Drs. Jonas Koeppel (right) and Sudarshan Pinglay: 'Jonas is extremely nimble, especially for doing the kinds of work that we do at SeaHub.'
Jonas Koeppel faced a dilemma in high school. Unlike many students, he was fascinated by science and art.
“There’s a way of being a scientist,” he said. “It almost feels like doing art. It’s an expression of asking the right questions and finding creative ways to the answers.”
Thirteen years later, the 30-year old researcher at the Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology (SeaHub), is asking more questions than ever before and identifying even more answers. His supervisor and mentor, Sudarshan Pinglay, Ph.D. affirmed his colleague’s work – and work ethic.
“Jonas is extremely nimble, especially for doing the kinds of work that we do at SeaHub,” said Pinglay. “It’s a lot of technology development and he’s very good at adapting quickly and trying out small tweaks to a bajillion things. It’s a ‘hacky’ way of approaching science that I absolutely love.”
Back in high school, Koeppel thought he might love architecture, so he enrolled in a one-week internship at a design firm in his home town of Heidelberg, Germany. He soon realized an important career lesson: learning what is not interesting and quickly moving on.
“I thought if you were an architect, you did the whole thing, designing an entire building and executing what you created,” he said. “I learned there are so many levels and that you are just executing on someone else’s idea. And you’re in front of the computer the whole day.”
Still in high school, he later explored a student science program at the German Cancer Research Center’s Life Science Lab, and in a seminar on synthetic biology watched a video, “The Inner Life of the Cell.” For Koeppel, reflecting 10-years later, watching the animated film was revelatory.
“It had beautiful animation, beautiful music, really conveying a sense for the immense complexity within each of our cells” he said. “And it was reasonably scientific for the time. I thought this would be interesting to study.”
“Interesting” is an understatement.
Koeppel entered Heidelberg University in October of 2013 to study Biosciences, enabling him to get a broad education as an undergraduate and having the flexibility to pursue subjects more deeply. Initially, he was interested in neurobiology, but soon realized it has “too much mouse work.”
Again, it was another opportunity to learn what he did not want to pursue. Rather, he turned to molecular biology, immunology, and biochemistry, allowing him to study “weird microbes.”
Upon completion of his Bachelor of Science degree, he remained at Heidelberg University to begin a Master of Science in Molecular Bioscience.
“It’s a blessing and curse when your home is in a city with a top university,” Koeppel said. “This program – cancer biology – was quite unique. It was an international program and all lectures in English, plus it was co-hosted with the German Cancer Research Center.”
His fluency in English likely increased with additional research Koeppel performed during an internship at the Broad Institute in Boston, where he used CRISPR screens and biochemistry to study small molecules. Moreover, he said, it is where he “really learned how to be a scientist – that’s where the value of a really good mentor comes in.”
That mentor at the Broad was Mikołaj Słabicki, Ph.D., who also serves as Assistant Professor at the Kranz Family Center for Cancer Research at Massachusetts General Hospital.
“Jonas is an exceptional scientist whose curiosity fuels both his experiments and his engaging scientific discussions,” said Slabicki. “Whether he’s troubleshooting complex molecular biology challenges, or championing late-night idea exchanges, he brings energy and insight to every aspect of research. His unique blend of creativity, technical mastery, and unwavering enthusiasm keeps both projects and collaborations thriving.”
Slabicki’s appreciation for that “energy and insight” carried through to Koeppel’s work on a Ph.D. at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and Cambridge University in the UK. It was a cross-Atlantic collaboration with Wellcome Sanger’s Leopold Parts, Ph.D., a Group Leader, whose team studies genomes by engineering DNA variation in cells. The effort led to Koeppel’s dissertation, “Understanding Genomes Through Engineered Structural Variation,” the abstract of which notes: “While enormous progress has been made towards understanding the 1% of the human genome that is protein coding, we are still mostly in the dark about the function and relevance of the remaining 99%.”
Parts seems convinced Koeppel is destined for an exceptional career as a scientist.
“He is relentlessly positive, with a seemingly endless pool of wonder and warmth that endears both peers and collaborators, but also motivates all team-mates and mentees,” Parts said, “People love working with him for the personal and professional quality that he brings.”
An “endless pool of wonder” may have been one of the qualities that intrigued SeaHub’s Pinglay when he heard Koeppel speak last year at a conference. That was followed by a brief conversation, then numerous emails and weekly Zoom meetings to discuss different, but complementary, papers the two were developing writing on structural variants. The papers were published in late January in the journal Science.
Those connections also led to Koeppel visiting Seattle last year and meeting with Pinglay and Jay Shendure, M.D., Ph.D., SeaHub’s Lead Scientific Director. A few months later, in September of 2024, Koeppel joined the Shendure Lab and SeaHub as a postdoctoral fellow.
He describes SeaHub a “super cool way of doing science, that lives somewhere between biotech and a purely academic environment.”
Has Koeppel become so immersed in science that his interest for art is a distant memory?
“Not at all,” he said. “Photography has become the remnant of interest in doing art.” Among his short list of places to capture images is the Olympic Peninsula.
In the meantime, Pinglay believes Koeppel is making important contributions to SeaHub.
“He tries to get as quickly as possible to a proof of concept, and for the kinds of things that we’re doing that is so key,” Pinglay said. “Because you want to show something is even remotely possible here at SeaHub. And once you’ve shown that, everything else is optimization. We’re running as quickly as possible to the finish line.”
