Deborah Daley 00:06
Hello and welcome to Changemakers, a podcast series brought to you by Nature where we shine a light on fascinating and extraordinary scientists.
I’m Deborah Daley, global chair of Springer Nature’s Black Employee Network. And I’m very proud to present this series where we explore exclusion in science and how some researchers are doing something about it.
In episode seven, we meet a Mexican American research leader who has turned mentoring into an evidence-based science.
JoAnn Trejo 00:50
Hello. My name is JoAnn Trejo. I’m a professor at the University of California, San Diego.
My job, basically is as a teacher, mentor, and I also conduct biomedical research.
The goal of our work is to understand how to make cells that line blood vessels, called endothelial cells, resilient, so that they can resist injury and inflammation.
This work is actually quite important because it provides fundamental knowledge regarding how cell behaviour is controlled, but it’s also important because it helps us identify new proteins or targets that might be able to be used to develop drugs to treat vascular diseases, particularly cardiovascular diseases.
And cardiovascular disease is a disease that can lead to heart attacks and to strokes. And in the US, the United States, at least almost 1 million people a year lose their lives related to cardiovascular disease.
And that’s sort of the greatest cause of death in the United States, and it’s greater than cancer and all other chronic diseases combined.
I come from a very modest background, from a family of Mexican farm workers. My family immigrated to the United States in the late 1800s actually, my grandfather came over in 1880 and my grandmother in the early 1900s.
Both of my parents were born in California, and I’m a third generation Mexican American. Neither of my parents finished high school. There was a lot of pressure to continue to work to provide for the family.
Coming from a Mexican American family, it’s very family oriented, and families often work together collaboratively to provide enough money to support the families.
So I have four older siblings, and I am the second in my family to go to college, and I grew up in the central valley, working with my family in the fields, harvesting produce on the weekends and also in the summers.
And I can tell you from my experience that the work is extremely hard, very harsh conditions, extremely hot, and the pay was minimal.
So I have a lot of respect for people, particularly labourers, that work in these types of sectors, and often these are people that are the most vulnerable and often exploited. I liked school from a very early age. I was extremely fortunate also to have great teachers and mentors in grade school and in high school, and they really served as the role models that really set a road path for me with regards to my education.
These early mentors saw my potential. They believed in me. They provided guidance and support and encouraged me to pursue an education and a career in science. When I reflect on my life and I think about how a poor Mexican American farm worker kid from an impoverished background, became a scientist professor, it’s actually extraordinary.
And I reflect on that, you know, was it just sheer luck that I just happened to be at the right place, at the right time and meet the right people? Maybe it was, you know, innate drive, probably had part of it, just my own capacity to be resilient, to be motivated to be really committed and dedicated and goal-oriented.
And sometimes I think maybe there was a little divine power, I don’t know, or maybe it was a bit of all of it. And, you know, it certainly was not easy, though. I had to learn a lot on my own on how to navigate the educational system.
So there have been challenges and barriers you know along the way. You know as a 60-year-old full professor, it is absolutely clear that mentorship is critical for success in everything that that one does, and particularly in science.
And when I think about my journey through grade school, through college, through postdoctoral training, you know, mentorship was absolutely essential for my success.
I would say that my background there were there are no scientists in my family, and neither of my parents finished high school, so my sister finished high school and went on to become an elementary school teacher, but she is not a scientist.
So I had this innate interest in in science based on my experience of, you know, trying to fix things, trying to understand how things work so one could fix them.
And I took, you know, the upper division math, chemistry and physics, and I absolutely, I absolutely loved it.
And I also had the very fortunate experience of meeting a professor from UC Berkeley that was the father of one of my high school teachers. So small world, but he was an engineer and was thrilled that I was interested in science and invited me to visit his lab at UC Berkeley.
And that was just fascinating. And I loved it just be…it was my first time on a college campus. Being in the Bay Area in Berkeley was absolutely beautiful.
