Shaping trajectory with Brian Murphy: Can relationships define our path?
In this episode, Grace Khachaturian sits down with Brian Murphy, researcher and pharmaceutical sciences professor at the University of Illinois Chicago Retzky College of Pharmacy, to discuss how relationships can shape life trajectory. Influenced by his grandfather’s World War II experiences, a childhood friend and his own upbringing, Murphy shares how service became central to his scientific work leading the Murphy Lab in the search for new antibiotics. He bridges cutting-edge science with community engagement by partnering with local organizations like the Boys & Girls Club to involve middle and high school students in biomedical research. Murphy reflects on the power of resilience and how meaningful connections can influence one’s path and help shape a deeper sense of purpose — both in and beyond the lab.
Key takeaways:
- Influential people in Murphy’s upbringing shaped his commitment to service and science.
- Community outreach is essential in bridging research and real-world impact.
- You can’t be learning when you’re talking.
- Life’s hardest experiences often forge the strongest qualities and character.
Biography
Brian Murphy is a professor in the UIC Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the Retzky College of Pharmacy. The Murphy Lab focuses on applying high-throughput robotics and bioinformatics toward the discovery of antibiotics from aquatic bacteria. Murphy was recognized as a National Geographic Explorer and a distinguished lecturer for the American Society of Microbiology. In Chicago, his lab partners with local community centers such as the Boys & Girls Club to perform high-end biomedical research in collabroation with middle and high school students. Murphy’s program has been featured in the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Chemical & Engineering News, NPR, the London Science Museum and additional global news outlets.
Show notes
- About Brian Murphy
- UIC’s Retzky College of Pharmacy
- About UIC
Grace Khachaturian 0:00
Welcome to “This is UIC,” the official podcast of the University of Illinois, Chicago. I’m Grace Khachaturian, and with each episode, we delve into the stories that drive us to impact our most compelling questions as Chicago’s only public research university. UIC is leading the way to create and inspire a better world.
In this episode, we sit down with Brian Murphy — a distinguished researcher and pharmaceutical sciences professor at the University of Illinois Chicago. Brian leads the Murphy Lab in the search for new antibiotics from aquatic bacteria. What sets Brian apart is his deep-rooted passion for outreach and service — within the Chicago community and beyond. Today, we unpack the root of that commitment and explore how people in his own story have greatly influenced his life’s work.
Welcome, Brian.
Brian Murphy 0:53
Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here, Grace.
Grace Khachaturian 0:56
Yes. So glad to have you on the podcast. We are excited to unpack the curiosity that many of us probably can relate to. “Can relationships shape our path?” And before we dive into that, I would love to begin our time together, understanding a little bit more about who you are and understanding your why. What is your why?
Brian Murphy 1:20
This is a is a super funny and packed question, right? There’s no static answer to someone’s why. Because I think why is a lifelong pursuit that is contextualized in what’s happening in your life. And I, for you know, for the current moment, at least, my why has transitioned from you know, in my life, I make distinctions between I now make a distinction between entertainment versus fulfillment. And I think my life up until my early 30s, was definitely based on doing things and driving things that entertained me, the hottest restaurant or, you know, the funnest bow, that adventure that’s going to give me that story. And that’s what I think drove me, what has really changed in my mid starting, I think my mid 30s, that next phase of life, it’s been that transition from entertainment to fulfillment. And I really asking myself, like, what fulfills me? And I think one of the things that fulfills me and that drives me, my why, which has been there all along, but now I really recognize it is, is service. Services is absolutely what I value and what I think if there was more service in this world, I think it would be a it would be a much better place to live in. And it’s really, I think it’s really difficult for people to now adopt a mentality of service when we’re living in a world that really prioritizes money, power and influence.
Grace Khachaturian 2:54
So true. Where do you think this kind of passion for service came from?
Brian Murphy 3:01
Childhood? I got to give you a little minor background and where I’m from. It’s indistinguishable from who I am today. I grew up in Winthrop, Mass., and I’ll talk maybe a little bit about that later, if we get into it. I was, I was very lucky in the sense I’m going to say something weird, I was very lucky in the sense that I grew up in a very functioning, broken home, okay, it was just me, my two older sisters and my mother. You know, my mom was a, she was a single mom, she was an or nurse, and she worked her ass off to support us. You know, 60 plus hours a week. So you know that she was definitely a source of, I would say, my work ethic and in a sense, you know, there’s few other jobs that are more quintessential service than a nurse, right? But that’s a real stabilizing factor in my childhood, because my mom was always working, my grandparents, her parents, and they lived in the next town over from us, and my grandmother was just the sweetest, nicest, talkative person, but I think the absolute biggest influence on who I am today, and what drives me is my grandfather.
