KU Alumni Honors Beloved Biology Faculty Member
The greatest honor a teacher can receive is the knowledge they have impacted a student's life. Mark Richter, Professor of Molecular Biosciences at the University of Kansas, was known for his deep sense of fairness and compassion when acting as mentor to the 100 plus undergraduates, graduate students and postdoctoral researchers who worked in his lab. His care for his students in the lab developed into deep and long-lasting relationships after graduation and show how faculty can enrich the lives of their students beyond the classroom. Though Mark passed December 26th of 2020, following an extended battle with COVID-19, the legacy of his mentorship continues.
[The following letter was presented to recipient, Kimber Richter, wife of Mark Richter.]
Hi there-
You might or might not remember me, but I was deeply saddened to hear about Mark’s passing and am (finally) writing to express my condolences. I was a student at KU from 1999-2005, where I studied Computer Science and Biochemistry and worked with Mark and Krzysztof Kuczera after being nudged that way by Mary Klayder. After I graduated, I went to Harvard Medical School for a PhD (and later postdoc) in Neurobiology. I now lead the Data Science and AI team at Moderna, which I’ve been at for 6 years (which, as you can imagine, has been quite a ride). I live in Massachusetts with my wife and our two daughters.
Mark was an incredibly generous and encouraging mentor, and without him, I would have never followed the path I have. He fanned the spark of my love for biology into a full-on flame that has never died, and whatever impact I’ve had in Moderna’s success can be directly tied back to him. Many at Moderna have had personal connections to folks that have been lost due to the pandemic, and I can tell you that these have and continue to motivate us. I think we often don’t know what impact we have on others that pass through our lives, and I wish that I would have been able to tell him more about what I’ve done since I left Kansas.
As part of my work here I recently published a paper that combines computational modeling and biochemistry and my co-authors were kind enough to allow me to dedicate it to the memory of Mark. I thought you might like to know.
All my best,
Andrew Giessel, Ph.D.
You may read Dr. Giessel’s paper, “Therapeutic enzyme engineering using a generative neural network” here https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-05195-x