportunity to purchase his own small airplane.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a 66 Beechcraft,\u201d said Maxson, who regularly used his plane to commute to USC from Napa, where he lives with his wife Peggy. \u201cIt\u2019s a very spiffy airplane.\u201d<\/p>\n

Follow the Sea Urchins<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 1983, Maxson began his 37 years as a faculty member at the\u00a0Keck School of Medicine of USC<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was a sense that it was nascent, that there was a lot about to happen,\u201d he said. \u201cThe Cancer Center<\/a>\u00a0was just developing when I interviewed for the job. They gave me a hard hat, and we walked through the steel girders. It was growing, and a cohort of people all came in at the same time. We knew each other\u2019s kids, and we watched each other\u2019s kids grow up, and we grew up scientifically together.\u201d<\/p>\n

As one of USC\u2019s first developmental biologists, Maxson spent the first decade of his career studying sea urchins. Specifically, he looked at genes encoding proteins called histones, which serve as \u201cspools\u201d for storing long strands of DNA. These strands remain in storage, tightly wrapped around the histones, until they\u2019re ready to unwind and actively send instructions to the body\u2019s protein-making machinery. Sea urchins have two major sets of histone gene, one active early in development and the other late. The focus of Maxson\u2019s lab was how the transition from an early-expressed set to the late-expressed set was regulated.<\/p>\n

In the early 1990s, Maxson\u2019s curious and collaborative spirit led him into an entirely new realm of research. He lent his genetics expertise to a large NIH-funded collaboration focused on skull development and birth defects, and quickly became an internationally recognized leader in the craniofacial field.<\/p>\n

Maxson easily saw similarities between developmental processes in the sea urchin and in the mammalian skull. In both cases, the \u201cepithelial\u201d cells that line the body\u2019s surfaces communicate with more stem cell-like cells, known as \u201cmesenchyme,\u201d to drive the process of development.<\/p>\n

\u201cI knew nothing about craniofacial development\u00a0per se<\/em>, but I knew about epithelial mesenchymal interactions and basic developmental biology,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd in some sense, there\u2019s really no difference between craniofacial and any other tissue in which tissue interactions are driving the development\u2014so the ear, the eye, the kidney. There are many similarities. And I\u2019d been taught that early on. So I thought, \u2018Well, okay, I can do this.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

In collaboration with human geneticist\u00a0Andrew Wilkie<\/a>\u00a0at the University of Oxford, Maxson used lab mice with mutations in two genes\u2014MSX2<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0TCF12\u2014<\/em>to model a serious birth defect known as craniosynostosis, which affects 1 in 2,500 infants in the U.S. In craniosynostosis, the places where the skull plates meet, known as sutures, prematurely fuse, impeding the growth of the brain and necessitating risky corrective surgeries.<\/p>\n

\u201cRob\u2019s discovery of a causative missense mutation in the MSX2 homeobox protein certainly ignited the field, demonstrating the type of molecule and signaling pathway that, when mutated, could give\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0rise to craniosynostosis,\u201d said Wilkie. \u201cThis was previously totally unknown.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yang Chai<\/a>, director of\u00a0USC\u2019s Center for Craniofacial Molecular Biology<\/a>, recently succeeded in using a stem cell-infused gel to encourage the regeneration of parts of the skull and mitigate neurocognitive damage in young mice with craniosynostosis. He emphasizes the importance of Maxson\u2019s work in modeling this disease in mice.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe creation of an animal model for a human disease is a powerful tool \u00a0for our research into disease etiology, treatment, and ultimately prevention,\u201d said Chai. \u201cBoth mouse models are still extensively used today, including in my own laboratory.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Ends of the Earth<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 2001, Maxson trimmed his sails once again and headed to Antarctica to study how sea urchins adapt to harsh conditions. In collaboration with faculty members\u00a0Donal Manahan<\/a>\u00a0at USC and\u00a0Adam Marsh<\/a>\u00a0at the University of Delaware, he discovered that Antarctic sea urchin larvae use very little energy to synthesize proteins, allowing them to live for as long as five years without food.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt turned out that it\u2019s a lot less energy than any other cell that\u2019s been described by a substantial amount, and that was a major new finding,\u201d said Maxson. \u201cSo we were lucky enough to publish that in\u00a0Science<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

While on the Earth\u2019s southernmost continent, he also began teaching in an international graduate training course, \u201cIntegrative Biology and Adaptation of Antarctic Marine Organisms,\u201d organized by Manahan. This course was dedicated to studying life in extreme environments and was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).<\/p>\n

