Tag Archives: RF2022-Week3

Dr. Zhiqing Huang’s Scientific Career

Throughout her scientific career, Dr. Zhiqing Huang has had to navigate international moves, her obligations as a wife and mother, and her own growing and changing interests as a scientist. At the beginning of our interview, Dr. Huang started by saying that her story was uninteresting because she became a research faculty later in her career than other professors, but I found her story to be the exact opposite of uninteresting.

Dr. Huang’s story starts in China. She began her journey in science by getting her medical degree. In China, unlike in the US, students do not need a bachelors to attend medical school. After attending medical school, Dr. Huang taught pathology at another medical school in China for eight years.

After her stint as a teacher, Dr. Huang found herself interested in pursuing research, so she went to another university to get her masters. Unlike in the US, students must get a masters before their PhD. By the time Zhiqing started pursuing her masters, she was already married and had one child. Zhiqing spent three years getting her masters in molecular pathology, however towards the end of her masters her husband was offered a scholarship and opportunity to work in Germany.

Zhiqing followed her husband to Germany where she continued her masters research and got her PhD in MCB after three years of research. She spoke incredibly highly of her experience in Germany. She described how she’s still in regular contact with her mentor from her PhD, Dr. Ralph Witzgall.

After completing her PhD, Dr. Huang and her husband faced an impasse. Zhiqing’s husband wanted to return to China and practice medicine, while Zhiqing wanted to go to America to pursue a research career. Their family decided to come to America. Zhiqing’s first job in America was as a postdoc in MCB at a lab within Baylor College of Medicine. After completing her postdoc, Zhiqing’s husband got a job at GlaxoSmithKline, leading the family to move to NC. Upon reaching NC, Zhiqing had her second son leading to her taking a bit of a step back from her research career. Zhiqing pursued a second postdoc in NC and following this postdoc, she became a research scientist which led to her then becoming a professor at Duke.

Zhiqing’s lab now focuses on ovarian cancer research. She began her career in pathology and her past work focused on reproductive cancers, primarily breast cancer. After Zhiqing took over her lab at Duke from the previous professor, she took up his work in ovarian cancer.

 

Dr. John Pearson’s Pursuit of Science

Ever since Dr. John Pearson was a kid, he knew he wanted to be a scientist. He is now living out that dream with his own lab, the Pearson lab. Earlier this week, I had the privilege of sitting down with him to hear his story.

Dr. John Pearson grew up in Kentucky and went to University of Kentucky to study math and physics and earn his Bachelor’s degree. Afterwards, he earned his PhD in Physics from Princeton. At this point, he was unsure about what he wanted to do, but he knew he had an interest in neuroscience, sparked by a neuroscience and physics class he took his last year of grad school. Inspired by that interest and his passion for science, he applied for a couple postdoc positions. He started at Duke in 2005 working under Dr. Michael Platt and he studied the neurobiology of decision making in monkeys. This lab was on the bigger side, which was something Dr. Pearson really enjoyed. He appreciated being in an environment where collaboration and learning was encouraged. This stood out to me because the value of teamwork is central to his own lab currently.

A few years and a couple postdoc positions later, Dr. Pearson developed an interest in data science and machine learning. In his time away from the lab, he started taking online coursera classes and training himself in that area. Not long after, he received a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to explore the intersection between computation work and neuroscience. He was an Assistant Research Professor in the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences from 2015-2018. In 2018, he signed to stay at Duke and started his own lab, the Pearson lab, which focuses on modeling and analyzing neural data using cutting edge computational tools. Since 2018, he has been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Informatics, under Duke’s School of Medicine. He really enjoys being the Principle Investigator of the Pearson Lab and some of the highlights include: overseeing a multitude of projects, training and mentoring students, creating an energizing environment with the team, and of course developing amazing new technology. 

Interviewing Dr. Pearson about his journey to becoming a scientist was super insightful and also inspiring for me as I start my journey into science. His path was pretty complex and there is one final piece of insight related to this that I would love to share. I asked him about general lessons for budding scientists and he told me this: Research is hard – it’s as if you’ve been dropped in a jungle with no map. You might panic and it might take a long time to get out, but with some hard work, you will eventually find your way to your passion.