And I would be remiss if I didn’t take a couple of minutes to just tell you about this unbelievable man, Michael Michella. He was a world war two veteran. He served aboard the USS Calvert. They essentially transported US troops and equipment from Allied bases to Axis beaches. He began his service on October 1, 1942 and he ended his tenure with the US Navy honorable discharge on September 16 of 1945 so he served nearly the entirety of the US, the US involvement in the war.
He was one of the rare few people who came in contact with German submarines in both oceans. He served in the US Navy, and then his ship, would, you know, occasionally go back to the US for repair.
He married my grandmother over one of those stops, went back to war. Yeah, crazy. They wrote letters to each other. And then after the war, he went back to Revere, Mass., where him and a bunch of his friends kind of settled down and like they called him the greatest generation for a reason despite all the societal problems at the time, they had some amazing qualities.
Him and his friends built their own houses. He went to work for a couple of years at the local lumberyard, and then after that, just joins the Revere fire departments. Served there for three decades. After retirement, he just volunteered as a local handyman for his church that was a couple blocks away. And so every phase of his life was service, and he was an incredibly humble guy, right? He never preached this. Not once did he sit down and preach service to me, but he just showed by example.
He was quiet, he was soft spoken, a quality that I need to adopt a little bit better. He was much better of a listener and less of a talker. And because when you’re talking, it’s really you can’t be learning when you’re talking. He showed me humility and he showed me service. And I just later in life, I realized that I probably modeled most of my, most of my adult life and research program, after qualities that he showed.
Grace Khachaturian 6:26
Well, it’s clear that his life was just lined with service and prioritizing other people, just an external perspective, which I think is honestly unique, which is kind of sad to say, but it’s unique to think that people have an external perspective on life these days.
You kind of mentioned this towards the end there, but how has this service and drive for service because of your grandfather, influenced the work that you’re doing now?
Brian Murphy 6:54
Yeah, so I get, I guess I’ll start off on just a couple lines about what I do now I’m, I’m an organic chemist, who’s got some experience in aquatic microbiology, and so I’ve run a research program that tries to discover a new drug leads from bacteria that we collect across the ocean and lakes, whether it’s Great Lakes, Atlantic Ocean, Pacific Ocean, oceans around the world. We’ll go scuba diving in different locations, grow as many bacteria as we can and see which ones produce molecules that can inhibit the growth of a variety of different diseases. And we’ve tried to, we’ve tried our best to mix that in the later years of my program, I’ve been doing this like 15 years now, we tried to mix that with community outreach, which has been a really wild and fun ride.
So, you know, in terms of obviously my grandfather was a huge influence on my wants to incorporate community outreach into high end biomedical research. But another major component, I think, is, you know, this research involves some risk taking because, not only because we’re doing weird things, but sometimes because we’re going to some unfamiliar places.
We’ve been scuba diving all across around the island of Iceland, with a collaboration we had there for a bunch of years. Oh, it’s, yeah, super cold. I’ve been to most, geez, most areas of coastal Vietnam through another collaboration, an international collaboration that we have that’s set on training young researchers and infectious diseases. So there’s, there’s a lot of risk involved, but yeah, so in the to answer your question, like that, element of risk inevitably comes from another part of my childhood. I think growing up in Winthrop, and you know, Winthrop, as I get to visit more places, it is an incredibly awesome and very unique place. You know, outsiders would call Winthrop one square mile of madness.
I got to learn so much living there and in so Winthrop, it’s a place that really makes you confident, and it’s like Winthrop is like trial by fire, and all your relationships are based on this, this really kind but merciless joking and just roasting one another. I’d say there’s one friend in particular who really of this crew taught me a lot about risk taking, because I kind of was not one of these boisterous people. I was a little bit on the quiet side, I was afraid to take risks, but I always hung out with kids who did take risks. So my friend Jonathan, I was friends with him through elementary school, middle school, in the first couple of years of high school, and we went on so many adventures that, and just a couple of them to give you an idea. And before I say these things, you have to realize we’re kids of the 90s. 1990s parenting was completely different. Back then, there were no helicopter parents, right?
