© PAUL SIMCOCKIt wasn’t until the end of her biophysics PhD that Sophie Dumont made up her mind to be a scientist. Until then, the physicist-turned-biologist was still mulling over a few careers—high school teacher and astronaut, to name a couple. But Dumont’s talent for research was evident. “I told her she was crazy not to consider academia,” says Carlos Bustamante, her doctoral advisor at the University of California, Berkeley. Ultimately, Dumont found herself in love with the complexity of cells and “hooked on the problem of cell division,” which her lab now studies at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).
Dumont wasn’t introduced to the study of cells until late in her education. As an undergraduate at Princeton University she majored in physics, and she later began a PhD in theoretical physics at the University of Oxford. “After one year I was just too excited about biology,” Dumont says, so she moved stateside and transferred to Bustamante’s lab to work on the mechanics of enzymes.
“Carlos’s lab was a very welcoming place for a physicist,” Dumont says. There, chemists, physicists, and biologists converged to ask “simple” questions. Among other projects, including one that called upon her physics background to test a statistical mechanics theorem on a biomolecule,1 Dumont designed assays that used optical tweezers to track, at single-molecule resolution, the movement of a viral helicase ...
