Maria Rodriguez
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.
Hi, my name is Maria Rodriguez. I’m a Longitude fellow and a graduate student at Rice University studying Geology. We are exploring the approaches of individuals to contemplation, experimentation, and communication in scientific and creative fields.
For this episode, I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Graham Peers. Dr. Peers is a professor of biology at Colorado State University, where he studies effects of photosynthesis on plants, algae, and cyanobacteria.
We start a conversation on how he found himself in the amazing world of biology. Enjoy listening…

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Maria
If you could tell us about your journey into the field of biology and what initially sparked your interest, and then led you to specialize into studying photosynthesis.

Graham Peers
So, I think it depends on who you ask. I thought my travels here were a little random. And I just kind of picked up interesting things as I go along. But if you asked my mom, she’ll say that when I was a little kid, I was like walking around picking up algae on the beach and messing around with things that I called the green slimes, like, you know, in in lakes and things like that all the time. So, she thinks I always had a predilection towards being interested in algae and photosynthesis and green things the whole time. But, you know, I think I came about it in in a kind of a slow way. I wasn’t too sure what I wanted to do and science initially, and because I wasn’t too sure, I was looking for things that were more kind of like general where I didn’t just have to specialize in biology or chemistry or something like that. And so, I got attracted to the oceanography program at the University of British Columbia, which is where I did my undergraduate. And yeah, it was interesting, because you know, for the first three years, you basically just took a little spattering of biology courses. And in my case, I chose biological oceanography. So, a lot of biology courses, you know, some geology, some chemistry, some physics, I think it was really cool. It just gave me a different perspective on things from my friends who took like just marine biology or just botany or something like that. I kind of stayed in the oceanography realm through my PhD. And then I kind of found that I was more interested with the individual organisms and more interested in how they actually got by living just on light and CO2 and inorganic nutrients. And so, I started to read more and more about that in my spare time. And I’ve just started to get absolutely fascinated by photosynthesis. I think it’s the most utterly amazing thing that happens on Earth. Literally, making something out of nothing is just fantastic to me. And learning about the complexity of how plants versus algae versus cyanobacteria do it is something that still totally fascinates me.

Maria
That’s awesome. That’s really amazing! Are you as fascinated with moss as I am? Because anytime I go hiking, I just go, and I touch all the beautiful soft moss.

Graham
Yeah, moss are super cool! I have friends who work on photosynthesis in moss, but I personally never got into it. They grow a little too slowly for my taste. I am kind of an impatient scientist so I like to try and find things out fast.

Maria
Oh, what would grow faster? Cyanobacteria or just like plants itself?

Graham
Oh, yeah. Cyanobacteria. The plants that a lot of people use for Molecular Biology of photosynthesis, one of them is related to like mustard greens. It’s called the Arabidopsis, and it can go through a full life cycle in less than two months.

Maria
Oh, wow. Very quick.

Graham
Yeah, you planted it immediately germinates and then within a month that flowers and then you can collect the seeds again, and keep going.

Maria
Wow, that is very fast. Can you summarize the project you’re working on in lay terms regarding space biology and lunar agricultural research and share its potential significance?

Graham
Yeah, so we’ve got two projects right now that we work on associated to thinking about plants and space. The first one is partnership with a private company that builds instruments that measure gases and the composition of the air in real time. It turns out, you know, other than just making oxygen and consuming CO2, plants also are interacting with the atmosphere in all sorts of ways. And they also make a hormone. We think about things in hormones in humans as being things like testosterone or estrogen, and they’re in our bloodstream. But it turns out there are plant hormones that are gases, as well. And so, if you’re a plant and you can’t move around, how is it that you can communicate with your neighbors? It turns out that they make this gas called ethylene. And ethylene, if you look it up really quickly, you’ll see that ethylene is like a gas that most people have familiarity with, but never knew what it was. And it’s the thing that makes bananas ripen quickly. So, bananas are throwing off all this ethylene, all the time. And if you put a green banana, and next to a really ripe banana, that ripe banana is making ethylene, and it will signal the green banana to start ripening really quickly. And it turns out, plants make this also all the time when they’re stressed out. And so, what we’re trying to do or what NASA wants us to do is can we develop this instrumentation so that folks on the International Space Station or people on spacecraft or even on the moon, don’t have to be continuously watching their plants? So instead of saying, Okay, going every day watering them trying to figure out what their physiology is, can we be continuously measuring things like the amount of ethylene in the air, and when it reaches a certain point, we could say, oh, there’s something wrong with the plants. Let’s go check on them see what’s wrong, right, because an astronaut has a lot of things to do every day, and gardening? Well, you know, it’s important to eat, you know, it’s something that if they don’t have to spend a lot of their time looking at their plants, that could be better for them. So that’s the first project that we’re working on. And that one’s been really fun. The instrument works, we know we can measure ethylene. But now we’re going to see if we can actually measure when plants get stressed.

