Graduate earns PhD after accomplishing lifelong goal of doing cancer research
Austin Blackmon is graduating with a PhD in molecular and cellular biology from the School of Life Sciences after years of doing cancer research. Courtesy photo
Editor’s note: This story is part of a series of profiles of notable spring 2025 graduates.
Instead of dreaming of being a firefighter or a movie star, when Austin Blackmon was a kid, he dreamed of finding a cure for cancer. Now, graduating with a PhD in molecular and cellular biology from the School of Life Sciences after years of doing cancer research, Blackmon can say he has followed through.
His dream was born after losing his grandmother to cancer.
“I saw how it impacted my family, and how the pain and trauma followed us through the years as cancer has continued to impact my family unit,” Blackmon says. “I knew I wanted to find a cure for cancer, not just become a medical doctor. I wanted to work towards finding a way to cure cancer not just for one person, but for all people.”
Blackmon held onto that dream through high school and started looking for research labs when he started his bachelor’s degree at Northern Arizona University. After years of failed searching, he finally got his chance to do research with the Barker Lab, studying a fungal infection endemic to the Southwest called valley fever.
“It wasn’t cancer research, but it was still really exciting,” he says. “That experience made me realize that as much as I love the science, it’s the people I work with that I love the most.”
Blackmon’s mentor at the Barker Lab pushed him not to give up on his dream of cancer research and connected him with Doug Lake, who runs a lab studying both valley fever and cancer.
“It was almost like a match made in heaven — I somehow am the perfect bridge between those two fields,” Blackmon says.
As part of the Lake Lab, Blackmon researched an enzyme called QSOX1, which cancerous cells make and secrete more of than other cells. That over-expression of QSOX1 makes cancerous tumors more likely to become invasive and metastasize, or infect other areas of the body, a process that makes cancer fatal. Researchers aren’t fully sure how QSOX1 makes tumors more likely to spread, though, which is part of what Blackmon was helping to investigate.
To do that, Blackmon looked into how QSOX1 interacts with the proteins that reside outside of cells rather than within them. Cancerous cells need to crawl through those extracellular proteins in order to invade other areas of the body, so through investigating how QSOX1 interacts with those proteins, Blackmon hoped to find ways to disrupt metastasis.
He came up with novel methods for observing QSOX1’s interactions with extracellular proteins. By creating a mutant version of QSOX1, he was able to trap QSOX1 to those extracellular proteins and observe how the enzyme interacted with them. Through his work, he found two new sites on the QSOX1 enzyme that it uses to bind to extracellular proteins. He hypothesizes that those binding sites help QSOX1 facilitate metastasis, which supports the importance of drug therapies that interfere with the activity of QSOX1.
Blackmon says no one else in his lab was doing enzymology: “I had to figure out a lot of it by myself, but I did it. It took a long time, but I found something important at the end of it.”
As Blackmon progressed through his PhD, though, his dream of finding a cure for cancer evolved. While he still cared about his research, he found that he cared just as much about directly working with and helping other people.
He came to that realization through doing extensive community service. Blackmon served as the director of the JEDI program for a year with the Graduate Student Government. In that role, he worked on making the School of Life Sciences more inclusive through directives like creating and implementing communication training programs, advocating for graduate students at the local and federal levels of government, and leading community-building events with the ASU Police Department.
Additionally, Blackmon co-founded a local chapter of Nucleate, a global nonprofit led by graduate student volunteers to help bridge the gap between academics and the biotechnology industry.
Blackmon explains: “Academia is really good at producing more academics, not at helping PhD students learn and navigate alternative careers, like biotech, venture capital, science policy, consulting, medical science liaisons — there are so many different things that scientists can do, but they’re not amplified and acknowledged in academia. It’s on the student to go and figure it out on their own.”
Blackmon’s chapter of Nucleate helps graduate students learn about different career opportunities and connect with industry professionals, as well as helps graduate student scientists with ideas for new inventions realize their vision and bring their science to the public.
When Blackmon decided he wanted to find a cure for cancer as a kid, he did it out of a desire to help as many people as he could. That desire is stronger than ever — his vision of what helping people can look like has merely expanded. Maybe Blackmon will still go on to do cancer research one day, or maybe his path will take him elsewhere. Either way, he is dedicated to doing science that does real good in the world.
“While I love science, I’ve realized that my passion is about serving people. Now that I’m looking for jobs, I know I’ve got to find something that lets me do both.”
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