When he attended Hillcrest High in Idaho Falls, Keaton Adams belonged to a science team that traveled to Washington D.C. to compete in the U.S. Department of Energy National Science Bowl, a competition he describes as bar trivia with more difficult questions.
His team didn’t make it to the finals, but the members learned a lot from strolling through the National Mall, one of the nation’s most visited plazas.
“There are so many great museums,” Adams said. “I spent much of my time in the aerospace and natural history museums.”
A lot of what he saw at the natural history and flight museums piqued his interest, because, he said, he has always been drawn to science and biology.
Adams will earn a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry in May 2026, a degree he says is useful in many aspects of science, especially research, a field he plans to pursue after graduation.
“It’s a good degree because it gives you foundational classes in more fields than microbiology,” he said, despite microbiology being Adams’ primary interest.
During his time at U of I, the budding microbiologist worked in the laboratory of Professor Chris Marx, exploring how cells with the same genetic makeup can display different characteristics in how they overcome the environmental stress of starvation.
Bacteria often face long periods without food, so they have developed ways to survive and recover quickly, he said. A substance the cells produce called PHB acts like stored energy and protects them during times of scarcity.
Adams’ research focuses on how cells with the same genome have an unequal chance of survival because of PHB.
He explains the research results:
“If you grabbed a thousand people off the street, representing bacteria with a different genetic make up, and had them run a marathon, you’d expect to get vastly different finishing times. But if you cloned a person a thousand times — representing bacteria with the same genetic make up — and had those people run a marathon, you would expect very similar finishing times,” he said. “We’re not seeing anything close to that with these starved bacteria.”
The research is important because non-genetic variation is often what determines whether a bacterium survives a treatment of antibiotics, or whether they become a pathogen and inject our cells with toxins, Marx said.
Cells differentiate into discrete types to either hedge their bets regarding future environmental fluctuations or to have division of labor and take advantage of two distinct strategies that can cooperate with each other, he said.
Adams’ name will appear as an author on a peer-reviewed journal article about the research in the coming months.
Marx, who has worked closely in the lab with Adams since his first year at U of I, calls him a remarkable student.
“He has been fantastic,” Marx said. “He analyzed all the data he generated, made the figures and wrote the paper. Being the lead author as an undergraduate is incredible.”
Research is important to me.
Keaton Adams
Senior in biochemistry
His success at participating as a high school student in the national Science Bowl, earning an associate’s degree while still at Hillcrest and securing an internship at the Idaho National Laboratory in Idaho Falls caught the attention of U of I recruiters who offered Adams a generous scholarship.
Securing the scholarship weighed heavily in his decision to attend U of I, Adams said.
After taking a campus tour with his dad, he knew he had found the right place.
“I didn’t realize how much I would love it here,” he said. “But when I got here and started going to classes and meeting professors and fellow students, I realized I had made an exceptionally good decision.”
Adams has already accepted an offer to enroll in a doctoral program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a top tier science research school in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“Research is important to me,” he said. “It keeps the world moving forward, and I would like to continue doing that.”