The second project that we’re working on right now is trying to figure out if we can improve the growth of plants on lunar soil or lunar regolith, so it’s not really soil because soil here on earth has a lot of organic constituents, dead plants, worm poop, you know, all that kind of stuff. But on the lunar surface, because there’s never been any life on the moon, it’s completely inorganic. It’s just ground rock pretty much. And the chemical composition of that rock or this regolith is very different from what we see on Earth. So even though there’s a little bit of shared geologic history between the Moon and Earth, the metal composition of the regolith, and the rocks on the moon are very different from what we see in the ground up rocks that we see on Earth. And so, it turns out that there are metals, particularly this metal called chromium, which is quite abundant on the Moon, and we don’t see very much of it naturally on Earth. So, our idea that we had when we were comparing the makeup of rocks on the moon and rocks on the earth were, okay, we think that one of the reasons that plants don’t grow well on lunar regolith, is because of the really high concentrations of chromium, because chromium is super toxic. So basically, our proposal was like, Okay, we think it’s issues with chromium. So how can we try to remove the chromium from the regolith such that plants would want to grow on it again. And we came up with an idea of using a cyanobacteria that is very insensitive to the chromium. So, at concentrations of chromium where you get poison for plants, the cyanobacteria don’t care. They can grow on them. They can take up that chromium. They don’t really mind. So, what this ends up being is a kind of a bio accumulation study. Can we get the cyanobacteria to grow on the regolith, suck up the chromium, and then use the regolith that’s been cured of chromium now and grow plants on?

Maria
Wow, that’s super interesting. Have you all tried experiments that plants do grow on this lunar regolith, it but they’re just like really stressed out? Or do they just not grow at all?

Graham
Yeah, so here’s the deal. This is the this is the kicker. Because it’s so hard to get that lunar regolith, you know, it’s not just at your corner store, you’ve got to go a fair distance to get that. So there really hadn’t been very many experiments done on the genuine thing, the actual article, but NASA scientists working with private companies tried to develop fake regolith or what’s called Regolith Simulant. And, and plants will grow on that simulant. You know, they’re not the happiest. You have to give them a little bit more nutrients, literally, you can just give them a little bit of a miracle grow, and that’ll help. You know, they grow okay, not great. There are a lot of people have been working on that, but finally NASA said, Okay, we’re going to release a little bit of the real stuff. Okay, and we’re gonna take a little bit and I’m talking, you know, the amount of regolith would be amount of the amount of dirt that you can like, put on your little fingernail. So, you know, they were growing plants, that mustard I told you about earlier, they were growing that. They germinated the seeds on the actual regolith, and the plants hated it. They’re like, Nope, we don’t like this at all. They were extremely stressed. They didn’t reach the end of their lifecycle. That made everyone’s kind of ears perk up, because we said, okay, there’s a difference between the real stuff and what we’ve been trying to use for the last 20 years to imitate growing plants on the moon. What we found was one of the major differences between the actual regolith and what we see in the simulant is that chromium. So, believe it or not, we only found that out, scientists only published that, last year. So, this is a pretty new finding. So, of course, NASA really wants to make sure that we can try and fix that.

Maria
Super interesting. Wow. And so just from my understanding of plants, just from what you had mentioned, when they are stressed in this type of environment, similar to your first project, do they emit that ethylene?

Graham
Yeah, you know what, there have been some studies on other plants and different metals that show that these plant stress hormones are produced during metal toxicity. I will be totally honest with you. I’ve never thought of combining the two projects until you mentioned it. That’s awesome.

Maria
Just to see if they’re stressed out. Yeah, I wasn’t sure.

