One of the biggest skills I've been developing is developing others

Suliana Manley is a renowned biophysicist, capturing details inside of living cells to an unprecedented level with super-resolution and smart microscopy and studying the way they work. She also has the extraordinary ability – and patience – to explain complex concepts and make them accessible to almost anybody, showcasing the depth of her own understanding of the matter, her curiosity and her strong desire to share knowledge. Now a Professor at the EPFL’s Laboratory of Experimental Biophysics, she is highly implicated in fostering the careers of scientists and in the academic community as president of the ETH Women Professor’s Forum.

Manley admits that she didn’t have her mind set on biophysics until after graduate school, which she says took longer than usual. But these so-called delays showcase one of Manley’s strengths: the ability to embrace new frontiers in tune with her own interests, like changing her course of study or geographic locations throughout her career. Once she had found her calling, she quickly landed a professorship at EPFL, right after her second postdoc. “I have always been drawn to a flexible and creative approach to science and the people who share those values,” says Manley. “The ideas are what really drives my science.”

Growing up on a farm to academia

Born in Hawaii, Manley discovered in High School that she excelled in math and physics. “My math teacher started to give me and two other girls extra math problems to solve because he thought we were good, it was really validating, plus it was fun!” remembers Manley. The same teacher also taught physics, so she decided to take this class too. “It turned out to be just totally mind-blowing to me that you could capture the phenomena in the natural world using a very compact set of equations.”

After High School, she moved away from home to Houston, Texas, to attend Rice University for their math and physics program, curious about research. “My parents were farmers, they grew flowers. That was my childhood and my reference point. Academia was totally outside of that sphere and trying to understand what an academic career looked like was very difficult for me,” recalls Manley.

From Harvard to MIT to NIH to EPFL

As for graduate school, “it didn’t feel like destiny,” Manley says. “Graduate school felt like a failure at the time, I ended up going to three different universities throughout my graduate studies.” She ended up at Harvard University and went on to pursue a first postdoc at MIT, then moved to NIH for her second postdoc. “Jennifer Lippincott-Schwarz, my supervisor, sent me a preprint of a paper about super resolution microscopy that got me very excited,” recalls Manley. “The paper led to the 2014 Nobel Prize!” There, Manley developed a new method to enhance super resolution microscopy with molecular dynamics that propelled her scientific career.

“Researchers were using this idea that you could make fluorescent molecules blink, and then you could figure out where the molecules were with very high precision and make pictures from that,” explains Manley. “What I realized is that you could also do tracking with that. You could do this inside of living cells. You could track single molecules and you could create maps of their molecular dynamics. This is important for biology because now you could make high density molecular maps of how things were diffusing or being actively transported, and this was orders of magnitude more molecules in a single cell than you could follow before.”

Shaping the community by developing others

After this breakthrough, Manley came to EPFL, where she continues to push the boundaries of biophysics with super-resolution and smart microscopy, and foster the scientific community. “To me, what it is to be a professor is to think about how to cultivate the people around you,” says Manley. “One of the biggest skill sets that I've been developing is developing others.”

“During the COVID pandemic, I felt an urgent need to reprioritize and put my energy into building connections and communities,” says Manley. She started then to teach a course called the “Scientific Journey” for PhD students at EPFL, intended to “acknowledge the fact that most people don't know what it is really to do a PhD,” providing guidance to students that Manley probably would have appreciated during her own studies. She also began organizing online coffee chats for the Women Professors Forum: “We catalyzed actions like the Commission on the Status of Women Faculty at EPFL and wrote position statements on EPFL and ETHZ policies impacting women. I was excited to take the lead in 2024, and I’ve had the chance to organize workshops and retreats for WPF members to develop actions toward our vision of a supportive and equal-opportunity work environment.”

“I want to debunk the idea that you have to feel destined to have a career in research. It’s a mistake to think that being a scientist has to be your whole identity,” says Manley. “I feel like this perception of research is maybe one of the barriers to academia. It’s important to have creativity and a unique perspective that you bring to the research and that is why diversity is great for scientific discovery.”