For this week’s blog assignment, I interviewed my principal investigator, Dr. Ken Poss, to find out more about his beginnings as a scientist and to gain any advice he may have as I begin my scientific career. Dr. Poss began his scientific career preparing fly media as a Biology major at Carleton College. It wasn’t until his junior year that he began work in a biochemistry lab after taking a small seminar course and being offered the position by his professor who had HHMI funding for undergraduate research. Following his undergraduate studies, he completed a PhD in biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the lab of HHMI investigator Susumu Tonegawa. As part of his PhD, he studied whether or not the knockout of a particular enzyme would have an effect on learning and memory in mice. Following his PhD studies, Dr. Poss drastically switched what he was studying and began working with zebrafish and looking into heart and fin regeneration with HHMI investigator Mark Keating at Children’s Hospital in Boston, MA. He noted that it used to be encouraged to switch what one was studying between graduate and post-doctoral studies to demonstrate that you could be successful at multiple things; however, he believes this model may be fading as different areas become more and more specialized. After completing his postdoc, Dr. Poss became a member of the Dept. of Cell Biology here at Duke University School of Medicine, where he currently resides as a James B. Duke Professor, continuing to study heart, fin, and spinal cord regeneration in zebrafish.
He has some experience teaching in the classroom, though he noted that there is not a major teaching component of his current position, since research rather than classes are the focus of graduate studies. However, he does teach a graduate level stem cell course and gives one lecture a semester to an undergraduate developmental biology class.
Dr. Poss enjoys doing science for the individualism and excitement of discovery. He finds it to be an outlet of creativity and that the benefit of being a principal investigator is you can have many projects going on at once, so although you aren’t the person discovering directly, you can still get enjoyment vicariously. In terms of advice, he advised me to “study something interesting and do it in the best way possible. Find the newest techniques and apply them to my model system before my competitors.”
One thing I took away from my discussion with Dr. Poss is that it is important to learn as much you can from your mentors. It is clear that Dr. Poss learned a tremendous amount from fantastic scientists such as Dr. Tonegawa and Dr. Keating, which presumably helped him to become the scientist he is today.
I would like to thank Dr. Poss for taking the time to meet with me for this interview and for the opportunity to continue working in his lab!