Graham
Yeah, we have a whole bunch of other ways of measuring plant stress. So like a doctor might measure your blood pressure, right? And say, Okay, well, your blood pressure is really high, your heart is racing, you’ve got this. And then you also have this stress hormone called cortisol. Right? So, a doctor can measure all those things and say you’re stressed. We have different techniques for measuring stress in plants. That’s actually looking at light emission from plants. So, we think about plants actually using light for photosynthesis, but it turns out, they also emit really low amounts of almost infrared light. And the amount of that light that gets produced gets increased when they get stressed. So that’s how we kind of independent measure stress in the lab. Yeah.

Maria
Very interesting. Very cool.

Graham
All the plants outside are glowing. You just can’t see it.

Maria
They’re glowing with infrared light. Wow.

Graham
Yeah, they’re fluorescent red during the day. Yeah. If you have the right instruments, you can measure that.

Maria
Can I ask how did you come to be involved with this project?

Graham
Yes. So, the first one, I was invited by the company and another person who has worked with the company before. They were looking for someone who had more expertise in photosynthesis, so they contacted me. This other project, the Chromium project, is working with a scientist at the NASA Ames lab, A-M-E-S. And I worked with the scientist there during his PhD. We worked together on algae on things that were completely unrelated to what we’re going to be working on for this chromium project. We enjoyed working together and we were trying to find different projects to work together on and this idea cropped up. And so, we decided to put it forward and we’re lucky enough to get it funded.

Maria
Real cool. Your research involves a multidisciplinary approach sounds like, and it combines genetics, physiology, plant biology. So how do you navigate the intersections between these different fields? And what have been some of the key insights gained from this inter disciplinary collaboration?

Graham
Yeah, yeah. How do you navigate it? Oh, man, I don’t know if I have a good blueprint for that, you know. I’ve always enjoyed thinking about different aspects of science. I don’t like to be siloed or just focus on one thing. And I think that came out of that oceanography degree that I told you about earlier, where I took a lot of different things. I like learning about a whole bunch of different things too. You know, I’m not the best at math, I will fully admit that. And so eventually, I kind of reach a point where I have difficulties and often at that point, if it’s something that I’m really interested in, and I think could be a powerful tool, I’ll try and find a collaborator to help with. Because everybody can’t be an expert in everything. It’s just not possible. And so, when I reach the kind of limits of my abilities, then I asked for other people’s help and I’ve never had any problem doing that, in my career, at least. And so, what happens then is that, you know, as you start to interact with people that don’t have a similar background to you, you start to learn additional things and new doors of knowledge open up to you. So, you start to poke around in a different area. Because I think most of us, you know, most active level scientists are still very curious, right? We, we like to find out new things still, even if they weren’t in our previous understanding of how the world worked. And so, I try to take advantage of that as I go along, and combine new things I, I try to look at what’s new in different fields. So, I actually read like the medical literature sometimes just to find out, Oh, what are people doing in this world that maybe I could learn something from, to apply to plants even? I think it’s important to be very open minded to that. And it can be frustrating, right? Because people use different terminologies or you know, you’re unfamiliar with certain methodologies. But if you have a little bit of patience with yourself, you can expand into those regions and start to learn more. Yeah, and so, the intersectionality, you know, it can be a challenge, but it’s also really exciting. It’s important to find new folks to work with who you enjoy working with and can learn from, and that’s really how you push the field forward.

Maria
I definitely agree. Coming from a geology background, I completely agree with that. Because geology is one of the most like interdisciplinary type of fields. We work with all types of geosciences, like climate scientists, soil scientists, like in our department here. Yeah, our field is super collaborative and just coming from that oceanography background, I could see that for sure.

Graham
Oh, yeah. I tell most of my students who are interested in studying evolution and microbes, I say, one of the most important things you could take is a geology course. Because the biological world, when we think about it, working on our life spans, the exertions that are exerted on the biological world are on geologic timescales, and understand how we got to life on earth as it is right now without understanding geology.

Maria
Awesome. So, you mentioned students, of course, and I know you’re not teaching this semester, but what do you find most rewarding about working with students, and do you have a favorite class you teach?

Graham
Can I start with my favorite class?

Maria
Yes.

Graham
Okay, so I actually just started a new class that I gave last semester for the first time. It’s an upper-level seminar and it’s all about death.