Brian Murphy 10:00
They would just, parents would just release their kids onto the streets, and the kids would eventually come home. We would go and explore Boston on the T this is the train, whether it’s the blue line, the green line, red line, and we would just go to random stops and get off and just explore. We have no phones. You’d have to use like an actual map, and sometimes it leads you to bad neighborhoods, and sometimes it leads you to cool neighborhoods. And we, we had that, that element of exploration. We would also go and we’d sneak into the Boston Garden. Another bunch of years were spent autograph collecting, where it would be like, 9:30pm on a Tuesday night, and we would just head on in and lose ourselves in the crowd, hide out in the stadium until the game was done, and then when the fans left and the vendors left, all that was left was just us and the players. And so we would hide out, get autographs, take pictures. Yeah, it was just all of these were, are the adventures that we were on in the and I had no idea at the time, but they were, they were really forming and inspired, forming my worldview and inspiring me, of like, how to safely take risks. Yeah, because Jonathan was just, he was absolutely, he was a true escape artist and and, and just an honest to God, good person, yeah.
Grace Khachaturian 11:13
Yeah, It’s amazing how people like that, even from childhood their impact can remain whether or not you remain close with them too, like their influence, same with your grandfather, their influence and their impact remain the same. Now I want to touch on something that you mentioned a bit earlier. You mentioned that you were raised in a functioning, broken home. What would you say to someone, maybe to encourage no matter where they’re coming from, but who might resonate with the fact that, gosh, I think I also come from a functioning, broken home. What would you say to them?
Brian Murphy 11:54
I would say, I mean. Not, not even facetiously, like, good for you. Obviously there are bad things that happened during that time, but, I’m kind of annoying, eternal optimist that even if something horrible happens . But I think that you can take these negative aspects your life and and do your best to power through them, stay positive about them, and just, you know, I gotta say that most of my, most of my, the characteristics that I that I want to keep about myself and that I think have allowed me to survive through some really tough situations, were actually qualities that I built during tough situations, during times where it was sink or swim and I had no one else to rely on. And, you know, my mother just equipped me with a sense of resiliency and work ethic that just made me for lack of a better term, just survive.
Grace Khachaturian 12:46
So we’ve talked about your incredible expeditions that you take for your research and things like that. But not only have you focused your work on, you know, fighting diseases and things like that, but also outreach. So what drove this desire for outreach?
Brian Murphy 13:05
Yeah, obviously the first driver is service, right? But there’s definitely more to it. Because, you know, after Virginia, I went to San Diego, learned a couple skill sets there, and then I came to Chicago, which is the start of my real advanced professional career, I think at UIC and I just over the years when, after getting out of winter, been learning that there are way different people and cultures out there. I just wanted to learn about where I lived and when I moved to Chicago. There were some things that were visually striking to me. And one of the visually striking things about the neighborhoods there is that is an incredible degree of both racial and economic segregation.
You know, you hear a lot of people talk about everywhere I go around the world, people talk about Chicago, especially in the US, they’ll talk about Chicago, but they’ve never lived there, and I just wish that they would do a little bit more listening to people who do live there, because any you know, there’s a lot of really nice efforts to try and remediate these problems in our neighborhoods, like right within the neighborhood of UIC Community. And I think these disparities are woven in the fabric of the history of Chicago, and we have to recognize that if we you know, it’s just silly to ignore it, and it’s unproductive, frankly, to ignore it, and I think it’s unethical. And so, you know, what drove me wanting to do research is just the more I learned about the community, the more I thought like we should just know each other. And I’m very passionate about the fact that I think universities should absolutely do more of an effort to connect with their local community.
So I started doing just volunteering my time at Marilla community center. I spent maybe eight years there on Tuesdays we would do like math and reading tutoring, and then that eventually evolved into me and my friend Akash would start to run our own science experiments on a weekly basis. And after a couple of years, there was a private donation. They asked us to run a robotics club. I don’t know anything about robotics, but we did it. We started a FIRST LEGO League Robotics Club. So now we’re going there every Tuesday afternoon, every Wednesday afternoon, for a couple hours. And over time, it just kind of becomes your family. And these were the most rewarding experiences of my life, just learning about people who are, who are different than you and them, learning about you,
and building those bridges that I think that’s been, that’s been, I think, the most valuable experience in my in my professional career, I think.
