Roxanna Mendez
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring you innovative insights from around the world.
Hi, my name is Roxanna Mendez, and I am your host today. I’m a student at Rice University, studying Architecture.
In this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Shellye Arnold, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Memorial Park Conservancy.

Memorial Park is the largest park in the Houston Metropolitan area. The Conservancy plays a crucial role in managing the park. Shellye Arnold has dedicated over 10 years to the organization, witnessing firsthand the park’s transformation.
With the ongoing changes and new constructions in the park, I seized the opportunity to ask Shellye not only about her role but also about the process required for this large-scale transformation. Tune in to learn how funding was secured, the challenges faced in such a major public project, and the must-see attractions if you ever visit Memorial Park.

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Roxanna
What led you to the park Memorial Park Conservancy?

Shellye Arnold
So, I actually came out of a corporate career, I studied public policy, and ended up right out of graduate school in a management consulting role that led me to a career in the tech world in leadership positions. I really wanted to get back to public service, about 10 years before I got this role, sought to change my career and orient myself that way. But I didn’t really know how so I started volunteering, and related things. And that led to this. And so here I am, I’ve been in this role. 11 years this month. Wow. And that was after about a 20-year corporate career. I can say about a third of my career is this now at this point, which is really great.

Roxanna
So like, what do you do in your current role? And how do you feel in it, you know, being the president and CEO of such a large organization?

Shellye
Well, I have helped really evolve the ability of the organization to deliver on its mission. So, the organization that I came to, had a mission already established. And it was a very small organization with about three people and about a $300,000 annual budget. The organization was at a point because of the 2010 and 2011 drought, where there was a big outcry from Houstonians from the private sector, citizens from the public sector from, you know, elected officials and government officials to do something about Memorial Park, because at the time, you know, 2012 2013, they were seeing the death of 10s of 1000s of trees. And driving through Memorial Park was like driving through a funeral. And people wanted to do something. There was a real outcry and then a commitment from the public sector side, the mayor at the time, who was a nice Parker, and her team wanted to find resourcing, to address the decline in Memorial Park, that wasn’t just the trees, the park was declining, for decades had been in decline. It wasn’t just the ecology; it was the built structures as well. The concerns its approach was, we need to do a new master plan for the park. And the city’s approach was we needed to do a new master plan for the park. And they both committed significant funding. And so, the conservancy at that point, decided it needed to grow significantly, and become a professional organization, as opposed to a board led organization. And the city found a source of funding to put into and commit to the park. And so, to your question, my role is to evolve that mission, to work together to bring the resources the team, the people together, to define this master plan, listening to the public, listening to science and data, ecological listening to stories, histories, tell, listening and asking. And so informed by two years of research and asking, we formed a master plan. So, my first role was to help develop and deliver the masterplan while establishing an organization and then beginning to fundraise more aggressively, then. So, my role then became to build outreach into the community, relationships, credibility, trust, and, you know, build, and retool the organization. So today, we are a 75-person organization with about a six and a half million-dollar annual operating budget. And we are executing a $200 million capital program.

Roxanna
Yeah, it sounds like you’re putting all the moving pieces together to make the project advance.

Shellye
I’ll say I am one of many actually.

Roxanna
Yes.

Shellye
I’m the one speaking to you right now but I am one of many people, and that’s the key takeaway is, it takes many people to do something like this. And you have to be working hard to establish alignment and maintain alignment to kind of row in the same direction. And we do, we do that together. Well, first of all, we are a public park. We operate the park on behalf of the City of Houston. The city oversees our work overseas to make sure that we’re executing in accordance with the Master Plan intent, and to make sure that we are operating the park in accordance with our contractual requirements. And that’s to protect the public asset and that makes a lot of sense.

Roxanna
Yes.

Shellye
And then we have project partners Also at the Uptown Houston organization, which is a public entity as well. And then we have project partners at the Kinder Foundation. That is our largest donor. And they establish themselves as part of this as an oversight body along with the city. And so, there’s something called the Standards Committee. We all sit on it together to make sure that we’re rowing in the same direction and make sure that we are executing correctly.

Roxanna
Yeah, there’s definitely a lot of moving parts to this, you know, such a large-scale project definitely requires so many people. So, I’m sort of curious, like when you were entering this position was this 10-year plan already in motion?