Maria
Okay!

Graham
Yeah, so I think as biologists, we spend all of our time teaching things about life. How life comes about, about reproduction, and we really don’t teach or think much about the end of life. And that’s one constant of all life forms, all life forms die at some point. And so, the concept behind the course was to remove ourselves from the human experience. So, I didn’t want to think about humans. I didn’t want to think about the metaphysical aspects, you know, of why are we here, etc, but instead to look at how other forms of life experience death. Just to expand, so really, you’re still thinking about biology, right? But you’re, you’re approaching it from a different angle and thinking about the diversity. So, for instance, we read scientific manuscripts and looked at data about organisms. This one organism in particular, there is a jellyfish that is immortal. Any as it gets towards the end of its adult lifecycle, it turns back into a juvenile again. And it goes back and forth. And they’ve done this cycle hundreds of times. So why? how does that happen? That completely is unusual, right? That changes our thinking about life cycles, etc. Another thing we learned about is some of the molecular biology associated with really long-lived trees, things like Gingko trees, or Giant Sequoias and things like that. Those organisms live for so long. And they don’t have the markers of aging that we see in animal systems and other plant systems. They’re just not doing the same thing as everything else like that. And they’re not related to each other. They’re very distantly related to one another, like Ginkgo’s and Sequoias are different groups of plants entirely. And they have all these relatives that can’t do it, but somehow, they’ve gotten to a position where they can have extremely long 1000s of year lifespans. How does that happen? So, there’s two examples of kind of how we think about things differently. So, it’s fascinating. It’s really intriguing to me. And the students, I think, really kind of get a broad idea of the diversity of what’s out there. Much more so than just taking a botany and zoology course. So that’s my favorite course right now.

Maria
So, for my own edification, which jellyfish is this, that is, quote, unquote, immortal that Phoenix’s into its new life?

Graham
Yeah, oh, I can’t remember the species name right now, it doesn’t really have a popular name. It’s very rare. I would have to look up and send it to you. I don’t have it at my immediate recall.

Maria
I’ll keep a lookout. Oh, my gosh, wow.

Graham
Yeah, it’s super cool.

Maria
Yeah, for that first part, what do you find the most rewarding about working with students?

Graham
Yeah. So, the best part about working with students is honestly seeing students become independent and they’re their own thinkers. It is, by far the most amazing thing. Just to put this into perspective, I have two of my most memorable students when I first became a professor here, these two students, they’re both in one class of mine, they both are applying for and getting interviews for professorships this year. And that is the most rewarding thing, I think that I’ve ever experienced as an instructor. To see people go from learning about science, practicing with science, to being experts in their field and wonderful teachers on their own, it’s just phenomenal. And so that’s the really, the most rewarding thing is to see a student, you know, essentially struggle a little bit with new information, struggle with how their worldviews change, but gain their own tools, they had their own experiences, to be able to say, I can do this, like, I am able now to take new information, put it into perspective, and go in a new direction with it.

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Maria
We hope you enjoyed hearing about the interesting facets of photosynthetic biology and the innovative ideas that come out of biological research. If you are as curious as I was about the immortal jelly fish Dr. Peers mentioned, it turns out, it is called Turritopsis dohrnii, a very small animal about 4.5 millimetres wide and tall, making it smaller than the average fingernail!

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To view the episode transcript, please visit Longitude.site. If you’re a college student interested in leading a conversation like this, visit our website Longitude.site to submit an interest form or write to us at podcast@longitude.site. Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

 

 

Emory Mckenzie
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

Hi, I am Emory Mckenzie, I will be your host today. I recently completed my masters in Geosciences at Rice University and now working for Chevron to discover energy resources.

For this episode, I had an opportunity to speak with Brandon Dugan Professor of Geophysics at the Colorado School of Mines. I was curious about Brandon’s research on unconventional freshwater resources that discovered under the Atlantic seabed. I wanted to know more about how he develops such fascinating research.

Join me in a conversation about his approach to science, mentoring, and writing papers and what led him to this project. Enjoy listening!

