By Carmen Visser

On the evening of 11 October, the tradition of celebrating a new professorship via an inaugural lecture took place once more at Rhodes University, and this time it was for Professor ?zlem Tastan Bishop.

Professor Tastan Bishop was promoted to her full professor position in January 2020, yet due to COVID-19-related backlog and giving her 2020 Vice-Chancellor’s Distinguished Senior Research Award lecture last year, the event could only happen with a three-year delay.

Nevertheless, Prof Tastan Bishop’s inaugural lecture was extremely well attended, and the attendees included Rhodes University Vice-Chancellor Professor Sizwe Mabizela, Deputy Vice-Chancellor Professor ‘Mabokang Monnapula-Mapesela, Professor Peter Clayton (Deputy Vice-Chancellor till December 2022), Deans of various Faculties, colleagues, students, friends and family. The attendance was extended electronically via Zoom and included national and international colleagues, grant officers, and her family from Istanbul. 

Professor Mabizela delivered an opening speech, extending warm and heartfelt congratulations to Professor ?zlem Tastan Bishop. He said, “Promotion or appointment to the rank of full professor marks a significant milestone in an academic’s professional and intellectual career.” He further summarised Professor Tastan Bishop’s life and academic journey: Prof Tastan Bishop was born and grew up in Istanbul, Turkey. During her childhood, she often accompanied her father to his workplace at the bank, thus she was exposed to very large numbers even before starting school, hence her love of mathematics developed during her childhood. After high school, Professor Tastan Bishop went to Bo?azi?i University in Istanbul and majored in Physics. “The department was known to be tough, and the graduation numbers were very low,” Prof Mabizela said. Nonetheless, Professor Tastan Bishop successfully graduated with a Bachelor of Science. While majoring in Physics, Professor Tastan Bishop also completed several molecular biology modules. She decided to pursue a Master of Science degree in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics at the same university. She continued working within the world of academia, achieving her PhD in 2003 from the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin, Germany.

Professor Mabizela continued to highlight Professor Tastan Bishop’s impressive list of achievements, beginning with her first international fellowship from the British Council to visit the MRC Molecular Haematology Unit, Oxford University. Professor Tastan Bishop recalled this time and said, “One can work hard and at the same time visit all the local pubs in Oxford!”

He also mentioned Professor Tastan Bishop’s other educational fellowships, including Monbusho Research Student Scholarship from Japanese Ministry of Education, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) PhD fellowship, NRF Free-Standing Postdoctoral fellowship as well as Claude Leon Foundation Postdoctoral fellowship; as well as her numerous awards some of which are Individual Internationalisation Award for 2018, Vice-Chancellor’s Distinguished Senior Research Award for 2020, South African Society for Bioinformatics (SASBi) Silver Award in 2022.

During the celebratory event, Professor Tastan Bishop delivered her inaugural lecture titled “From Istanbul to Grahamstown/Makhanda: Different countries, cultures and education but always science”. She began the lecture by referring to the lack of women professor characters in movies and fiction novels and said, “This needs to change”. Then continued – “How does it go in real life? Let me tell you about my adventures.”

She also emphasised, “For me being a professor, an academic is not a job, it is a lifestyle. It is part of me. I believe my personal and educational journey over the years made me what I am now as an educator and as a scientist. Thus, I would like to use this opportunity to first, share some snapshots of my educational journey with you, and my “super-heroes and heroines” that I listened to and learned from.” Professor Tastan Bishop expressed gratitude to several individuals who played pivotal roles in her academic journey, notably Professor Dr Knud Nierhaus, who supervised her PhD on Ribosomes, and Professor Fourie Joubert, who helped her start her research group.

The inaugural lecture of Professor Tastan Bishop took many unorthodox turns, and she linked the stages of her education experience to current postgraduate training. She presented take-home messages from her studies from undergraduate, through PhD to postdoctoral. She emphasised the importance of ethics, honesty and originality in science. She reiterated the knowledge she passes onto her students, which she learnt during her PhD: “Be true to your data because there might be a difference between what the data tells you and what you like to see. Check your results triple times. And most importantly, accept if you did something wrong and correct it.”

After being headhunted by Professor Greg Blatch, Professor Tastan Bishop joined Rhodes University as a senior lecturer within the Biochemistry and Microbiology Department. In 2010, she was able to get the Bioinformatics and Research Laboratory designed and built with only R50 000 and humorously added, “Being Turkish helps because you bargain well with all the people involved in building the lab.”

Professor Tastan Bishop primarily specialises in the field of structural bioinformatics, and her main goal is to “introduce non-traditional approaches and tools to fill the gaps in computational drug discovery.” She emphasised that knowledge of the 3D macromolecule structures is crucial in drug discovery. She discussed the problems during the discovery process as well as when the drugs are marketed, i.e. drug resistance and drug toxicity, and brought suggestions from a broad range of her research topics that tackle these problems. Furthermore, Professor Tastan Bishop argued that missense mutations on proteins affect their structure and function; hence understanding the underlying molecular mechanisms is essential for effective, long-lasting and safe drugs.

In the concluding remarks of the inaugural lecture, Professor Tastan Bishop ended with: “People should receive the right medications for their medical condition based on their genotype.”

The inaugural lecture is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pn7fnqwtltE