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For her efforts leading the COVID-19 testing lab on campus, Caryn Heldt has been selected
to receive Michigan Technological University’s 2022 Faculty Distinguished Service
Award.
“Solutions always start small.”
That’s the advice Caryn Heldt offers anyone feeling daunted by all the big problems
facing the world right now, and she is well-qualified to offer it. Heldt — a professor
and the James and Lorna Mack Endowed Chair of Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering
in Michigan Tech’s Department of Chemical Engineering, and also the director of Tech’s
Health Research Institute — helped solve one of the largest problems the University
has ever faced.
In early 2020, Heldt led the collaborative effort to stand up a COVID-19 diagnostic testing lab at Michigan Tech — the first and only
such lab in the Upper Peninsula at the time, and one of the few campus-based testing labs in the nation without prior certification to handle human samples. For Heldt’s tremendous
accomplishments during this time, she has been awarded MTU’s 2022 Faculty Distinguished
Service Award.
Distinguished Faculty Service Award
The Michigan Tech Faculty Distinguished Service Award recognizes faculty whose service to the University community has significantly improved
the quality of some aspect of campus or community life. The award is intended to recognize
exceptional rather than integrated service. The work could have resulted, in part,
from compensated efforts, but it must have been of a level that distinguishes itself
above and beyond the normal execution of those tasks. Nominations are solicited from
University members and reviewed by the award committee. Winners receive $2,500 and
a plaque at an awards dinner sponsored by the Office of the President in the fall.
In his letter of nomination, Vice President for Research Dave Reed notes the “seemingly
millions of details” Heldt navigated in setting up the lab, most of which occurred
during the chaotic early days of the pandemic. “We had daily and often twice daily
calls with the team because things were advancing so fast,” says Reed. “Caryn had
to hire and train staff, coordinate with medical care providers, manage the internal
dynamics of using rooms assigned to different academic units, and acquire and move
equipment from several other labs on campus.”
Heldt’s natural leadership abilities were immediately apparent to the interdisciplinary
laboratory group. “Her organizational ability was outstanding and her people skills
were truly amazing to watch,” Reed says. “From the first moment, others looked to
her for that leadership.”
Heldt and her team’s work soon proved invaluable to the community. The lab analyzed
samples from both surveillance testing and from symptomatic individuals, making it
possible for the University to bring students back on campus for in-person instruction
in fall 2020. By the time the lab stopped accepting patient samples in December 2021,
it had provided almost 40,000 diagnostic tests for the people of the western U.P.
“While all this was going on, Caryn went through what most every other faculty member
went through, from having children in school to switching to online instruction and
meetings, maintaining research projects, advising graduate students and keeping up
her departmental service,” says Reed. “She graduated one M.S. and three Ph.D. students
while working with the testing lab, published eight papers that year — twice as many
as normal — and was awarded two grants of over a million dollars each.”
Where others might have been overwhelmed by so many responsibilities or by decision
fatigue, Heldt thrived. “Part of being a good problem solver is learning how to break
the problem down into small pieces,” she says. “That’s the best way to solve these
big problems. Sometimes the solution isn’t to impact the world. But if you can make
your community better, then that’s how you start.”
“All faculty went above and beyond during COVID. In fact, everyone on campus did things
they had never done before as we adapted to the rapidly changing situation. Many people
worked as a team to stand up and operate the University’s COVID-19 medical diagnostic
laboratory, but Caryn was far above and beyond anyone else in her leadership during
the testing lab establishment and operation. She went so far above and beyond her
normal responsibilities that it is difficult to comprehend how she did it. But she
did, and she is truly deserving of the Faculty Distinguished Service Award.”
Service as Second Nature
None of this registers as exceptional to Heldt, whose aptitude may be rivaled only
by her humility. “At the time, it didn’t feel like service,” she says. “It needed
to be done, and I happened to be there and had the knowledge to help. Nobody said,
‘Caryn, you’re doing this.’ I just knew the answer to a lot of their safety questions.
That’s the expertise I had. I work safely with infectious virus particles on a daily
basis in the lab.”
Her laboratory expertise and the service-oriented approach she takes in her work began
long before the COVID-19 pandemic. She credits her parents for serving as early role
models and supporters of her dreams. “My dad had grown up helping on the family farm,
so service was second nature for him,” says Heldt, a native of Pinconning, Michigan.
“And my mom was always volunteering at church, and always volunteering us — me and
my sister. There’s no telling how many cinnamon rolls I made and dinners I helped
serve when I was young.”
Heldt’s sister and mother would both eventually become nurses, and although she had
a similar desire to work in the medical sciences, she knew by age 11 she wanted to
be an engineer. “I remember watching NASA Mission Control,” she recalls. “That’s what
inspired me to become an engineer. Those people were so awesome. I never even realized
when I was a kid that they were all men. I think back now and am like, ‘I wasn’t supposed
to do that.’ But that’s what I wanted to do, and my parents said, ‘Sure! You want
to do that, you should do it.’”
Chemical Engineering, and an Affiliate Professor in Biological Sciences at Michigan
Technological University. Her lab is focused on the purification, removal, inactivation
and stabilization of viruses and gene therapy vectors. By understanding the underlying
scientific principles of how compounds and surfaces interact with viruses, processes
can be improved to be more energy efficient, cost less, and be more productive.
So she did.