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Brandon Dugan
I was always fascinated with science and engineering and started out just as a math major. Maybe on the on the creativity side and the brain of an 18-year-old, it seemed kind of boring to me. I was good at math but doing math for math’s sake didn’t really encourage me or excite me or anything like that. So, I just started looking through a physical paper catalog at the time in the 1990s, you know, what majors used math to do other things. And I found the geological engineering program. It seemed to engage my math and science brain, but also my desire to work with nature and see things. So unbeknownst to me, I sort of saw early creativity of trying to take natural processes and explain them with math and physics. I started out and completed my degree in geological engineering and during that time, I was fortunate enough to do two internships at Oak Ridge National Lab. And so, in the middle of taking my classes where everything had an answer that was perfect to three decimal places in my engineering curriculum, I started measuring things in the earth during these internships. I realized that the Earth was much more complex than a number that I looked at in the book. And so, I really got interested in how the Earth changed and how well we can understand that. I started thinking about water processes and sort of it was going back to my youth, I spent a lot of time outside in nature playing in water, and I saw that, hey, I could still do my science and engineering and look at water. I just saw the complexity of Earth and the elegance of math and how we could work together to explain problems. Pursued that on my PhD more on the geo side, on the earth side of things, and on the engineering side. And I’ve continued that career just chasing problems that I want to find an explanation to. I might not find an answer, but I can at least provide some insight to how something works.

Emory
You were more into geomechanics and like slope stability on the seafloor, and now you’re in the freshwater resources. How do we get to that transition?

Brandon
Great. So yeah, as you mentioned, Emory, for my PhD, I worked on geomechanics. So how sediments in this case, not rocks are things that were softer than real rocks, kind of like modeling clay, how they break apart and form landslides in the ocean on these really low angle slopes, almost flat slopes. We did a lot of work, both with elegant math and field studies, just like I talked about and how I got there of trying to understand this. And in doing so I was just looking back at a lot of historical literature. What do we know about these continental shelf environments near the coastline. And I found these, this dataset from the 1970s, where the US Geological Survey had found freshwater beneath the ocean on the continental shelf. They weren’t looking for freshwater, they were actually trying to do a minerals assessment along the margin of the United States in the 1970s. And so, they wrote about it, but it wasn’t their primary objective. So, they didn’t really try to explain it. And so, it was geographically proximal to where I was studying submarine landslides. And it was just another problem or phenomenon that was interesting to me. Why would you find freshwater beneath a big body of saltwater the biggest body of saltwater on Earth? And so, I started trying to explain that, again, similarly, trying to understand, theoretically, how could this water be there in the perfect world? How could we explain water being 50 kilometers offshore, and 200 meters below this below the seafloor being fresh enough that you could drink came up with some predictions. And since then, we’ve been trying to collect data to improve and revise those predictions about how that water got there. How much water is there? And what that water might be used for?

Emory
Could you speak to like how collaboration helps the creative process for you? Like, how is their expertise fueling your motivation for studies?

Brandon
I think part of it, it sort of starts with my career starting out in engineering and going to geosciences. I’ve been able to work on both sides of that field and see that what a geologist knows and can work with an engineer to solve a problem. So, when it comes to things like, I need to look at solute transport, how salts moving around. I understand the basic physics of that problem but to really understand what we need to measure and how we need to measure it, I need to talk to somebody who thinks about that problem intimately and they can share their information with me, and I can share my information with them. The sum is greater than the individual parts kind of thing. For me, it’s always bringing in new knowledge. We pay a lot of money, we put a lot of time into collecting data, let’s get everything we can out of it. So, if somebody can contribute to the puzzle, let’s think about how they think about that science. And then I might think about it differently based on their perspective, just like you might think about it differently from your perspective based on your training if you’re a pure engineer and as a pure geologist, and we’re studying the same problem.

Emory
When you bring students in to come work with you, is it best to have a kind of geomechanics background a freshwater resources background, or engineering?

Brandon
I guess for students who are coming to work with me, I probably view two things that are probably less discipline specific than that first is really important. So, one is a passion about whatever problem they’re working on. So, if I have a student who is really interested in geomechanics, that’ll get me excited about geomechanics and we can learn together. I have a student who’s really interested in freshwater resources, and they have a project they want to attack that that will excite me, and we’ll work together. And that’s again, going back to collaboration and teamwork, you can feed off each other’s enthusiasm. So, I don’t really have a preference, it’s more of their perspective of why they want to do this and what their end goals are, whether it be to go work for a government agency, to go work in an engineering consulting firm, you know, as long as they show that passion and that enthusiasm to me, that’s what I’d like. And then underlying that, I like to see strong math and physics backgrounds, because whether it be in the modeling that I do numerically, there’s a lot of math and physics behind that, or even the field work that we do, there’s a lot of math and physics underlying that. And so, if they have that underlying knowledge, I feel like I can mentor them, and help them learn the discipline-specific things, whether it be electrical resistivity surveys, or triaxial stress experiments, or groundwater flow, I feel like I can add that subject expertise on top of the fundamentals.

