Shawn Gomez’s research trajectory had already started to shift during the first few years of graduate school when life forced a more severe change upon him. Gomez’s PhD advisor at the University of Colorado Boulder, the accomplished aerospace engineer Marvin Luttges, died suddenly of a heart attack at age 53, leaving Gomez to plot a new path forward.
Rather than persist with his work in aerospace engineering, which had crept from control systems for spacecraft to life support systems for astronauts, Gomez opted to lean into biology and medicine. He finished up formalities for his master’s degree and moved across the country from Colorado, where he’d lived since childhood, to New York to attend Columbia University for his doctorate, this time in biomedical engineering.
More than three decades later, he’s made another cross-country move—from North Carolina to Madison—where he’s joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Biomedical Engineering as a professor and the new Peter Tong Department Chair.
“UW-Madison is just a fantastic institution, with a huge number of resources, and it’s really collaborative,” he says, noting the presence of collocated engineering, medical and veterinary schools and an array of biomedical and biological research centers across campus.
Gomez spent the previous 21 years in the Lampe Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University.
His research is rooted in computational systems biology, mapping protein interaction and cellular signaling architecture across the human body to better understand disease progression and inform treatment, particularly in regard to solid tumor cancers. In recent years, he’s focused more on translational machine learning and artificial intelligence for clinical applications, such as predicting the likelihood of a patient developing drug resistance or an infection.
“The longer-term goal is that those two things will eventually join up, because we want to be able to basically influence the choices of drugs that are used for treating a particular patient,” he says. “You’re trying to identify the right drug or set of drugs for a set of patients and the right time for them to get it. We’re trying to do that from both ends—from the basic science and understanding the principles of how cells work and then also from the clinical side.”
At North Carolina, Gomez founded and served as co-executive director of FastTraCS, a medical technology incubator at the Chapel Hill campus. In his new role at UW-Madison, he’s excited to build connections among the biomedical engineering department and recently launched entrepreneurial efforts at the campus (Wisconsin Entrepreneurship Hub) and college (Badger Tech Foundry) levels and to leverage existing technology-transfer infrastructure through the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and the Technology Entrepreneurship Office.
Most of all, he plans to deepen the partnership between biomedical engineering and the School of Medicine and Public Health to connect engineering developments with clinical knowledge.
“I think there’s just a huge number of opportunities for us,” he says. “We should be able to do a lot more joining forces and combining engineering and technologies that are coming out of our college with the practical needs that are happening in the School of Medicine and Public Health.”