And from that introduction and forming that relationship, Dr Oppenheim then informed me that there was an opportunity to do undergraduate research at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which is part of the University of California system, which just sits right above UC Berkeley.
The views from Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory are absolutely spectacular. So I applied to this internship, and I got an offer to come and work in the summer at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, which, at that time, this is what’s, you know, I was 20 years old, so that was like 40 years ago, these types of experiences didn’t exist.
It was very rare to have an undergraduate come and work into a laboratory, and it was a paid internship also.
I did learn later that he had some influence, again, you know the importance of networking, of getting to know people who can help you, and mentors who can really help sponsor you with these sort of activities. And that experience was absolutely transformational.
I got to work in the laboratory. It was my first time actually doing experiments in college. You know, in a chemistry lab at some of the Bio Labs, you did a little bit, but was always in teams, and it was pretty limited with what you could do.
But here I was working in, you know, you know, fully functioning laboratories where there were other scientists and postdocs and students, and it was just fantastic.
Dr, you know, Oppenheim was, you know, an extremely generous person. He also lived up in north Berkeley, and on his property, he had a small, small cottage that they would often rent to international students. It so happened that during the summer the cottage was vacant, so I was actually able to live free of charge, you know, in the cottage.
And that really also allowed me to be able to work at the laboratory to save some money, and just to have this amazing experience. I also got to see what it was like to live a life of as a professor. And I was like, wow, this is actually pretty good. I like this.
And I think you know, when I reflect on this, having again crossed path with this amazing person that took interest in, you know, my education and really opened doors for me, it’s just incredible. And my experience as a mentor, as well as, you know, a faculty member, I see faculty and academics and scientists doing this all the time.
We are a community of individuals that are scientists, and we love our research, but we also understand the importance of training the next generation of scientists, of providing opportunities and access to science, because the next generation are the future of science, and so that is also our mission and our responsibility.
Professor Oppenheim was a Polish immigrant. He came from a very educated Jewish family. Immigrated to the US after World War Two.
He had life-changing experiences from World War Two that he shared with me, and really was an amazing, amazing person, and I’m very, very fortunate to have crossed paths with him.
I live in a country where there is significant and growing wealth disparity in the US. This may be prevalent in other countries. I don’t know the data, but it’s very likely.
And you know, I’m also keenly aware that there are many people from different, you know, racial, ethnic backgrounds, that lack generational wealth and live in communities that lack resources and jobs where they can live, earn a living wage to support their families.
And people are struggling. You know, rents are high. It’s tough. And I see so many young people from, you know, low-resource communities that are brilliant, creative, forward thinking, but they can’t afford to go to high quality institutions for their education.
They can’t afford to take, you know, additional courses or tutoring to do well on standardized tests. They can’t afford to have their parents send them away, you know, in the summer, to get, you know experiences in different areas.
And that really does disadvantage them to be competitive for the best educational institutions, graduate programs, physician scientists, training programs and so on and so forth. And I see this as a big problem and a significant waste of talent.
You know, it’s really difficult to come up with a solution, right? There’s really no clear path to how we can ensure that the brightest and the most talented people have access to opportunities in education to pursue careers in science.
So I see it as my job and my responsibility to encourage people to take advantage of as many opportunities as as they can, and again, trying to find mentors and teachers that can help guide you and provide support and sponsorship, you know, on your journey.
The other thing, though, it’s important to recognize, is that it is hard work and you really have to hustle. You have to be resilient, you have to be passionate, you have to be motivated, and you have to sacrifice.
You know, I have spent a lot of my hours working beyond an eight-hour day to be successful in my my graduate training, in my postdoctoral training. It’s not a nine to five job, but I also see this work as my passion.
And it’s like an artist, right? It’s like your passion. It’s something that helps you thrive. And so I don’t mind working. I love I love it. I love doing science.