Emory
So those students who come in, they want to work on a certain problem. Let’s say they want to branch out how do you influence them, or motivate them to branch out of their comfort zone and study a different problem and learn a new discipline?

Brandon
I try to let students develop their own thought process. So, I will help them with questions. I will rarely tell them what they have to do. And if I see things that are peripherally related to what they’re doing, I might point them in the direction say, oh, have you ever thought about this, or when constructing their thesis committees or things like that, I tried to make sure that we have a well-rounded group of people. So, they’re getting feedback from people who are not the same expertise as me.

I just returned from the American Geophysical Union Conference last week in San Francisco. It has a whole range of geophysical problems. And so, when I’m there with students and mentoring them, I tell them to go explore things that they’re just curious about, maybe it might not be their primary area of interest but there’s 20,000 wonderful scientists there. Let’s go hear what some other people have to say. Maybe they’re talking about water on Mars. So, it’s related to water at some level, but it’s on a different planet. So, I try to encourage students to think of their skill set and how it can be applied to other disciplines, because their creativity, their interests will change over time, we might get new datasets that will change over time, we might discover old datasets that will make us think about something differently. So I always like to encourage students that it’s their approach to thinking about a problem, which is which is what’s going to get them success, not just picking I want to do this problem, because it’s exciting right now in the news, or it’s a buzz trending on some social media, you know, they should do what interests them and try to find creative problems that excite them.

Emory
I’m glad you mentioned the conference because conference is where you get a lot of ideas. There’s so many people studying so many different sciences that you might hear one word that like piques your interest in talking, it’s like, this is something that I want to study now.

Brandon
Yep.

Emory
I love geosciences. Because it’s always a linkage between two sciences, now especially, you have to incorporate many disciplines to kind of understand a problem. Have there been any big discoveries in freshwater resources within the past, say 20 years?

Brandon
Yeah, so I’ve collaborated with Chloe Gustafson at Columbia University, her PhD advisor, Kerry Key at Columbia University, and another colleague of ours, Rob Evans, at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the 2000s, really developed how we could use electrical techniques in marine environments to image where we see pieces of the earth that are more resistive or less resistive. And that has allowed us to basically make 2D pictures of where we think freshwater and saltwater interacting beneath the ocean without actually sampling them. So, it gives us targets to drill if we want to understand the age of those waters, and when they were emplaced, or geometries to think about, where, is water flowing in really thin lenses or is it in big, blocky bodies. And so, they overcame some pretty interesting technological concepts to be able to do these electrical surveys in the ocean because the ocean is full of saltwater. So, you put current in it, and it just wants to short circuit and go right through the saltwater. And so, they were trying to basically set and current into the more resistive layer. They figured that out and it’s now helped how well we can constrain where freshwater might be in the offshore environment without actually having to drill the well like they did in the 70s. Of course, we have to work with well data to get the true rock properties and fluid properties. But the two work together to get sort of fine scale features and then map them out more regionally with the geophysical data.

Now we can look at precise locations where we might want to drill and sample the waters to find out if they’re 10,000 years old or 100,000 years old, or 100 years old, which might tell us something about how quickly they’re recharging. Are they recharging over human timescales, something like a modern aquifer that we use to get a lot of drinking water and agricultural water from or is it something that’s a relic from in a previous climate state when sea level was lower, and glaciers were larger, or something like that.

Emory
When you’re writing a paper, so how do you kind of get creative, let’s say in the discussion section of a paper?

