William Picking, chairman of Oklahoma State's microbiology and genetics department, will join Kansas University as its third Foundation Distinguished Professor.

Wendy Picking will join KU as a professor of pharmaceutical chemistry and work with a new vaccine center.

Back when William Picking started college, his initial plan was to go on to medical school.

“When you grow up in small-town Kansas and you like science, you start seeing yourself as a physician,” said Picking, who’s originally from Abilene.

But in college Picking found other branches of science that interested him and other ways of helping people besides through practicing medicine. One day when he went to pick up his test from the instructor of his microbiology class, the professor asked Picking about his plans and nudged him toward graduate school in microbiology.

And Picking did just that. He earned his Ph.D. from Kansas University in 1989 and would come back come back within a decade to teach at KU, before leaving to chair the microbiology department at Oklahoma State University.

Now Picking is returning to KU yet again, this time as a Foundation Professor, a new type of distinguished faculty meant to spur multidisciplinary research at KU.

As a Foundation Professor, Picking will help spearhead a new center to develop vaccines that will pull together existing resources and expertise, and be the focus of four new hires in the pharmacy and engineering schools.

Much of Picking’s research looks at the molecular mechanisms pathogens use to take over healthy cells and cause disease. When he started his own research program as a professor, Picking hit the books to find a pathogen to investigate. He began studying Shigella, a bacterium that attacks the digestive system.

He looked at Shigella partly because it is a scourge in developing countries, killing many thousands of people every year, and partly because “everyone and his dog was working on salmonella,” another deadly disease-causing agent.

Picking and collaborators honed in on the protein Shigella uses to trick human cells into letting the pathogen in. He hopes to make that protein the base of a new vaccine to inoculate people against the bacteria.

That will be one of Picking’s priorities for the new vaccine center, dubbed the Kansas Vaccine Development Center. The center will make use of the existing Macromolecular and Vaccine Stabilization Center, headed by distinguished professor of pharmaceutical chemistry David Volkin, and involve partnerships across KU’s campuses and with Kansas State University.

Christian Schöneich, a distinguished professor and department chair of pharmaceutical chemistry at KU, said creating the center was one of the main reasons for pursuing Picking as a Foundation Professor.

“We knew him, he’s an excellent scientist, he has a nice personality,” Schöneich said. “We thought he would be a great fit.”

Also re-joining KU will be Picking’s wife, Wendy, who will come on board as a professor of pharmaceutical chemistry. Like Picking, Wendy earned her Ph.D. from KU, where they met. Also like Picking, she’s spent much of her career studying the Shigella bacteria. At Oklahoma State the two worked in adjacent laboratories and frequently collaborated, authoring several papers together.

For Picking, the move to Kansas is a kind of homecoming, but one that will allow him to keep pushing forward the research he launched while in Oklahoma. That opportunity made for an easy choice to come to KU, Picking said.

“There wasn’t much decision making to be done.”