Shellye
The 10-year plan started as a result of coming together of this partnership. Houston Parks and Recreation Department and the Uptown Houston organization. We were the first project partnership. We together, delivered the master plan in 2015. And that was after years of interviewing Houstonians. We had a survey that was online for three months. We had eight large public meetings that were around the city in different parts of the city, some were standing room only, some were just filled to capacity. We had some in Spanish, some in English. We had, I think, 20 workshops of folks who ranged from teachers to cyclists to runners, you know, all kinds of park users. So, we had over 3300 Houstonians participate in this master planning process. We had an ecology technical panel, where I asked the Sierra Club for help, because they were actually opposing us delivering this master plan.

Roxanna
Oh, wow.

Shellye
And so, I asked them, if that would help us. And what do you want? I think we have some shared objectives here in terms of advancing the ecological services function, and restoration of the park. And so, they helped that they gave me that list of people to bring into the panels. And so, we got this panel informing us for years during master planning process and all these other people that I mentioned. We hired stormwater management experts, we heard historian, we brought a history panel together, mostly volunteers. So, we had that. Then we had the master plan. So, the city approved the master plan in 2015, it became a city ordinance that was unanimously approved by city council. And then we started off on the work together. We started fundraising. At that point, the Kinder Foundation approached us. And so, we really decided together with our project partners, that they would join the effort with this catalyst funding of $70 million that leverage them another $50 million dollars from the city. And we committed $55 million on top of that, and then we agreed that together, we would seek $30 million of federal public funding. So that’s where over $200 million number comes from, to deliver 10 years’ worth of projects. The 10 years’ worth of projects became the 10-year plan. That happened in 2018. None of that was underway when I joined. When I joined, I joined to do these things specifically. I didn’t we didn’t have the words for 10-year plan, and we didn’t know how it was going to play out. But then when we all came together the four partners now the Parks Department, Uptown Houston, Kinder Foundation, and we, we defined 10 years’ worth of plans $205 million, approximately worth of capital investment, the operating plan for these projects, and then we started off together in 2018. And so, between 2018 and 2028, we’ll deliver 10 years’ worth of these plans.

In 2020, we delivered the 100-acre, Clay Family Eastern Glades and a sports complex. We opened those during COVID. At first the sports complex couldn’t be used but Clay Family Eastern Glades was like a lifeline to so many people.

In 2022, we fully moved the one-mile segment of the Seymour Liebermann Trail that runs long Memorial Drive, off of Memorial Drive. So, we take runners now and walkers, all the people that use it through the woods and over some ravines, over some bridges. It is really, really, pretty and no longer on Memorial Drive so you don’t have that danger on the street. It’s so much, it’s so much better experience.

In 2023, just a little over a year ago, we opened another 100-acre project called the Kinder Land Bridge and Cyvia and Melvyn Wolff Prairie. I know architecture students find that one very exciting.

Roxanna
Yes, we do.

Shellye
And then at the end of 2023, in November, we opened the two parts of a three-part running complex which has become quite popular, and then an event plaza that is a rental space for weddings and other functions. And soon we will open a new cafe and that’s the last part of the running complex. And then we will be on to our next project, which is likely to be Memorial Groves, which will be a third, 100-acre project. and to put that in context 100-acre park, that would be the 10th largest park in Houston. That will be the third one inside of Memorial Park. That’s a very special feature.

Roxanna
Yeah, that’s definitely a lot of work getting done on the park. So, I’m sort of curious, you mentioned community involvement. How did that help shape the final vision for the plan?

