Raquel Lieberman, associate professor at the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, is having the Best. Winter. Ever.

That is, as long as you don’t count that whole Super Bowl thing.
Lieberman, who joined Georgia Tech in 2008, has started the year with some very good personal news: She’s been asked to serve on the academic editorial board for a major scientific journal, and she and her research team – the Lieberman Lab - can continue their work on early stage glaucoma, thanks to this month’s renewal of a $1.48 million National Institutes of Health grant.

“We had known since June that the (grant) score we got was meritorious,” Lieberman said. “The percentile was within the funding range for NIH, but you can’t count your chickens before you hatch.”

If any birds have learned that the hard way, it’s the Atlanta Falcons. In the days before Super Bowl 51 proved that point, Lieberman patiently waited to hear if she had scored her grant request.

Her spirits got an additional boost early this month when Georgia Tech’s Office of Sponsored Projects – the Institute’s support department for research administration – told her it needed to do some budget updating. “Which is a good sign,” she said.

“But then the Falcons lost.”

Lieberman was determined to not let that historic collapse jinx her hopes or dampen her mood. Sure enough, it was the very next morning when Lieberman learned from the NIH that she could continue her work, and keep her staff of researchers employed for the next four years.

“Now it’s going to be nine years of working on this exact same line of questioning, which is super, super gratifying,” she said. “We started from nothing, we didn’t have any structure. We didn’t have anything, just very basic observations. We were able to make something and contribute so that NIH would give us more money instead of having to apply our knowledge to something new, so to me that’s a huge milestone.”

The path to that success has included two advances in understanding glaucoma, a collection of eye diseases that make up the second leading cause of blindness worldwide. Lieberman’s Lab is focused on the protein myocilin. Mutant forms of myocilin collect in front of the eye, preventing an easy flow of fluid and raising eye pressure, which damages the optic nerve. That can result in early-stage glaucoma, which affects about a million people from childhood to age 35.

“If you gunk up that matrix, the fluid can’t flow out and the pressure goes up,” Lieberman said. “This protein kills the cells that are making sure that extracellular matrix does what it’s supposed to do, which is maintain its porosity.”

In 2014, Lieberman’s Lab announced that it had identified molecules that could serve as targets for experimental drugs seeking to block the impact of mutant myocilin. The next year, thanks to Lieberman’s expertise in creating three-dimensional representations of protein, the team announced it had mapped the 3D structure of a particular domain in myocilin – the olfactomedin (OLF) - that is tied to early-onset glaucoma.

That’s where the protein mutations are happening, and the new NIH grant can help unlock more of its mysteries.

“We know about this part of the protein, but that’s just half of the amino acids sequence in the whole thing. There’s this whole other black box in which there are mutations that cause disease, and no one has looked at them,” Lieberman said.

Lieberman’s fantastic February also includes the news that she’ll serve a 3-year term as an academic editorial board member for the PLOS (Public Library of Science) Biology journal, a high-impact publication that is known for spotlighting innovative research. But first she had to make sure the email inviting her to join PLOS Biology was the real thing.

“Nowadays, if you’re an academic researcher, every morning you wake up and there are a lot of emails from people and entities you’ve never heard of inviting you to conferences or journals, or predatory journals. Obviously PLOS Biology is not a predatory journal, but because I get this spam all the time, I had to make sure that this is real, that this is what I’ve been waiting for.”

Lieberman will be reviewing 1-2 articles each month, setting up peer reviews and helping to determine if they should be accepted or rejected. “I have a lot of experience with rejection,” she laughed, “but there’s very high expectation for PLOS Biology. It’s what constitutes the most exciting work that’s being done out there. We’ll see what comes down the pike, but I’m very excited.”

She can also help her fellow Georgia Tech researchers navigate the PLOS Biology process for their own papers. “I want people around here to know that I can help facilitate their submissions. I can’t officially be the editor for an article that’s from here, but I can help send them to somebody else.”