Dr. Christian Whitman

As a child growing up outside Hartford, Conn., Christian Whitman was fascinated by school - the learning and understanding process. He also enjoyed passing on his knowledge to others, specifically his younger siblings upon whom he practiced his teaching skills.

At the University of Connecticut in Storrs, Whitman chose chemistry as his major because he thought it “sounded better” than biology. As an honors program student, he was required to do an undergraduate research thesis. Listening to members of the organic chemistry department discuss possible thesis topics he could pursue, Whitman decided “this is the most boring thing in the world. I don’t think I can do this.” Instead, he chose to research with the pharmacy department because they “worked on drugs, which sounded so cool - it was the 70’s”. After talking to a professor working on curing brain cancer, Whitman was convinced that medicinal chemistry was to be his focus.

Whitman chose the University of California, San Francisco for graduate school because of its excellent medicinal chemistry reputation and because “growing up on the East Coast, California had this allure.”

After talking to a research advisor who described a dull-sounding research project, Whitman located a professor intending to make an inhibitor of the enzyme released into the bloodstream when heart attacks occur. Thus began Whitman’s fascination with enzymes, which led to his PhD project studying the enzyme that biodegrades trees.

Whitman moved to Austin in 1987 after a three-year post-doctoral stint at the University of Maryland. “When I first came here it seemed really hot, he says. “It took me about two years to get used to the heat, but I really like it now. Austin grows on you.”
Whitman currently teaches a freshman seminar and a pharmaceutical biochemistry class for the PharmD students. He likes everything about teaching except writing exams. “I like standing up there giving a lecture, feeling like you’ve done a good job and feeling like the students have learned something.”

He also enjoys writing scholarly papers for journals. His writing interest does not extend to textbooks, however. “That wouldn’t be one of my favorite things to do,” he says. “I don’t think the rewards would match the work I’d put into textbook writing.”
Those hoping to research and study with Whitman can expect an environment that is both relaxed and rigorous. “I’m reasonably laid back,” he says. “The undergrads have told me that I lure them into a false sense of security because of how laid back I seem and then I hit them with the exams. So I always warn them now that everyone hates my exams. I take it seriously, but I’m not sure they get that impression.”

Whitman likes his graduate students to take ownership of their projects and think closely about experimental results, even if Whitman was the one to encourage exploration of a certain enzyme and helped guide the procedure. “The difference between those wanting to be technicians and those in the PhD program is that the PhD student actually has to generate new ideas,” he says. “I like students to be ambitious.”

The five graduate students in Whitman’s lab are currently researching how bacteria evolve new enzymes, which works toward understanding how bacteria become resistant to antibiotics. “Bacteria have a number of mechanisms by which they can do this because bacteria are very good at survival,” he says. “One of their mechanisms is to make the antibiotic useless, and that involves the evolution of enzymes.”

Whitman’s research goals include discovering environmentally-friendly biocatalysts that carry out reactions synthetic chemists want done, and taking a secondary purpose of a multi-purpose enzyme and “ramping up” that purpose to obtain a new enzyme. He’s also interested in the evolution of enzymes that degrade environmental pollutants such as oil products and pesticides. He notes, however, that in general "people don't like when you throw bacteria into the environment."