Dr. Ru-Rong Ji: Chief of Pain Research

You know how a lot of the times when you look at someone very successful you imagine that they must have always known what they wanted to do, had a detailed plan of how they were going to do it, and simply did it. Well recently I have been realizing that in reality, this isn’t how the narrative goes, and I was able to see this yet again through mi PI’s story. Dr. Ru-Rong Ji never initially imagined there was a possibility of him going to college. Being from China in a time where there was a lot of political turmoil, he says it was not part of his foreseeable future until Deng Xiaoping opened the country to the rest of the world and the US said that they would allow half a million Chinese students to come study in the states. Dr. Ji earned a bachelor’s degree in biology in China and did research on acupuncture analgesia with a professor in acupuncture for 2 years. This marked the beginning of his interest in pain and neuroscience research, which later led him to get his Ph.D. in neuroscience in Shanghai. Continuing his academic career, Dr. Ji went to Johns Hopkins as a Neuroscience fellow in the school of medicine for 3 years, spent 2 years in Stockholm studying gene regeneration in animal models, and then went to Harvard Medical school which he considers was a turning point in his career as he took on the role of Instructor and got his first NIH funding. After a total of 14 years there he came to Duke, has been here for 10 years, and is currently the chief of pain research. 

Despite not initially picturing his future to evolve into what it has, it is what he now considers to be his dream job. One of the things he enjoys most about it is the new discoveries you can make when doing research, always new and exciting projects, and how creative the job requires you to be. Not to mention the amount of traveling he has been able to do as part of business trips and the like. He says you get to see the world and often be shown around the area by colleagues. Although working in the lab can involve many hours per week, he also enjoys the flexibility that also comes with it.  

It has been so wonderful seeing how much his research means to him and his dedication towards it. From what I can tell, Dr. Ji is also always attentive to the people in his lab and comes in to check on things in the bench lab area at least once a day. A healthy lifestyle and good mentality are things he considers have helped him also get where he is today and says that he sees himself continuing with his research for many more years to come. With this in mind, there are a few key things he considers critically important for being successful which include having a good attitude, being patient, and being persistent. These are things I will keep in mind as I embark on my own career journey and use Dr. Ru-Rong Ji as an exceptional role model in the field that I am profoundly interested in.

Dr. Shyni Varghese: How did she get here?

Dr. Varghese was born and raised in India, traveling around the country frequently due to her father’s post in the military. She did primary and secondary school all over the country, although mainly in the southern state of Kerala. Afterward, she attended Mahatma Gandhi College, an institution that focussed minimally on research at the time of her attendance. However, she was able to conduct research more wholly at the National Chemical Laboratory of India, where she performed her Ph.D.

The National Chemical Laboratory, based in Pune, India, is a government research institute that investigates a wide array of chemical, physical, and biological sciences. Dr. Varghese studied both chemical engineering and polymer physics, investigating the thermodynamic properties of associating polymers. Her investigations gave her a thorough background on hydrogels, three-dimensional polymer chains that are often used in organ-on-chip models, the place where she eventually ended up applying her knowledge.

She next conducted her postdoc at Johns Hopkins at the Elisseeff Lab. The lab primarily studied tissue engineering, but Dr. Varghese worked with the PI, Dr. Elisseeff , to work on stem cell engineering and cartilage tissue engineering, a far cry from the work she did in polymer physics during her Ph.D. However, she says, “my thinking was influenced by it [Ph.D work], but directly, no I don’t use it.” She explains how her Ph.D work shaped her analyses and approach although it didn’t have direct applications to her current cell and tissue developmental work.

In 2008, Dr. Varghese got a Bio-Engineering faculty position at the University of California San Diego, where she spent 10 years continuing her work on bio-inspired materials and stem cell engineering. Her extensive work there framed how she conducts research and the research questions that she now develops at Duke University. Since she joined Duke Faculty in 2018, she has published numerous papers, served on various committees, worked as a MEDx Investigator, and worked as associate editor of Biomaterials Science, a Royal Society of Chemistry journal. She continues her work in various fields including developing smart biomaterials, extracellular matrix biology and engineered matrices, stem cell engineering, tissue regeneration, and organ-on-a-chip technologies.

