Luke Handke has spent most of his working life in a laboratory, but he’s often teaching. Usually not in front of a classroom, but more often one-on-one, helping budding scientists and colleagues.
“I enjoy seeing people around me be successful, and if I can play some role in helping them to become successful in what they want to do, I’m very happy to do that,” he said. “That’s where I’m coming from.”
In the lab—“my home away from home,” he said with a smile—he works with an MD/PhD scholar and a PhD student that will be finishing at the end of the year. “Just helping them learn the ropes, how we do the research we do, the techniques they need to know,” he said. “And I’ve been privileged to work with the genetics workshop (staph camp), doing some teaching, so that’s been rewarding to do.”
The way he looks at it, he’s just repaying what he’s received working at UNMC. “I feel fortunate to be surrounded by talented, very kind and helpful colleagues in this department and on this floor.”
The Nebraska native first came to UNMC in 1999 as an undergraduate looking for summer employment. He wound up working in Dr. Paul Fey’s lab that summer, then returned in January after earning his bachelor’s degree at Kansas State University. He worked as a lab technologist until the fall of 2000, and he spent much of his time in the lab while earning his doctorate in 2005.
Handke spent the next three years on a postdoctoral fellowship at Tufts University in Boston, where he received an F32 training grant from the NIH, then went to work for Pfizer in New York in 2008. “I was brought in to support their S. aureus vaccine program, because I had a lot of experience with staphylococcal biology from working with Paul,” he said. “Over time we moved to different programs. We were doing viral vaccine programs, we were working with other bacteria, with other bacterial vaccines. Eventually I found myself leading a team of molecular biologists, and we supported a vaccine program for RSV, respiratory syncytial virus, and that program ultimately went on to be a licensed vaccine they sell.”
In 2018 Dr. Fey contacted him about a job back at UNMC, working again with staphylococcal metabolism and genetics. Dr. Handke said he couldn’t pass on the opportunity to get back into the lab, and to move back home where most of his family lives. He said he wanted his two sons, now 15 and 13, to get to know their grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins. “My dad passed in 2023. So I was really thankful that my boys had the opportunity to get to know him.”
Itidal Reslane, a recent PhD graduate from the department and now a postdoctoral trainee at Vanderbilt University, said: “I feel incredibly fortunate to have been mentored by Dr. Handke. He taught me many molecular biology techniques that have already proven invaluable in my postdoctoral work, even though I am currently studying a different organism. But more important than any technical skill, Luke taught me something I will always carry with me: to choose what is right over what is convenient. When you do that, you always win.”
When he’s not at work, Dr. Handke likes to brew beer, read, listen to music, and cook for his family. “I really like it,” he said, though he saves his experimentation for the lab. He described himself as a follow-the-directions type in the kitchen, not someone who throws in “a dash of this or a dash of that.”