\u201cRob was a master teacher in these NSF \u00a0training programs, bringing an intellectual rigor in molecular and cell biological approaches to understanding adaptations to life in extreme-cold environments,\u201d said Manahan, the professor of biological sciences at the\u00a0USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences<\/a>\u00a0who ran the program. \u201cSome of the early indications of the impact of global climate change on life on Earth were first noted in polar regions, and Rob helped train the next generation of researchers to address the mechanistic bases of defining biological limits to respond to environmental change.\u201d<\/p>\n

Maxson calls his seven trips to Antarctica \u201can amazing experience like nothing I\u2019ve ever done.\u201d He stayed in the McMurdo Research Station, first when it was still under the control of the U.S. Navy, and later when it was run by the NSF.<\/p>\n

\u201cNSF hires world-class mountaineers to come down and run a training program,\u201d said Maxson. \u201cSo before you can do anything in the field, you have to go out and usually end up having to spend the night on the ice to simulate a survival situation. They teach you crevasse rescue and how to travel across the ice and how to construct a snow shelter and all kinds of stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n

On a volcanic island in a frozen sea next to an ice shelf, Maxson reveled in Antarctica\u2019s unique biology and spent countless hours on the sea ice while his graduate students scuba dived for sea urchins and other biological samples.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe scuba diving is extreme and leaves no margin for error,\u201d said Maxson. \u201cThe low temperatures require dry suits and thick long underwear, and there are hazards such as Weddell Seals that will decide that they like your ice hole. And they\u2019ll actually come up, and they\u2019ll defend the hole. So if you\u2019re a diver, and one of these seals happens to do that, you\u2019re out of luck. You\u2019re not going to be able to get out of that hole. It\u2019s not common, but it\u2019s enough of a worry that they always drill two holes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Happy to Help<\/strong><\/p>\n

Back on USC\u2019s Health Sciences Campus, Maxson played a major role in building the university\u2019s thriving stem cell research community, and establishing its strength in craniofacial biology.<\/p>\n

Early on, Maxson recognized the broader potential of genetic engineering to create models of human disease in mice. He also knew that very few laboratories had the expertise to create these transgenic mice without support from a shared research facility.<\/p>\n

In 1993, he became the director of a\u00a0Transgenic Mouse Core<\/a>\u00a0dedicated to helping laboratories across the university access these cutting-edge technologies.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s much easier to just get on with your own work and not do things, but the community comes together around people like Rob offering to actually go beyond what they need to do to help others and create things like the effective transformational core facility that he generated,\u201d said\u00a0Andy McMahon<\/a>, director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC. \u201cAnd institutions rely upon people who will go the extra yard, and they don\u2019t do it for anything other than thinking that their job, as a good citizen and scientist, is to help others.\u201d<\/p>\n

McMahon, who also chairs USC\u2019s Department of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, still recalls a debt of gratitude that he incurred in 1983, shortly after Maxson joined the faculty of USC.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was a postdoctoral fellow in Eric Davidson\u2019s lab at Caltech,\u201d said McMahon. \u201cAnd what I was trying to do there was to understand gene regulation in sea urchins, and the approach I was taking was to try and make transgenic sea urchins. He showed me [a technique for injecting DNA] that changed my whole postdoc. And what I remember very vividly about that is that he instantly responded, he was extremely helpful, his advice was extremely well thought out. And literally the very first time I did the experiments the way he suggested, then it was working.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Professor\u00a0Qi-Long Ying<\/a>\u00a0joined USC in 2006, he worked with Maxson and the Transgenic Core to pioneer some of the world\u2019s first \u201cknockout\u201d rats, modified to lack one or more genes.<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter two years of hard work, we succeeded in establishing, for the first time, authentic rat embryonic stem cells,\u201d said Ying, a professor of stem cell biology and regenerative medicine at USC. \u201cFollowing the establishment of rat embryonic stem cells, my lab worked with Rob and his team at the USC Transgenic Core to explore the power of genetic modification in rats and generated the first gene knockout rats using embryonic stem cell-based gene-targeting technology. This work, published in\u00a0Nature\u00a0<\/em>in 2010, marked the first success after 20 years of efforts around the world to achieve this goal and was selected by\u00a0Science\u00a0<\/em>magazine as one of the top 10 scientific breakthroughs of 2010. Without Rob\u2019s guidance and support, these projects would not have gone so smoothly and been successful.\u201d<\/p>\n