Heldt first came to Michigan Tech in the late 1990s as an undergrad. She got involved
in a number of extracurricular organizations, including the chemical engineering honor
society Omega Chi Epsilon, for which she served as founding member, vice president
and president. She was also a Blue Key honor society member and treasurer of Alpha
Kappa Psi. A few years after earning her B.S. in chemistry and chemical engineering
in 2001, Heldt applied to engineering graduate schools with strong medical science,
biology and biochemistry programs. She ended up at North Carolina State, where she
earned her Ph.D. in 2008. That’s where Heldt first learned about the surface properties
of viruses, how to work with viruses safely and how to remove them from solutions.
During her postdoctoral research, she shifted her focus from viruses to amyloid fibers,
the protein aggregates that are proposed to cause Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and other neurological disorders. When
she returned to Michigan Tech as an assistant professor in 2010, she combined her
interest in protein biophysics with her engineering expertise in the chemical properties
of viruses. “That’s when I really started focusing on the vaccine industry,” she says.
“In my research I ask questions like, how can we make vaccines better, faster, cheaper,
and get them to more people? And more recently, how can we reduce the cold chain?”
In February 2020, Heldt was awarded a grant from the National Institutes of Health
to answer precisely that question. Over the next two years, as the pandemic upended
daily life around the world, Heldt’s knowledge of viruses and her expertise in vaccine manufacturing made her an important source of information for local media and the MTU campus community.
Colleagues came looking for her expertise and guidance when the need for COVID testing
on campus arose. “It just kind of organically happened,” she says. “No one ever told
me to lead the COVID lab. I don’t remember ever feeling like, ‘I’m leading this.’”
But lead she did — first as the lab’s technical lead in 2020 and as its primary technical
advisor in 2021.
When asked to describe her style of leadership, Heldt’s answer is characteristically
humble. “I just try to lead by understanding other people,” she says. “And by understanding
people and their motivations, it helps to grow community.”
“I just really believe in the philosophy that my life isn’t about me. My life is about
us, and the planet and the future generations. If I can help the next generation to
have a better life, that’s what I want to do.”
Not that any of the COVID lab’s successes came easy. “Oh, there were a lot of hard
moments,” Heldt admits. “A lot of decision fatigue, because everything was new. Everything.
But the amazing thing was that we had almost all the expertise we needed for the COVID
lab either on campus or in our network. The knowledge was just in dispersed areas
that you probably wouldn’t have thought to look for help with medical testing. I mean,
the lab was being run by a chemical engineer. I didn’t know much about PCRs.” PCR
stands for polymerase chain reaction, the test used to detect viral genetic material
in patient samples. “The expertise in PCR came from ecology, forestry, biology, genetics.
MLS (medical laboratory science) was amazing. The IT we needed was all here on campus.
Facilities, everything. Everybody worked together and realized how important the COVID
lab was. We all had the same type of attitude, which was, ‘We’ll figure it out. This
is important, we need to do this and we’ll figure it out.’”
run the COVID-19 testing lab on campus.
Serving Future Huskies
Back in late spring 2020, the view from Heldt’s third-floor office in the Chemical
Sciences and Engineering Building was all snow and sidewalks, no students. Today,
two and a half years since the pandemic moved people indoors and classes online, the
same view is of rubble, dirt, pickup trucks and excavators. Construction crews are
hard at work standing up another kind of innovative campus lab: the H-STEM Engineering
and Health Technologies Complex, or H-STEM Complex, a state-of-the-art teaching and
research space that Heldt says will be a hub for health research on campus.
Like the COVID lab, the H-STEM Complex will be a place where multidisciplinary teams
will work together in shared, flexible, collaborative lab spaces to advance learning and research in health-related STEM fields. “I just see health
research on campus growing very quickly over the next five to 10 years through the
Health Research Institute and in the H-STEM building,” says Heldt. “There were so
many people involved in the COVID lab that I had never met before. And even today,
my main collaborators are in biomedical engineering, but they’re all the way across
campus. I don’t see them very often. I have to seek them out. The H-STEM building
will be a place where I can bump into them in the hallway.”
The H-STEM Complex, along with the Great Lakes Research Center, will be one of the
first physical structures on campus to support Tech’s innovative, multidisciplinary
research and learning initiatives. Such research will include work like the genomic
surveillance of emerging infectious disease threats, an $18.5 million federally funded project Heldt and others from the COVID lab team are currently working on. “I really like the Michigan Tech model of having themed
buildings by research type and not by department,” Heldt says. “I’m so excited to
have a bunch of interdisciplinary graduate students working together in the H-STEM
building. They’re going to come up with brilliant ideas because they’re all together
in the same space. And as the students get more ideas, they’ll write more papers,
and they’ll be principal investigators for more grants because their ideas will be
ones that funders get excited about.”
If all this sounds like too much for Heldt and her colleagues to take on, well, the
recipient of the 2022 Faculty Distinguished Service Award might respectfully disagree.
That’s because Heldt sees solutions where others see problems. And she knows from
experience that to make a big difference, the best approach is to start small.
Michigan Technological University is a public research university founded in 1885 in Houghton, Michigan, and is home to more than 7,000 students from 55 countries around the world. Consistently ranked among the best universities in the country for return on investment, the University offers more than 125 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in science and technology, engineering, computing, forestry, business and economics, health professions, humanities, mathematics, social sciences, and the arts. The rural campus is situated just miles from Lake Superior in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, offering year-round opportunities for outdoor adventure.
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