Shellye
It was and is really, really important. Before we even started design, we spent 18 months listening and asking, listening and asking. We were seeking input from any Houstonian that wanted to participate because this part is for all Houstonians. And so, we were treating it that way in terms of public input. It allowed us to understand what Houstonians wanted and didn’t want. For example, one of the biggest things that we heard was they wanted to keep the character of the park the same. And what evolved kind of as the character of the park was that it was this uniquely urban wilderness experience right in the middle of town, and an active recreation park, but also passive recreation. People didn’t want that to change. For example, what would change that would be to formalize the park. And so, for example, Hermann Park is a very formal European Park, it’s a wonderful park I grew up going to Hermann too. It’s a contrast to this park. So, they wanted Memorial to stay that way, urban wilderness, recreation. Another thing people wanted; a big request was access to the parts of the park they didn’t know. So, the parallel to that was safe crossings across Memorial Drive for people and animals. So those things all went together to inspire the land bridge, which became much more than that. But another thing people wanted, were gathering spaces, they didn’t feel that there were enough gathering spaces. And related to that was inviting places for families, for kids, for elder family members. There just didn’t feel like two people, there were those spaces. And really, there weren’t except in one area of the park. And that area wasn’t well served or well known. And so those were just some of the things that we heard. A lot of people did say they wanted their forest replanted, and then a lot of people would say, you know, they just wanted it healthier again. What the research led us to understand is that what we started off doing replanting forest, that’s what we started off doing. We even had signs that said, “Your forest will live again” on the road. That wasn’t intended to be. That’s not what nature wanted. And this park, we learned through the research was historically a native grassland, Gulf Coast prairie. Most of Houston land was this grassland prairie. That’s why we have farming and ranching. But what happened in Memorial Park, was that a lot of pine logging operation established itself in the 1800s here. And that’s why I became a largely pine forest in part. So anyway, back to your question, which was what did people want? They wanted their park to be healthy again. They wanted like decent restrooms. They wanted the trails repaired. There were very few requests for new things. But we did listen, we read every single response. And we did you know, the things especially that were the high focus areas for people that were the common requests, we did our very best to accommodate those. So that’s what you’re seeing.

Roxanna
Thank you so much. I think that was a closer look into how you know, community inputs affect these large-scale projects in order to like make it more for the people. You were talking about the landscape architects. So how did you approach hiring them? Was it through competition? Or was it an open call or another process?

Shellye
There was a group that was assigned to select the landscape architect. And it was a group that was comprised of people from the mayor’s office, people from the parks department and people from the conservancy. And people from the Uptown Houston organization. There were a couple of people that were really instrumental in identifying the best of the best of landscape architects that fit the criteria that we put in place. And so, the criteria were that they had experience managing, damaged or challenged ecology, so doing some ecological restoration, that they performed work, that was large scale impactful, visible globally, data science driven. So, what we didn’t want was a designer who was going to come in and bring just their ideas to the table and put their thumbprint on it everywhere and make it about their vision. This was going to be a vision that needed to be developed organically by asking and researching and looking to the future. So not just looking to the past, looking a lot to the past, to represent the past in the stories that the land would tell, but also to look to the future. And so, we had four firms that we brought into interview. And there were 10 or so people on this panel. They just narrowed it down to the final interviews, and Nelson Byrd Woltz strongly prevailed. And we’ve been very, very happy with their work. The other firm that we brought in that was very impactful is Lord Cultural Resources. They lead the public input engagement piece, and they lead the market research piece. We also talked to Steven Kleinberg, sociologist. We spoke with all kinds of folks as part of the market research work.

Roxanna
That’s great to hear, because I’ve seen the master plan, and it’s really beautiful and really great. So, it’s nice to know that was not only done by a good firm, but one that really takes into consideration that the people that it’s working with and working for.

Shellye
Oh, very much. And if I could, I’d like to talk a little bit about their approach that I’ve since learned one of the reasons that they are so distinctive in their work. In addition to listening, and asking, and researching, they think in terms of systems. So, let’s say we’re going to do a project. Let’s take the land bridge, for example, and prairie.

Roxanna
Okay.

Shellye
That was inspired by the need to cross Memorial Drive safely, animals and people. And that Memorial Drive, which is virtually a six-lane highway with a median bisected the park, 1500 acres, literally cut it in half. We kind of think of it as a wound as much as people love driving down Memorial Drive through the park. From the park perspective, it was a kind of a wound to the park for years. And so, the first idea was, Let’s heal this, you know, create these safe crossings. But then, because the research was done, and thoughtfully in terms of systems, all the work was done thinking in terms of systems. So, we ask questions like, how could the park absorb more stormwater? So how can the park be a better big green sponge? How can the park better absorb stormwater that will help the park itself because we lose so much land? It every time it rains and every time there’s a huge storm, it’s not good for the park, that millions of gallons of sheet water flow across the park. It’s not good for the city to have millions of gallons of floodwater flowing into downtown and into Buffalo Bayou Park. And so how can Memorial Park be a better steward to Houston? You know, how can it better serve Houston? And so, thinking about stormwater management is one of the systems that we looked at. And so, the projects that we created, the land bridge and prairie has 50 or 60 acres of prairie that is native grassland prairie that is the most, for our zone or region ecological zone, the most absorbent of stormwater compared to turf or trees. It’s also you think in terms of carbon dioxide, how can the park absorb more and sequester more carbon dioxide? The prairie does that better than any system in our area.