Grace Khachaturian 15:35
What do you think is the importance of that kind of exposure to younger generations?
Brian Murphy 15:43
I honestly, I don’t even want to present this answer as a one way answer. It is a two way street, because every, every single thing I can tell you that maybe had an influence on them, absolutely had an influence on me and my team of mentors, tolerance, right? Tolerance is one of these things you’re you’d have people who grew up completely differently than you did, even within our volunteer team of mentors, people, the team of mentors, grew up completely differently from different countries and when we go out to community centers, it’s just, we all get to sit down and just talk to each other about our experiences, who we are.
Brian Murphy 16:19
it’s not always, you know, the volunteering as I always say, it’s not always pretty, and they often use the words of the late great Leonard Cohen, volunteering is a cold and broken hallelujah is there are times that are so tough these kids go through, you know, both incredible successes, but also immense hardships due to the situation that there that has been engineered by laws, previous laws in our country that most people think because the law ended, there’s no more hurt. But those laws have generational effects, as you see clearly in Chicago. So I think you know, being able to go to these community centers and build that bridge that those students they will grow up, knowing that a university exists, and knowing that hopefully science sometimes could be fun, even though maybe in class it stinks.
Grace Khachaturian 17:12
Well, I love what you just said of volunteering is a cold and broken hallelujah. That quote is so powerful, and it just makes me think that so many of these individuals might be coming from functional or not that broken homes, and looking for that outside influence to be the one that impacts them in the direction that they want and maybe even should go. So it seems like you and your team and fellow mentors and volunteers have the opportunity to be that outside influence, which is so cool, which leads me to the overarching question of this conversation, can relationships shape our path?
Brian Murphy 17:55
Yes. And as you can tell by the way I said that there’s a “but” yes they can absolutely. But back to something I said in the beginning, we often talk of this in a state of permanence, and It is not permanent. It is ever changing, right? Our present is ever changing, and I think our past can kind of be overshadowed by what’s happening at any given moment, no matter how strong that past is, current events can change people.
Brian Murphy 18:30
And so back to, like your question about the relationships that form the foundation of who I am. And so I am a combination of a lot of different things, just as you are, just as we all are, and you know, we you’re it’s funny, because you’re talking to me, and I think academics will be able to relate to this. You’re talking to me at a very very poignant time in the life of a university. It is inseparable from my personal story because there’s a ton of proposed, well ongoing and proposed cuts to scientific research, and these cuts have absolutely decimated the community outreach programs that I have spent years building up. They’ve decimated the international collaborations that I’ve spent years building up in nearly they they’ve touched nearly every part of my program, and just, you know, absolutely incapacitated our ability to do research.
Grace Khachaturian 19:22
So thinking about the question can relationships shape our path, it’s not just the relationships that are in our lives but also the ones influencing our society and our culture. They all play a role.
Well Brian, throughout our conversation today, we’ve unraveled your story and passion for service and your work in research and outreach. All of which you traced back to relationships in your life.
We do like to end every episode on a unique note that allows someone to kind of help tell their story. So if you were to pick a theme song that best represents your story. What song would you pick?
Brian Murphy 20:00
I have to, I’m very biased, and I have to draw the attention of viewers to an incredibly influential band in the 90s, Rage Against the Machine. And they have a song, “Take the Power Back.”
[MUSIC: “Take the Power Back” by Rage Against the Machine]
And you can just play this album start to finish. And it’s a way that the Rage Against the Machine taught me how to channel your anger into positive things like writing and social action. So that, I would say, among others, that is my theme song.
Grace Khachaturian 20:51
Yeah, anger used correctly can be impact. Okay, well, Brian, thank you so much for your time here today, unpacking such a rich curiosity. I’m so grateful for your time.
Brian Murphy 21:00
Thank you, Grace. I appreciate it.
Grace Khachaturian 21:03
Likewise.
Learn more about Brian Murphy and his antibiotic discovery lab in the show notes at today.uic.edu.
[MUSIC: “Take the Power Back” by Rage Against the Machine]
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