‘A great scientist’ and a ‘fun guy to talk to’: A tribute to Reuben Kaufman 

If you talk to anyone who’s crossed paths professionally with Reuben Kaufman, you soon find out he’s more than just a world-renowned expert on the ticks that spread Lyme disease — he’s also an inspiring teacher with an engaging personality.  

“Everyone who meets Reuben is captivated by his intellectual curiosity. Reuben loves exploring ideas,” says Janet Sperling, the president of the Canadian Lyme Disease Foundation, a graduate of the University of Alberta, and one of Kaufman’s long-time friends. 

“CanLyme is very lucky to have been able to interact with a scientist of the stature of Reuben.” 

Kaufman, who retired in 2012 after 30 years as a professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta, spent decades as an internationally respected tick physiologist. He spent time in Neuchatel, Switzerland and Oxford, England, where he collaborated with other highly regarded experts in the field.  

He joined the CanLyme board in 2005 and retired from that position last summer. 

‘I didn’t want to go into a well-researched field’ 

He says he was introduced to “bloodsucking insects” while doing his Masters degree. He remembers that at the time, it was a big area of interest for entomologists, but he wanted to go in a different direction. 

“I knew I didn’t want to go into a well-researched field,” Kaufman says. 

“But ticks! Very little is known about the physiology of ticks. When I started my PhD, I asked if I could work on this project and that was how I got into it,” he adds. 

“Of course, the more you do the more interested you become.” 

Kaufman researched the feeding behaviour of ticks at the University of British Columbia, where he studied under Canada’s leading expert in the field at that time, Jack Gregson.  

Kaufman’s impact on Lyme research indirect but important 

The young researcher wanted to discover how they can expand their bodies to take in such an enormous amount of blood.  

“The cuticle of the female tick is actually quite hard when unfed,” Kaufman says.  

“Over time, the properties of its cuticle change. It takes about a week to feed 100 times its weight. Once fed, an engorged tick produces thousands of eggs and then dies.”  

Kaufman was interested in understanding the mechanical properties that allow the cuticle to stretch. He says he never did discover the actual physiological mechanisms, but he was able to measure the way the cuticle expanded and became more pliable.  

His research didn’t touch on how ticks spread the bacteria that causes Lyme and other illnesses. But his field of study is indirectly related to the effort to understand and fight Lyme. After all, the more food a tick takes in, the more eggs they can produce, which in turn means more ticks available to harbour and transmit disease. 

“Even though it may not have a direct relationship, it’s interesting to put together disease transmission by an organism and the biology of an organism,” he says. 

An inspirational professor

As a professor, Kaufman was known as a tough marker whose “tolerance for sloppy thinking is limited,” Sperling says.

But he was also a big inspiration to many of his students, including Dan Riskin, an evolutionary biologist who’s best known to most Canadians as the host of Daily Planet on Discovery Channel.

Riskin took what he calls an “unbelievable” zoology course taught by Kaufman during his freshman year at the University of Alberta. 

“He was so enthusiastic about the hormones in ticks that I was really entertained by his class, his passion and his excitement for the material. He really got me going down the scientific route,” Riskin says.  

Kaufman not only had an impact on 20-something students. He also inspired Peter Flynn, a retired engineering professor who decided to audit a biology course he was teaching.  

“Of course I was 63. And everyone else in the class was 22. So I stuck out a bit,” Flynn recalls in a story about his introduction to Kaufman published on the University of Alberta’s website in 2018. 

It wasn’t long before Kaufman was picking Flynn’s brain to get an engineer’s perspective on the mechanics of how a tick’s cuticle can expand so prodigiously as it feeds. And that led to a lengthy collaboration between the two men. 

“I was able to suggest different ways to characterize the data. We needed to normalize the stress and the strain,” Flynn says. 

Soon after his retirement from the University of Alberta in 2012, Kaufman moved to Salt Spring Island in British Columbia. But his fascination for the physiology of ticks never waned, and neither did his dedication to CanLyme.

‘An unwavering commitment to scientific integrity’

“Janet Sperling was a good friend of mine there. It was good to be part of a group that was related to tick research, even not directly related to the research I was doing,” he says. 

“I enjoyed being a part of a community and I was happy to use some of my academic expertise to join in conversations.” 

And people on Salt Spring Island have been only too happy to assist him in helping with CanLyme’s mission, often bringing him ticks to analyze. 

“The local ticks here were very much involved in Canlyme’s research,” he said. 

“I read a lot of papers about the transmission of diseases through ticks, but not in terms of doing research, but in terms of understanding an aspect of tick biology that was important.”  

Sperling adds that Kaufman was something of a mentor to her when she first arrived at CanLyme. 

“He is a deeply ethical person with unwavering commitment to scientific integrity. I am grateful that I had the opportunity to learn from him in the scientific realm, as a new CanLyme board member just learning how a board functions as well as having some wonderful philosophical discussions,” she says. 

But Sperling says Kaufman is so much more than just the sum of his research and his work with the foundation.” 

“To encapsulate Reuben, I’d say he’s a great scientist, a decent person and I know he’s a proud father and grandfather,” she says. 

“He’s a fun guy to talk to.”