And then you think about like the soils and how to use the soils. We dug up 500,000 cubic yards of soil from around the land bridge to create a 10 feet down prairie and from the Eastern Glades Lake, we used them to create nature bridges. And so, we didn’t have to bring in 61,500 trucks of soil across driving down the freeways. So again, thinking in terms of systems and then cultural systems you can think of too. Demographics. We want to ensure that we are welcoming all Houstonians. Everyone comes and feels welcomed here, can afford to be here. We try to maintain everything or almost everything is free, that we manage or very low cost. So, half the parking is free, for example. Those are the systems we think in terms of.

Roxanna
That’s it’s really good to know I think you know all these systems that you’ve mentioned are sort of like addressing previous problems, and you’re trying to find a solution for them.

Shellye
And future problems.

Roxanna
Yeah, future problems as well.

Shellye
We anticipate more drought, more hurricanes, and more freezes.

Roxanna
I was just like thinking more of like, with all the solutions, but have you faced any unexpected challenges?

Shellye
Oh, yes. All the time. I think one of the hardest challenges we’ve had is growing an organization that fast. We were three people in 2013. We were nine people in 2016. And we took over managing 1100 acres of the 1500-acre park. But we did it and we did it because we have good partnerships. The people that we had are good people. Very committed, very talented, best of the best what they do. And in 2017, we had 20 people. So now we’re at 75. These are generally hard jobs, but they’re fun and challenging. The park itself presents unique challenges. I think if you can help ensure that some large percentage of people that they’re serving are happy, and I can understand why you’re doing what you’re doing and be inspired by what you’re doing. And that’s what a lot of people find here. They’re inspired by the work. We want people to come away better than they came into the park. Just better in some way healthier, happier, more connected, connected to other people connected to nature. Just better.

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Roxanna
I hope you found our discussion on Memorial Park’s 10-year plan enlightening. It is important to understand the large amount of effort behind the ongoing construction and revitalization of the park. It has certainly added depth to my appreciation of such projects. Hearing about the extensive input of community involvement that shapes these plans was particularly impactful. Next time you visit a local park, perhaps you’ll reflect on the considerable planning and community effort that contribute to its beauty and functionality.
Thanks for listening.

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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.

 

 

 

Louis Noel
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.
Hi. I am Louis Noel, Longitude fellow and graduate of Rice University in Mechanical Engineering. For this episode, I spoke with Helen Little.

Helen is a mechanical engineer at Axiom Space, but she is also a talented artist and engineer in many other disciplines. We delve into Helen’s unique perspective on how her artistic background enriches her diverse engineering endeavors and vice versa. Join us as we uncover the symbiosis between art and engineering in her life, and how this fusion not only drives her professional journey, but also shapes her approach to problem solving and innovation.

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Louis
You earned your Bachelor of Science in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from Rice University but before that you attended the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Houston. From our past work together, I know you’re a talented sketch artist, creative writer, and avid reader, could you share what influenced you to pursue engineering at university instead of a degree in the arts?

Helen Little
Well, first of all, thank you for describing me so generously. That was definitely an interesting choice for me. So when I was in high school, I got to do three hours of visual art every day, as part of my schoolwork. And then the rest of the day was dedicated to high level academic classes that were available to me. And by the end of the four years, I was realizing like, I had already gotten the opportunity to really like, put time and energy into art, and not so much into the academic subjects I was interested in, which were mainly science and math. The other thing that I realized is that, even though I really like math, and science, and art, realistically, I felt like it was easier for art to be a hobby, rather than the science and math to be a hobby. And it’s easier for art to be the hobby without a degree. If I really wanted to get into like math and science and engineering, I would need a degree for that. So, I think that that held true. And then the last reason which I didn’t realize at the time when I made this decision, but more so, you know, looking back in hindsight, is that I think the reality is, in our capitalist society, the nine to five work schedule, I feel like it works way better, or doing engineering work. Like it’s easier for me to turn on that analytical side of my brain and a nine to five format, versus doing that with art, where there’s a lot of waves of creativity and motivation that are more difficult to kind of push into that. And I think that has to do more with just like how our society and work life is set up where it’s just, it’s just easier to do it, via engineering versus than art. So that was also a benefit.