Maxson also served as an exceptionally helpful colleague to\u00a0Gage Crump<\/a>, a professor of stem cell biology and regenerative medicine at USC.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I got to USC, he was definitely one of my primary mentors who assisted me a lot and getting going and getting my first grants,\u201d said Crump. \u201cAnd then going from there, we became more collaborators when we got a joint graduate student, Camilla Teng, and so we really started doing comparative zebrafish\/mouse studies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, Maxson\u2019s influence on his USC colleagues extends far beyond science. Professor\u00a0Malcolm Snead\u00a0credits Maxson with not only being a generous academic peer, but also his inspiration for becoming a pilot.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe actually helped me get started in flying with the joke that it would only take me about 30 hours \u00a0to learn how to fly and then about 10 percent of my income to keep flying,\u201d said Snead, chair of the Division of Biomedical Sciences at the\u00a0Ostrow School of Dentistry of USC<\/a>. \u201cYou\u2019d have to say that I love Rob, and for reasons that are just based in his humanity first, and his stellar ability to be a scientist. The reason I think Rob won this award is because of that outstanding capacity to contribute to other people\u2019s projects.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his own laboratory, Maxson enjoyed a reputation as an exceptional advisor for his graduate students and postdoctoral trainees, and received a distinguished Mentoring Award from USC in 2016.<\/p>\n

One of his early PhD students,\u00a0Amy Merrill-Brugger, is now a tenured associate professor at the Ostrow School.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe easiest thing for a mentor to do is jump in and just fix it for you,\u201d said Merrill-Brugger. \u201cBut instead, he allowed us to learn, and in that, he prepared me personally for the winding path of scientific research, which can be full of setbacks and failures, but also unexpected results that are exciting and lead to important discoveries. And so his greatest gift to me, as a mentor to a mentee, was preparing me for that journey. And I do look to him not only for scientific advice, but also as a model of how I should mentor my trainees.\u201d<\/p>\n

More recently, Maxson served as a co-mentor for\u00a0D\u2019Juan Farmer<\/a>, a postdoctoral fellow in the Crump Lab who is on the cusp of launching his faculty career with a focus on craniosynostosis.<\/p>\n

\u201cRob is very supportive, and he\u2019s particularly a really great historian of developmental biology,\u201d said Farmer. \u201cI lean on that a lot, because there\u2019s so much of old literature that is super interesting that hasn\u2019t been followed up on, and he usually has a good handle on those things.\u201d<\/p>\n

Maxson launched many other future scientists by taking the lead in creating a training program in stem cell biology for graduate students and postdoctoral and clinical fellows at the Keck School, supported by more than $8 million from the\u00a0California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM)<\/a>. Thanks to this training program that began in 2006, USC offered its first courses in stem cell and developmental biology, as well as an annual retreat and weekly seminars for PhD students and postdoctoral trainees. Eventually, these educational offerings coalesced into\u00a0USC\u2019s PhD Program in Development, Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Maxson also served the broader academic community as the Co-chair in 2010 and the Chair in 2012 of the Gordon Conference in Craniofacial Morphogenesis, the leading meeting in the field. During the closing celebration, he always entertained his fellow scientists as the guitarist for the conference band, the Squawking Heads\u2014since he\u2019s also an amateur musician with a passion for flatpicking, bluegrass, and 60s rock.<\/p>\n

Although Maxson\u2019s colleagues are quick to describe him as \u201chumble,\u201d \u201cnon-flashy\u201d and \u201clow-key,\u201d his solid contributions as a scientist, educator, and \u00a0good academic citizen have often placed him in the spotlight. He received a USC University Scholar Award in 1986 and was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2013, in addition to his most recent accolade of the USC Faculty Lifetime Achievement Award, which he will receive at USC\u2019s 40th<\/sup>\u00a0Annual Academic Honors Convocation via Zoom on April 12.<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel honored on the one hand, but why me?\u201d said Maxson. \u201cWhy not this person or that person? I mean, we should all get lifetime achievement awards, because if you talk to pretty much anybody about what they did in their career, you\u2019d probably get a similar story. Maybe mine is a little more extreme, just in the number of different things I\u2019ve been able to do.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n\n <\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":84,"featured_media":3979,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":true,"advgb_blocks_editor_width":"","advgb_blocks_columns_visual_guide":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[61,436],"class_list":["post-3978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-press-release","tag-education","tag-usc-stem-cell"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nUSC celebrates Robert E. 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