Meet the Faculty: Daniel Scoles, PhD
What are your hobbies?
I have several hobbies, so brace yourself. Foremost, I have played the guitar since a very young age. After I completed all the lesson books in the series, my teacher then began teaching me standard jazz songs to memorize. I was in two different embarrassing rock bands in junior high and high school. In graduate school, I met an instructor who taught me the right hand, and I learned to play some Spanish romances, flamenco, and classical styles. I went through several years of obsession with the pathogenic need to build boats and completed a canoe and an exceptional 15-foot New Zealand style sailboat. I also have an insatiable craft foods obsession that includes beermaking, winemaking, cheesemaking, breadmaking, and sausagemaking.
What is your favorite meal/dessert?
My favorite thing to eat is salmon, and as strange as it seems, I think I have some four to five times a week. I have mostly lost interest in eating desserts and have gone to the savory side of eating. If I had to have dessert, I’d rely on my childhood wont for a birthday cake with the Crisco frosting, as terrible as it is!
What are one or two things you want to learn to do?
I would most like to learn to make wines like a master. I planted two wine grape vines in my yard four years ago, and last year I was able to make one bottle from them. It turned out very good, so that was very satisfying.
What is one thing that can instantly make your day better?
One thing that makes my day instantly better is when someone else on our research team comes to me and thanks me for something I did that makes their day better.
What song always gets you out on the dance floor?
This would be a song from my childhood. When I was five years old, my father built a garage on the opposite end of our house and then converted our existing garage into a pool room and installed a Seeburg jukebox that he purchased from our family barber. (Haha yes, the barber, it’s true.) By the 1970s, my brothers and I had decorated the room with psychedelic posters and flashing lights. The jukebox came with British Invasion music: The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Zombies, The Animals. These are the songs that energize me!
What is something people would be surprised to learn about you?
I think that’s among the above haha!
Name one thing on your bucket list.
I have wanted to travel to Italy for quite some time to see where the Nebbiolo wine grapes are grown, and I will be doing that in June!
As a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?
In high school, I volunteered with the California Department of Forestry as a firefighter. I almost burned to death twice in one week, once with an air tank on my back in the attic of a burning two-story house, and the other time when we were backfiring a canyon fire that overtook us. I turned in my gear the next week to consider a different career.
What is the best concert you’ve ever attended?
Beatlemania at Pantages Theater in Hollywood in 1978 when I was 16 years old.
What is your favorite thing about your career?
I love the experiences of my career path and the successes we have had.
In high school, a friend and I made a pact to become marine biologists. I attended the University of California at Riverside and got my degree in biochemistry. Unfortunately, in 1986, my mother passed away of a neurological disorder called CJD (my tragic introduction to neurology), and I sort of ran away. I enrolled at the College of William and Mary’s Virginia Institute of Marine Science, still acting on that high-school pact. But after earning my PhD studying the genetics of globally distributed fish populations, I wanted to return to the basic sciences of biochemistry and joined forces with Stefan Pulst, who is currently the chair of our Department of Neurology.
That was in 1994, 28 years ago. So, my career path has been extremely rewarding, but at the moment, perhaps my favorite thing about my career is that we have a drug that we helped to develop for alleviating ALS that is being tested in a clinical trial. If this drug works, for me, there can be nothing more rewarding.