Louis
That was a really good breakdown. I can only imagine that, you know, it’s easier to explain it in two minutes than it was to actually go through it. There are a lot of interesting insights that we will get into some of that, so really teed it up well. Your projects at Rice and your subsequent professional roles, suggests that you have significant aptitude in various fields of engineering, notably mechanical and software engineering. For instance, you designed and prototyped a zipline for feeding lions at the Houston Zoo, worked at Epic, the largest medical record software company, innovated in 3D printing with recycled plastic at re:3D, and are now contributing to the design of the world’s first commercial space station at Axiom Space. How did you discover your passion for these diverse engineering disciplines? And how have you cultivated your expertise within them?

Helen
Well, when you list them all out like that, it does seem very diverse. That was not intentional on my part. I did not plan that at all. And the way I kind of approach working in different things or changing jobs, I actually don’t plan that far ahead. I know there’s a lot of people who like to have very linear career paths, and think, Okay, I’m gonna get this degree and do this graduate school and then go to this role than that, that will go to this role. I haven’t been doing that. Instead, what I’ve been doing is just pursuing things and topics that interests me, for the sake of that they’re fun, and trying to not think too hard about how they will actually manifest in a quote unquote, practical or useful way in my life, whether that means like, a career or whatever. Because I feel like I can’t predict that ahead of time and so in the short term in the present, if I’m interested in, you know, urban design, I’ll go watch some YouTube videos about that. And maybe some people will think that’s a waste of time, because I’m not an urban designer, but who knows. What if something I do in the future, this interests that I kind of fed, somehow comes back around and actually helps me out. And I find it it’s so difficult to predict that and sometimes those opportunities only come after dabbling a little bit in whatever space that’s interesting. So it’s like might as well just dabble into whatever is interesting to you today and figured out like the rest later. I’m sure there’s cons to doing things that way. It’s worked out for me so far. But it does involve like picking up new things quickly. That is one con to it versus like just building on something that feels safe and that you know. And for me, I think I’ve just accepted the fact that I will always have to start from zero in terms of learning new things, and just accept that I’m just going to be like, unknowledgeable about topics at the beginning and there’s always going to be a bit of a learning curve. And I think having that humility to admit that I don’t know things is what actually helps me learn things faster, because that means that I’m not afraid to ask the stupid questions and reveal my lack of knowledge in order to fill that lack of knowledge. That’s the only way to really learn.

Louis
I feel like you have a lot of curiosity, I know. And we talked about intrinsic motivation in a past episode. And I feel like you were really leveraging that and as a creative, you can have these ways of dabbling, and then go back, if it ever comes up in a future conversation and kind of lean on those things that you may not have previously had exposure to. But wow, you had so many good takeaways out of there, like especially talking about just trying new things and having the humility to ask questions. That’s really the fastest way to learn.

Helen
I almost feel like I had a false perception in college that, like life was going to be very linear and planned out. But I suspect that a lot of people think that and that’s not the reality, for most people, I think, most people’s lives take unexpected turns. And that’s more the norm than otherwise.

Louis
Yeah, which fundamentally leads to some of that anxiety. We’re kind of teed up as this career path and then you get to figuring out, oh, it’s not all like that and there’s more flexibility in career and you know, what you’re interested in.

Louis
Designing, prototyping and testing appear to be hard coded into your skill set. You won first place at an innovative designathon, created an interactive exhibit at the Houston Weather Museum, and imparted your knowledge to hundreds of Rice students at the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen, where you started as a junior lab assistant and eventually became the head lab assistant. Could you explain the design prototype test process for our lay audience? And how does it engage you as both an engineer and creative thinker?

