I was able to interview my PI, Dr. Staci Bilbo this week, and while I had met her once before. It was a great experience to learn about her career journey and why she chose to be a scientist in the first place. Dr. Bilbo studied psychology and biology at the University of Texas. The research she partook in focused on the spatial navigation of frogs and lizards and this is where she fell in love with research. It was a clear path for Dr. Bilbo to continue on to grad school because for her it was the best way to pursue a career in science. During her time at school, she became interested in the concept of neuroimmune interactions. It was a novel idea at the time to study the responses we have when we are sick and the idea that the immune system was playing a role in this. After taking a class on neuroimmunology, she learned about macrophages in the brain (microglia are one of them) and how behavioral changes must involve microglia in some way. This was an incredibly new concept because it was believed up until then that microglia only caused problems in the nervous system. Moving forward to the present, Dr. Bilbo runs her lab which focuses on microglia as well as having an appointment at Massachusetts General Hospital and running a lab and retaining employees there as well.
Besides doing research, I asked Dr. Bilbo, what are other parts of her career she enjoys and she mentioned how much she loves teaching. It is an incredibly fulfilling part of her job at Duke and she gets to teach a neuroimmunology course that no one else does.
Lastly, I wanted to touch on what she liked about science the least. She said how sometimes there is too much emphasis on how many papers you have published and how high an impact the journal it was published in is. This mindset discourages people from taking risks in their scientific endeavors because there is a chance that your experiment will not work and if that happens you can’t publish a paper. She wishes that there was more of an opportunity to simply conduct science for the joy of it because you do not know what will happen. You are at the forefront of emerging ideas and that is incredibly exciting even if they don’t work out. In summary, Dr. Bilbo wants scientists to have a better capacity for failing and I found this to be really encouraging advice. It’s really nice to hear your PI say that it is ok to fail and that it’s part of the process.
I had such a great time talking to Dr. Bilbo, and it was really cool to learn more about her. I’m super excited to keep working with her and my other mentors in the lab.