Brandon
I guess I’ll talk about my writing process in general. Two things that I do when I start writing is, first one is, I think about the figures I want to present. What is the data and information that I want to show? Doesn’t have to be the perfect figures. They can be hand sketches, but the first thing I want to show. I’m looking offshore in New England. I need a map. I need to tell them where we’re working. We’re gonna show them some seismic data. So, I’m gonna have to have a picture of some seismic data. I’m gonna have a groundwater model so I’m gonna have to have, you know, some of these things. So, I look at the picture and that sort of tells, that gives me the overall flow of the paper that I want. And then what works best for me is just to write, so it’s just brain dumps. I don’t try to edit. I don’t try to do anything. And I just, I just write, and I write, and I write, and I write, and then I go back and sort of rearrange things to align with the order of those pictures. And then when it gets to, sort of the main part of your question, where’s the sort of creativity and the integration come in? I go back to what motivated me about this. The introduction of my paper is going to say, what motivated this study in freshwater resources. I’m just really curious as to why do we have freshwater offshore. We predict that there might be as much as 300 years of freshwater available to New York City offshore, even if it’s not renewable or recharged today. That’s pretty amazing to me that there’s that much freshwater beneath the ocean. And so, when I’m thinking about the discussion, I’m trying to think about, you know, what’s my original, simple prediction based on theory. How was that refined from the data that I collected? Just like you mentioned. And then how do I weave these things together to sort of say, how much of that original motivation have I addressed. Yes, we’re confident the waters there, we have uncertainty about how much because we have uncertainty in this data quantity. If we change our model by this much, here’s, here’s where we get with uncertainty. And so, I think about a lot about how do I put uncertainty on it. Or another way to think about is like, how can I put confidence on my work? And it’s by pulling all these things together, being honest to the data. An observation is an observation. You have to explain it to your audience, whether it aligns with your original hypothesis or not. It’s usually my experience, the ones that don’t align with the original hypothesis are the ones that require the most creative thought, not to explain them, but to understand them so you can explain them. Why didn’t this match? There’s a reason for it. It can be because I didn’t understand the system, it could be because we took a sample the wrong way. All of these things are valuable. So, I go back and think about what was my motivation, have I used my evidence to support that we’ve made some advancement there, and also motivate future science.

So, when I’m talking to my graduate students, or early career researchers and colleagues, I tell them that any great science project will answer one question and ask six or seven more good questions. And to me that’s success. It may feel like you’re not making a lot of progress, because you keep asking more questions. But that’s actually one of the parts where a lot of us, myself included struggle when it comes to science, because you’re trying to address this one question. And then two new ones pop up and you want to address those. But at some point, you have to say no, I need to stop and just answer this first question and save the other ones for later. And so when do I call a project done? Well, it’s probably never done, but I know when to stop and restart and share the information with the community.

Emory
It’s the beauty of science. Once you know one thing, we need to know three more.

Brandon
Yes, exactly. You’d asked or mentioned sort of like how I deal with like roadblocks at the beginning in things like if I have roadblocks when I’m writing, when I’m thinking about new projects. For me, it’s really, I love my work. I love what I do. I’ve been doing it for 20 plus years, it’s evolved from different aspects of mechanics to freshwater, but breaks are important. And so for me, it’s being outside in nature, whether it be hiking or walking. I like to spend time out in nature. I used to do a lot of running, now I do a lot of hiking and camping. Even simple things as I commute to and from work most ways, I park in the farthest place that I can of a parking lot, so I get some extra time outside. To me, it’s that fresh air and recycling of it, let’s my mind sort of let go of everything. Forget about it. And then a couple hours later, the next morning, pick it up. So, for me it’s just physical and mental detachment from the workstation as much as I love the workstation.

Emory
I greatly appreciate your time and all the insight.

Brandon
Thank you.

Emory
I’m kind of interested in freshwater resources now!

Brandon
Yeah, it’s really cool what we’re doing. So, we think the one in New England is driven by the last age of glaciation. We have glaciers there 10,000 years ago, but we’re also looking at some in New Zealand where there weren’t glaciers 10,000 years ago. So, some of these looks like they are sort of active today and some look like they’re probably relic. Sometimes you find the most curious things when you’re not looking for them and nobody was looking for freshwater and beneath the ocean and that’s what they found.

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Emory
We hope you enjoyed our episode. I’m constantly fascinated with our ability to find natural resources that contribute to the well-being of society. Brandon’s approach to research showed me that exploring past discoveries, then applying new knowledge can lead to developing great science and solving problems.

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