You know a lot of people who are just have amazing talent, and we really need to seek these individuals, you know, to pursue careers in science, because it’s really important for, you know, the scientific enterprise that we have people who come from a range of different experiences, different, different thought processes, different ways of approaching problems, how they see things differently, because all of that brings innovation and creativity to our work, and It’s really critical to push the field forward in all sorts of different areas of science, in, you know, engineering, in biomedical research and mathematics, and all of these particular areas.
It’s, it really is quite critical to have this diverse range of individuals. And there are a lot of preconceived notions about what is merit and who should be admitted to our program or who should be recruited as a faculty, and many of these merit-based decisions are based on individual performance on standardized tests or individuals grade point average, or individuals institution and over and over and over again, when people have studied these merit based parameters, they have shown that they are not the best predictors of success, right?
You know, it really has to do more with people’s motivation and determination to really pursue a career in science, and that really has to be taken into consideration.
Maybe a student has a lower standardized test because they could not afford to take these additional tutorial courses to teach them how to take these standardized tests well or during college and even high school, they had to work because they needed to help their family or they needed to work in order to be able to go to college.
And these are things that are not considered often in decisions, when we’re making decisions about admissions into programs and or hiring of faculty.
So mentorship is is very, very important, and we cannot leave mentorship up to chance, because if we leave it up to chance, we’re going to have a situation where some people are going to get extraordinary mentorship, and others may get no mentorship.
And this can be applied to students to postdocs to early career faculty.
And you know, in my mind, it’s very simple is you create a structure, a program, where everybody has access to effective mentorship, where everyone has access to participate in programs that will help them learn how to write a grant, where everyone has access to a program who will help them understand all the different types of skillsets that they need to develop, to become an academic, or to become a scientist, or to be promoted within an academic institutions, or to seek a position in industry, or those sort of things.
And so you create structure, and you then utilize within the structure or program activities that have been shown to be evidence-based, effective in improving whatever the program’s intent is to improve.
You also need to evaluate programs. You need to assess outcomes. You need to determine whether your idea, it’s like doing science, right? You have a hypothesis, you create an experimental design, you do the experiment, and then you get the data, and are the data meaningful?
But you got to have the important controls right, and you have to evaluate this, and it’s the same sort of concept, but we’re doing it with people and programs, and it actually works.
I’m always astonished by the success of these programs, and then how we see no difference based on gender, no difference based on race or ethnicity that everyone is doing equally well in this system where everyone has access to the same mentors and activities that the program provides.
When I think about how I started, which was, you know, now, dating myself, you know, started my academic position actually in 2000 so that’s like 25 years ago, it was a very different environment.
You know, we didn’t have as many platforms to connect with people beyond your neighbours in the same building down the hallway, and it was a lonely experience.
And when I think about how I started and what I did, and what I would do differently if I was that person, (wind back) is I would be much more proactive in building networks, in establishing collaborations and developing relationships with other scientists, both within my institution and outside of my institution.
And I was sort of under the impression when I started as an academic that it was frowned upon to collaborate, because people would think that you weren’t capable of doing the work by yourself. So it was more of a need to collaborate, and maybe people would have viewed me that way, but I know from experiences, it’s a lot more fun, it’s a lot more creative, the work is better when it’s done collaboratively with people.
The scientific community is an amazing community, and to work with people, to collaborate with people, to get to know people, and it just, it just makes science better.
It’s, it’s a way of being inclusive of the scientific community is really, really important.
I intentionally now try to interact and collaborate more with early career faculty, with junior faculty, putting them on grants.
First of all, they’re really smart. Second of all, they understand computational biology a lot better than I do.
And I can benefit from having them, because they bring different skillsets.
And they can benefit from me, because I can help them with generating the hypothesis. I understand the biology more. I am more of a biologist, and we’re a wet bench lab, and so can provide them with, you know, those research aspects of their career. So I really enjoy having these relationships with the junior faculty, particularly.
Deborah Daley 21:22
In the next episode we meet a biochemist in Kathmandu who is determined to improve access and opportunities for Nepalese girls and women in STEM careers.
