Noah Eckman

Both my parents are engineers, so that career was always in the mix, but my grandmother was a high school biology teacher, and I remember talking with her about the protein synthesis cycle when I was in fourth grade. My grandfather was a lab scientist for the USDA working in animal husbandry, and we kids loved spending time in his basement, where he had jars of preserved spiders, snakes, and other interesting things he’d bring home from work.

I was drawn to chemistry in high school and college, and later to chemical engineering, because I liked that it teaches you the fundamentals and gives you tools to understand problems in many areas. I knew early on that I really enjoyed working on hard problems and thought I wanted to do a PhD, but it wasn’t until I got to Stanford that I truly realized how committed I was.

Today I work in the Appel Lab, where we make biomaterials, some of which are used to extend the release of drugs in the body. These hydrogels, which are mostly water with a small amount of polymer, are solid, but liquify when they are injected through a needle, and once in the body, they reform as a solid. We do extensive work fine-tuning these materials to dissolve and release their drug cargoes at various rates. Developing extended-release therapies is incredibly important, because many drugs – like insulin – require the patient to dose frequently, and people are less likely to take their medicine correctly when that’s the case.

My own work focuses on understanding the fundamental properties of these gels and whether we might be able to use them to transport not just drugs but CAR-T cells to treat cancer. CAR-T cell therapy is a type of immunotherapy that uses a patient’s own immune cells to fight cancer by genetically engineering T cells – a type of white blood cell – to recognize and attack specific cancer cells. It’s a huge area of research and has been very successful at treating some blood cancers, but hasn’t worked well with solid tumors because injected CAR-T cells circulate throughout the body and have trouble locating tumors. We’re encapsulating these cells in our gel and injecting it next to tumors, where the cells can be released over time and easily locate the cancer. This approach also has other advantages: Because they’re alive, the CAR-T cells can replicate in the gel, which is what we want. Also, by localizing their release to a specific site, we can reduce the body’s systemic immune response to the therapy, which makes the treatment easier for the patient.

The best part of my PhD is being part of the amazing range of expertise we have in this lab – chemists, bioengineers, biochemists, material scientists, chemical engineers, and polymer scientists. This is science today, you can’t solve any problem that really matters without bringing together multiple disciplines. My PI, Eric Appel, is very collaborative and brings in people with a range of skills who are excited to work on lots of different problems. I’ve been able to learn an amazing amount – more than I ever thought possible – and I’m excited to go into work every day because someone might be working on something I don’t understand, and I’ll be able to learn from it.

Away from the lab, I love playing cello with the Stanford Philharmonia. The cello is a beautiful instrument and playing it is such a physical experience. You feel the music in your whole body, and in terms of its range, it’s the closest instrument to the human voice. Playing music forces my brain to work in a completely different direction, which is mandatory for me. It’s about thinking and doing something very focused, but also about making something with other people. And that’s the most beautiful thing there is.