Helen
All right, great question. Um, so I take this as the engineering design process, but you can have different versions of it applied to solving problems that are not necessarily engineering. And for me, the steps are actually broken out even further. So, you got to define the problem, research the problem, brainstorm, choose your solutions, prototype, and then test. I guess I kind of like expanded the design section of that and that’s an iterative process. There is sort of like a linear step by step, but at any point in that, you may have to double back and go back to a previous step based on what you learn at any one step in the process. And it’s just a way to sort of break down how to solve a complicated problem efficiently. So, when solving any kind of problem, there is a process through it. So, the first step is to define what is the problem you’re trying to solve. That’s the first step because if you don’t know what problem you’re solving, you may design something for a completely different problem and not actually make a solution that works for whatever is at hand. Then after that is research. So, gathering a bunch of background information, seeing what has been done already, just start to kind of like, give some information to start working off of. And then brainstorming is very important in that it allows you to let your mind wander and really be creative and coming up with potential solutions. And the really key part of the brainstorming step is to not jump ahead to judgment of any solutions, because that is what will kill the ability to be generative with ideas. The idea is just to come up with a ton of wild ideas as much as you can. And then from that you call the solutions and you pick which ones are actually good or seem decent. And then prototyping is actually trying to implement it in a way that is low cost, proof of concept as quick as possible without having to build the final thing, just to test out some basic principles of it. And then that’s when you test a prototype and then what you learn from that, you know, you can always double back. Like maybe you make a prototype and then you realize, you know, whoever your customers or clients, whoever gave you the problem, maybe find something else about the problem that you didn’t realize you didn’t properly define. Now you have to go all the way back to the defining the problem. And then maybe you have to redo some brainstorming now that you’ve redefined the problem. Or, you know, maybe you test a prototype, and you realize there’s some issues with the prototype. So, then you go back to the brainstorming phase, what solutions can we come up with to improve this prototype. It is like, generally step by step but there’s loops within that as you gain more information and it’s iterative. So, you’re kind of building yourself closer and closer to your final solution. There’s this concept known as spiral development, where you kind of just build different things. And every time you re try to build something, you learn from the previous one, and you just get closer and closer to your final solution. Because nothing is ever built perfectly the first time, I think that’s really what it gets at.

Louis
That was a perfect explanation. I feel like that was, you know, anyone could understand that. And you, like you said very early on in the answer it is a process for solving more than just engineering problems, which I’m curious to hear about in this next question. In what ways do you lean on your creative mindset to deliver engineering solutions? And has there ever been a time when your engineering mindset helped you solve an artistic problem?

Helen
Okay, I’m gonna flip this question on you, and actually answer the opposite, where the artistic mindset helped me with the engineering problem.

Louis
Okay.

Helen
Because I started with art in high school and the process for creating an art project actually had a ton of overlap with the engineering design process I learned in college. Usually, when you’re making an art project, you kind of start with, Okay, what’s the general thing I’m trying to make? In school, initially, the teachers would define that. They would say, hey, I want you to make a piece of art that uses these materials, or this size, or it’s supposed to convey this concept, or you’re supposed to use this technique. So, they define certain aspects of it. And then you’re supposed to come up with the rest. So, before you even make the piece of art, I would take my journal and write down ideas or thoughts I have about it, to explore. And then we would draw what’s called thumbnails. So, it’s just like a quick sketch of whatever the thing is, so you can kind of get a general idea. And I would, thumbnail different ideas, write out different lists, and then from there, kind of select out, okay, I’m liking this direction, or let me combine these two ideas for oh, this is interesting, but not quite it, let me branch off and try to do something related. And then once I settle on that, that’s when you like, start to actually execute, and you make the artwork. And then, you know, anyone who’s like a full-time artist, or usually it’s not about the fact that they just made one piece of work, it’s that they have a body of artwork. So, they have made a piece of art, learned something from that, and then made another one that, you know, maybe it’s similar in some ways, but explores different aspects. And you will have whole collections of artists doing like a certain style of work. And if an artist like lives long enough, and does art long enough, they’ll have periods, like how Picasso had his blue period, right. So, it’s really the same in engineering, when you just follow the same engineering design process, with like defining the problem, brainstorming, executing on it, learning from it, and then basically doing it all over again.

And the other aspect from art that really helped me in engineering was learning how to critique. So in art, what we would do is, everyone would be given an art project. And then when the project is due, we hang up all the art and we all sit around and go through each piece and talk about each piece in terms of like, what we’re interpreting from it, ideas for how it could be better, or what we liked about it, what we didn’t like about it. And it’s not just feedback for the artists themselves, it’s also an exercise for the people giving the feedback to understand how to actually analyze something, to improve it. And that in itself is a skill and takes humility too because, you know, when people create art, a lot of times they’re very emotionally attached to what they create. And that can make it difficult to be a little bit more objective to see like its flaws, but you kind of have to do that in order to improve on it. And it’s also really valuable to accept that critique from outside perspectives too, which can also be even, you know, more anxiety inducing and harrowing for people. I see the same thing happen for engineering because a lot of engineers really care about the work they produce, and they can feel very self-conscious about having it be critiqued by someone else and point out the design flaws. But you just got to remember, at the end of the day, you want that work to be the best it can be. And inherently, it kind of does involve being able to look at it and fix the things that are wrong with it and to get help from other people to get that outside perspective. Yeah, I mean, it happens a lot, everybody has a blind spot, or like, you know, maybe they get 90% of the way there, but that last 10%, they can’t see it, and you just have one other person walk in, and they immediately see the issue. And you’re like, yes, thank you.