Working under Dr. Shyni Varghese has been an incredible experience and I have gained invaluable insights about the way research is conducted and the degree of work that goes into maintaining the integrity of results and analysis. I’m looking forward to learning more from her and the rest of the lab during the remainder of the summer and on!

The Scientific Journey of Dr. Pelin Volkan

The scientific journey of Dr. Volkan started in Turkey where she was born and completed her Undergraduate and Masters in Molecular Biology and Genetics. Interestingly, she initially had a strong interest in film but decided to go down the science route and into academia–an ambition she had since high school. This decision brought her to research neural development in the retina and what the genetic mechanisms were in that developmental process. She quickly learned that mammalian research was not for her, so, when Drosophila research gained traction in the 1990s, Dr. Volkan jumped at the opportunity. 

To further develop her career, Volkan knew she had to leave Turkey and ended up down the street at UNC-Chapel Hill to study fly genetics and development for her Ph.D. Her initial work in Bob Duronio’s Lab used Drosophila as a way to understand how cell cycles in the body are regulated through development. This gave her the background she needed in working with flies and learning fly genetics. At this point in her career, Volkan was still figuring out what she wanted to do for her postdoc. She found cell cycles to be fascinating, but it was too crowded and full of opposing ideas. This ultimately brought her back to Neuroscience and across the country to Los Angeles. 

“It [Neuroscience] has always been very interesting for me–from understanding how the brain is organized, how it orchestrates all our behaviors and thoughts, sensations, feelings, and I still wanted to stay in fruit flies, so I decided to do a postdoc in Howard-Hughes lab at UCLA.”

The next layer she wanted to unfold, using her background in developmental biology and genetics, was genetic programs that build nervous systems and connected cells and neurons in different ways to form neural circuits. Two questions that guided this research were 1. How do you wire these circuits correctly? 2. How is the architecture of the circuitry regulated during development? Little did she know that right when she started to get involved in this area, the fly olfactory system would get deciphered and the organization of the system would be already discovered. However, during the genetic screening, she stumbled onto a specific mutation and was influenced by a book she was reading about the life of Seymour Benzer (Time, Love, and Memory) to focus on how to quantify behaviors within the systems of neural circuits which ultimately led her back to North Carolina and to Duke. 

“What we found [at the start of the Volkan lab] was a sensor of environment that regulates the expression of these critical modulatory genes–what I have been waiting for all this time.” 

Why Do You Study That? Dancing Flies | Duke Today

Dr. Pelin Volkan

Today in the Volkan Lab, Dr. Volkan continues to study developmental neurobiology and is also researching how sensory cues depicted by the peripheral nervous systems regulate behaviors such as courtship and feeding to change the expression of certain genes. Outside the lab, you can find Dr. Volkan enjoying music, art, nature, martial arts, film, cooking, and most importantly, spending time with her family. She describes cooking as her zen moment and enjoys continuous motions such as chopping vegetables. Her love for academia and art is shown in her office with diagrams and images all over the wall of Drosophila, but the closest image to her desk is one of her family. 

From Turkey to UNC-Chapel Hill to UCLA and back to Duke University, Dr. Pelin Volkan has a robust scientific career full of many stories. Sitting down with her for even 30 minutes–this is apparent. Another thing that is apparent is her love for science and exploring something new; this desire has led her to where she is today and continues to motivate her as she continues her personal research and expands her work in the Volkan Lab. I am grateful and excited to learn more from Dr. Volkan this summer. 

