From mill town to research campus a different path right back home – Independent Tribune

Kannapolis has gone through a lot of change in the three decades since Kevin Lambirth was born in the bustling mill town.

And though the Kannapolis native has seen his fair share of change, as well, Lambirths life seems to have come full circle. As a project manager in UNC-Charlottes bioinformatics lab on the N.C. Research Campus, Lambirth walks and drives many of the same streets he did in his youth.

I do have the nostalgia of the mill and driving past the mill, he said. The mills were huge. I mean they were big, and they were actually split across four plants. The one that was here in this exact location, which was plant one, was the biggest plant.

Lambirth said he drove past the buildingwhich sat where NCRC is todayevery day on his way to high school.

It was enormous, he said. Just driving past and youd look straight up, and youd see the top of it, and it was just this huge, giant brick square. I remember some of the doors on the side of it would be open, and you could kind of see in, see all the pipes and all the industrial-looking things in there.

Lambirth actually comes from a family of millworkers himself. His grandfather worked at Cannon Mills for 20-some years, from 1956 to 1990. His grandmother worked at a textile company that used raw products from the mill to make baby and other clothing products.

Both his parents worked in the mills over summer break when they were in high school and college.

But Lambirth said he knew that wasnt in his future.

I was not going to work in the mill, he said. It was abundantly clear that the mill was not going to be here when I graduated, and freshman year it was demolished, so I knew I was not going to be working at the mill. And I had no desire to do that, either.

Lambirths love for science actually began right here in Kannapolis at A.L. Brown High School. While the campus didnt have quite as advanced of a program as it does today, Lambirth was still able to soak up every bit of biology, chemistry and physical sciences as he could.

I always loved the science classes, he said. I knew I really enjoyed it; I didnt know if I wanted to make a career out of it. I was going to be a software engineer. Thats what I wanted to do. I wanted to make video games. But I loved sciences, and I always excelled in those classes, and I was always the most interested in those. Everything else just bored me to death.

Lambirth graduated from A.L. Brown in 2006 and went on to Pfeiffer University, where he had a scholarship to do research. His mentor had a collaborative effort with SoyMeds, a UNC-Charlotte spinout company, so he worked with them looking at the potential of soy beans to act as edible vaccines.

When he graduated, Lambirth took the logical next step of working for SoyMeds as a lab technician before starting graduate school in biological sciences at UNC-Charlotte in August 2011.

In his second year, he was accepted into the Kannapolis Scholars program with the N.C. State University group at NCRC looking at soy bean gene expression pattern.

That involves a lot of bioinformatics, and so my project was very heavily centered on bioinformatics and big data, he said. That kind of got my feet wet.

When he finished his PhD in 2015, Lambirth said the timing was perfect. The UNC-Charlotte Bioinformatics Services Division needed a postdoctoral researcher, andgiven his experience with both wet labs and big dataLambirth was a good match.

I guess were kind of a rare breed, he said. Youre either one or the other. So Im a Heinz 57 that you usually dont come across. I fit the bill, and I was there at the right time and the right place. It just kind of happened.

The Urban Environmental Genomics Project

At the Bioinformatics Services Division, Lambirth works as the coordinator and project manager for the Urban Environmental Genomics Project, which looks at water and soil samples in and around two wastewater treatment plants in Charlotte to test for antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

We look for the bacteria thats there, he said. We look for the antibiotics that are there and genes that may be resistant to those particular antibiotics. Then we find out how much is there and look at different patterns to see what persists through different stages of the plant, what seems to rise out of nowhere.

The next stage in the project will be to look at sediment and bio solids, which tend to be used as fertilizer in agricultural fields for the high nitrogen content.

A great reuse ideaits really good for crops and things like that, Lambirth said. But if those antibiotic-resistant genes are present, do they fall out in the sludge as well? And is that transposited into agricultural fields? Were going to be eating that. So thats the next step.

Even though Lambirth just recently moved up the road to Salisbury, he said hes happy to be back in his hometown.Kannapolis is always my home, he said. The majority of people I went to school with could not wait to get out of this town. They wanted to go elsewhere. It wasnt hipster enough; it wasnt bustling enough; it wasnt cultured enough; theres not enough to do, and they just wanted to get out. Funny enough, it seems like Im running into more and more of my classmates at local places. This has always been my home, always been here, grew up here and lived here.

He said hes excited to see things moving forward in terms of developmentthough he had hoped it would move along a bit faster.

Things are moving slower than I think everyone had anticipated, because who expected 2008 to happen, he said. So its a little discouraging to see it happening as slow as it is, but the stuff that is happening hereit is nice to see a revitalization, Kannapolis the way I used to see it.

Lambirth said hes still kind of taking things one day at a time. His position in the bioinformatics lab isnt a permanent one, so his future certainly isnt set in stone. But things in his life have sort of taken a course of their own, falling into place when the time was right, and so he said he wasnt in the habit of making firm future declarations.

It seems like everything up to this point has just kind of worked out, and its hard for me to say a definitive long-term goal, he said. But if I was here doing what Im doing with this group of people as a permanent position, Id be perfectly happy with that. So long-term goals, keep doing what Im doing, get better at what Im doing and hopefully be around to see this campus prosper a little more.

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From mill town to research campus a different path right back home - Independent Tribune