What is your job title?
Associate Professor and Director of the Mouse Behavioral Assesment Core.
What are your main duties and responsibilities ?
Most of what I do is management. Managing experiments, meeting with people, training, writing- grant writing, paper writing. It’s very diverse, actually it’s almost hard to have an answer for that because it changes on a day to day basis. I could be down doing experiments with animals, or I could be up here [in the office] writing a grant, I could be meeting with other scientists.
Can you describe your most typical kind of day, or some of the tasks you perform each day?
A typical day that would be a diverse day would be coming in and catching up with emails and making sure that everybody knows what they’ll be doing today and if anybody has questions, I’ll work with them to answer them. Then maybe I would get myself organized and go down and run an experiment. and then, for example tomorrow I’ll be down there doing an experiment, I’ll be injecting mice and testing them, and then after that, I’ll come up [to the office] around lunch time, then settle down into checking emails, and maybe I’ll have a request from somebody from somewhere like UCSD saying “We heard about you and we want to get a quote from you for testing our mice with this new drug that we’ve come up with” and they’ll ask for us to provide a quote, and I’ll of course say “Sure!” I’ll write back, ask for a few more details, then make the quote for them, get it all formalized and sent off to them. Then I need to do some data analysis, so I’ll sit at the computer and do some stats, then I’ll write up the methods and results for whatever I’ve just done, then I’ll send that off. So, my day is a lot of just keeping up with my emails and doing little tasks all day [laughs]
Were you always good at balancing that, or was it something you learned over time?
How did you end up working at Scripps and what path did you take to get here?
I originally wanted to be a veterinarian. I grew up always loving animals and wanting to work with animals. When I was in highschool I wasn’t the greatest student in the world, I mean I was probably like a B+ kind of student- not bad, not great- and when I was starting to think about colleges, I realized that If I wanted to be a veterinarian, I need to go to UC Davis. Then I thought, “I’m not sure I can get into UC Davis”. Back then- this is very interesting actually because thankfully they’ve changed this- but back then, they had very inconvenient way to apply to the UC system. You could only apply to one school at a time- isn’t that weird? So you would list your school choices from one to four- maybe it was more, maybe it was as many as you wanted- but the way it would work was that they would send your application to your number one, and if they accepted you, great-they’d tell you, if they didn’t, they’d send it to number two. I guess at the time they thought it made sense. I would get so nervous because I thought that if I didn’t get into UC Davis, I might kind of miss out. So I decided to play it safe and applied to UC Santa Cruz- I knew I could get in, I loved the campus, loved Santa Cruz, it was great. When I was at Santa Cruz, I knew that I could still pursue veterinary medicine if I wanted to, but I became extremely interested in Psychobiology- I started as a biology major but then I took a couple of psychobiology classes and I was like “duh-nuuh!” [triumphant “aha-moment” sound effect]. It was taking what I loved about veterinary science- working with animals, watching animals, and analyzing their behaviors, and taking that into science instead of a practice. I still remember some of what I learned in psychobiology- I still remember some of my crazy professors. I mean they were crazy- for some reason the psychobiology professors are a little bit psycho themselves. They were such characters. Anyway, I rememebr learning the behavior of bees in terms of following the queen, and we did other migoratory behaviors, and the behaviors of elephant seals as they dive down and we used math to calculate how far they would dive down to get the maximum amount of squid and all this kind of cool stuff. It was all about how the brain interacts with the body- so biology plus psychlogy, which isn’t quite as quantitative. And that was that, I changed my major to psychobiology, which they offered at Santa Cruz. Then in my Sophomore Year, I got a research position for the summer, and then I really realized, oooh, resarch is fun, I really like designing experiments and figuring out how to answer a question- sort of what your experiencing. After that it was pretty basic. I realized I watned to go to graduate school so that I could actually run my own lab someday and os I just geared my college toward making sure I could get into graduate school. I went to portland oregon for graduate school, and that was an incredible experience. After I got my Ph.D in 1993, I stayed for a one year project and then came down here in 1994. I worked with a famous scientist who is now working in Washington D.C. to head up the National Institute of Health Department of Alcohol Abuse. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to move up with grant writing, because the funding was starting to really drop at that time. So I asked if he was interested in having a lab manager to run his lab, deal with people, and help him write his grants. So I got a great deal of experience with that job, and it really helped me gain the skills that I needed to be able to run my own lab today.
I’ll be very interesting to watch your generation, especially you and and others who have gone through the High Tech High system because you get that early exposure to just feeling good about yourself- not cocky, but secure. Secure in yourself, in what you can get done, in maybe not having all the skills, but being able to be okay with that and being able to look for a team who will help you get where you need to go. I want to see how your generation will progress. I hope that your generation will ultimately change the climate [in regards to collaborative work in the scientific field]. I still feel like science, at the upper levels, is very “one for yourself”. But what the government a lot of funding agencies have started doing is support collaborative projects because it is much more cost effective. So, I can’t wait to see how your generation will thrive in the scientific field