 

Interview with Dr. Scott Soderling

The Chair of Cell Biology at Duke University Medical Center, George Barth Geller Distinguished Professor for Research in Molecular Biology, Professor of Cell Biology and Neurobiology, and Director of the Transgenic Mouse Facility, Dr. Scott Soderling began his research journey while completing his undergraduate degree at Pacific Lutheran University. As a school with strong biology and business departments, and a close proximity to Mount Rainier conducive to pursuing mountain climbing, it wasn’t until a particular genetics class that Dr. Soderling knew which of the two majors to declare. Indeed, through an introduction to gene mapping using drosophila with a gene mutation, Dr. Soderling became fascinated with discovery – being the first to see something that has existed for millions of years. Ergo, he majored in biology with a concentration in biochemistry, going on to pursue a PhD in the department of Pharmacology at the University of Washington in a lab that studied cell communication, particularly signal transduction through the identification of enzymes impacting this process. Through this intersection of molecular biology and bioinformatics, Dr. Soderling concentrated on the role of cAMP and cGMP in the activation of kinase-mediated phosphorylation and thus cell signaling. During his postdoc at the Vollum Institute, where Dr. Soderling wanted to understand the impact of cell spatial organization and communication on physiology, he identified the WRP protein as being imperative for the WAVE signaling network, the latter of which directs actin reorganization in neurons (Soderling et al., 2002). Additionally, Dr. Soderling saw a clear link between what he was studying and human health when, in the case of a patient with an intellectual disability whose X chromosome and chromosome 3 had been translocated, there was a link between this phenomenon and a mutation in the gene for WRP. 

Today, Dr. Soderling and his lab focus on the neurobiology of neurodegenerative, developmental, and psychiatric disorders through proteomics, mouse models, and genetics. Although the job requires hard work to ensure success and presents challenges when grants or papers are rejected, Dr. Soderling believes the genuine enjoyment he derives from his career surpasses any such tribulations. In fact, this, combined with the freedom to be creative with his academic pursuits, being able to work with smart people from all over the world, opportunities for travel, and watching students and postdocs grow in the lab, is what makes him feel fortunate about the path he’s chosen. For Dr. Soderling, some of the best advice he’s ever received came from his father, who suggested that he choose between academia and industry according to whichever path offered the most options afterwards. Now, his own advice for students considering a career in science or research is to choose that which inspires the most passion and love, for if so, hard work won’t feel like work at all. 

Lastly, when asked if he wanted to share any embarrassing or funny moments he experienced in the lab, Dr. Soderling mentioned a practical joke his fellow lab members played on him while he was a postdoc. As he was reviewing data he had just gotten back for his paper on WAVE1 and the novel WRP protein, he received an email from an alleged professor at another research institute whose work mirrored his own. The implications of such an email were enough to make the blood drain from Dr. Soderling’s face. His lab mates let him sweat for a moment, before bursting out in laughter and confessing that it had been a ruse. Although the moment inspired a mixture of stress and embarrassment, Dr. Soderling laughs while telling the story.

A sincere thank you to Dr. Soderling for his time and the opportunity to learn about his own experiences with science and research.

My mentor: Rachel Keener

My mentor is Rachel Keener. She is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Ko lab in the MGM department. She went to the University of Georgia and majored in genetics. Her first interest in biology, particularly genetics, stemmed from her ninth-grade biology class, in which she learned about genetic diseases. She found it fascinating how one amino acid change/deletion can make someone so sick, yet people can have a whole extra chromosome and still be relatively healthy. Her interest in this field grew further when she took ap bio a few years later and learned about the impact of epigenetics and microorganisms on human health. By then, she had decided to pursue scientific research as a career. What she likes most about science is that she gets to be involved in the process of answering questions she’s curious about. Rachel especially likes studying the intersection between infectious disease and genetics. She has always loved genetics because it’s like problem-solving for her. She likes infectious diseases because it’s easy to see a direct impact by treating them. 

At the same time, Rachel also developed an interest in science policy and global health. She grew up in Atlanta, GA, where the CDC is headquartered. Her future goal is to work in an organization like the CDC, where she would mostly work on cases. She is enthusiastic about communicating science and contributing to policy-making, so she envisions her future career to be 60% research and 40% policy and communication. Her favorite part of the day-to-day as a scientist is the flexible nature of the work — she gets to manage her own time and project. 

Jun Zeng’s Pursuit of Science

My graduate mentor, Jun Zeng, is a 3rd year MGM student at the David Lab. Jun grew up in China, where he recounts loving “taking things apart” and learning how things worked. This love for discovery and exploration has carried him to where he is now, researching the microbiomes of cancer patients at Duke. This path was not always the specific plan- no one in his family had expressed a shared interest in research- but rather a product of continuously following his curiosity.

Much of that curiosity was sparked in high school, after reading the book A Short History of Everything by Bill Bryson. Bryson’s book about life and science ranging from chemistry to astronomy highlighted the wonder of science and was a strong factor in Jun pursing the field. In high school he studied slime molds: did you know that they communicate with chemical signaling? They can move?  Jun smiles talking about this work, reveling in how unique and complex the organisms were.

When he got to college at the University of Washington in Seattle, he knew he wanted to do research and overloaded his classes the first two years to get ahead on his majors Biology and Microbiology and clear up room for lab work during the rest of his time. Does he recommend this stressful, arguably fanatical decision? No. But did it let him spend the latter half of his college experience primarily in the lab, gaining an abundance of microbiology training? Yes. His lab studied bacterial competition and he was even part of finding a bacterial toxin secretion system that could be used for mitochondrial DNA editing. When asked why he reached out to this lab in particular, Jun’s child-like wonder reemerges: “It’s awesome, I mean it’s bacteria fighting each other. I thought it was cool.”

Jun started the MGM graduate program in 2019 and found his fit at the David lab. While he’s had his fair share of lab-related mishaps- such as lighting a bench with ethanol on fire- he finds joy in wet-lab experiences. He likes the process of doing experiments and prefers bench work to the more academic path of a professor. To that end, he wants to stay in the lab moving forward after graduate school whether that be in an academic lab setting as a researcher or in industry. Having received help from online groups of graduate students when he was applying for grad school, Jun also helps mentor international students from China who are applying for graduate programs in the US. He’s been an exceptionally knowledgeable, friendly, and helpful mentor for me these past few weeks and I’m excited to learn more about his experience with research!

Dr. Emily Bernhardt on Ecology and Biogeochemistry

My mentor this summer is Dr. Emily Bernhardt, a genuine, kind, and established scientist who also happens to be the chair of the Duke University Biology Department. In these first three weeks of BSURF, I have gotten to know her a little bit more, especially through weekly meetings and setting weekly and semester-long goals (so-called “frogs”). I was able to talk one-on-one with her this past week regarding her passion for ecosystems ecology and biogeochemistry in relation to pollution and environmental stressors.

Many undergraduates come to college either not knowing what they want to do, or being absolutely dead-set on a pathway initially but then changing their plan completely throughout their education. Dr. Bernhardt, on the other hand, knew exactly what she wanted to do in her undergraduate education and kept with it: ecology. In her words, she has “never met anyone who actually wanted to do [ecology] at that stage.” She has always loved the outdoors and camping, while also maintaining interest in water quality and ecosystems. She also had a neighbor growing up who served in the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps in WWII; this neighbor had collected different species throughout her travels and also other insects and plants, displaying many of them to Dr. Bernhardt. The only thing that changed slightly from her undergraduate experience at UNC  Chapel Hill to her graduate education at Cornell University was focusing on rivers rather than wetlands, but she still studies wetlands to this day.

Dr. Bernhardt said to me, “It could be that I’m remarkably uncreative because I just kind of decided this is something I wanted to do, and I just did it…I just knew.” I personally disagree with the statement that she is uncreative – she has found and still continues to find new ways to involve herself in academia and within university affairs. When I asked her why she decided to become a department chair, she described a year-long teaching for equity class she had taken that primarily taught anti-racism. She believes “it’s not enough to not just yourself cause harm – you have to actively do what you can to make things better.” She feels that by being a department chair, she has a lot more say in implementing these anti-discriminatory actions. She also strongly affirms: “It’s time. We gotta shift the demographics of the faculty so they look more like – well, America, but let’s start with looking more like our student body.”

All in all, I am really inspired by the work that Dr. Bernhardt does, in both her research and her involvement in representation and university functions. She is passionate and dedicated to her work, and her support of undergraduate research is also very obvious; not only does she support BSURF students like me, but also several Data Plus teams. Although I have only known her for three weeks, she has been nothing but open and willing to answer any questions I may have. It is very important to have people like Dr. Bernhardt in academia, science, and overall decision-making and influential positions, and I am grateful for the opportunity to work with her and in her lab.