Louis
Wow, I never really thought to consider that but you’re right, there are really similar ties, especially when you brought in the concept of critiquing, or giving feedback. I feel like we don’t really do that much in engineering in our formal education, aside from maybe when we get put on a group project, then we have to, you know, duel against someone else against a known idea, but sounds like as an artist, you had a little bit of a head start on some of us. So that’s great,

Helen
I can give a more explicit example, actually, from work. So, you know, I’m currently work in aerospace and NASA has what’s called the NASA product development process. And the idea is you know what your end product is, which could be a space station module. And there are all these things that need to be designed at different stages of maturity in order to reach that. So, they’ve broken it down into different stages. So, there’s like SRR, which is you define your requirements. SDR, which is like the system definition. And then you have PDR, which is like your preliminary design. And then CDR is Critical Design Review. And so, there’s like all these reviews at different points in the maturity of a product. And the point is that, at any one of these reviews, the people working on the project create a data packet, and they present it to everybody. And so, you have all the other stakeholders, you have like subject matter experts, senior technical advisors sit in and basically critique the design at that stage. And that’s to, essentially, catch any situations where maybe like, there’s a requirement that’s misunderstood, or is incorrect, or there’s something missing. And so you catch it at every stage so that you don’t get too far along in the process going in the wrong direction, essentially.

Louis
That’s a perfect example. I can imagine like, you need to have some sort of structure to doing this. I mean, can’t just rely on tribal knowledge passed down. Yeah, it seems like having some structure to the process really enables you to de-risk a solution.

Helen
Exactly.

Louis
So some might think fields like science, technology, engineering, and math lack creativity due to the black and white nature of their governing laws. However, creativity often drives breakthrough innovations in these areas. What are modern methods for integrating creativity into engineering? And could you share an example?

Helen
Yeah, I really hate that take that they are separate. And I really don’t see them as being totally different disciplines, there’s so much overlap. I mean, the whole discussion is kind of pointing that out. But when it comes to STEM fields, I think the really exciting part of those fields is building something new. So innovating, like furthering technology, building upon what currently is into the unknown. And so, by definition, it isn’t black and white. Right? Like you are working with uncertainty and that’s where being creative, being innovative is key. I think I heard somewhere that a lot of innovation happens from connections being made between different fields. Which kind of makes sense, because, you know, if something is truly innovative, it’s probably because people overlooked it.

Louis
Good point.

Helen
Unexpected. So, like the best places to look for innovative ideas are where people aren’t looking for them. The big example for that at my current role is, I’ve been learning a lot about space architecture. So, this is this integrated concept of how do you actually design, for example, like a space module or a space station. And the history of this is that initially, these designs were very much driven by engineering and engineering principles, because there were major engineering hurdles to be met for people to live in a zero-gravity low earth orbit, Space Station. And so, that was where most of the focus was put on but over time, people realized it’s not just about the engineering and using engineering problem solving methods don’t solve for everything, such as things like human factors or architecture or like the psychological effects of working in this type of environment. And that’s where like people outside of engineering disciplines kind of come in, you know, people with backgrounds in industrial design or aesthetics or like UI UX and things like that. And I think it’s tempting for engineers to be kind of snobby about it and like, who cares about things looking pretty, we need to keep you alive. But then you have to, you kind of have to ask yourself, you know, it’s not just about surviving, it’s about thriving, right? Like what is the purpose of creating new technology or engineering. Like at the end of the day, these things will impact people, so you have to remember the people aspect of it and like we don’t live in a vacuum.

[music]

Louis
We hope you enjoyed our episode. I particularly enjoyed how Helen highlighted the value and importance of critiquing and engineering, similar to art. Whether you’re an aspiring engineer, an artist, or anyone in between, Helen’s story is a compelling reminder that the paths to fulfillment and success are as diverse as the individuals who tread them.

[music]

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.

 

 

 

 

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…

[music]

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.

[music]

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!

[music]

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.

 

 

 

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

Hi. I’m Louis Noel, Longitude fellow and graduate of Rice University in Mechanical Engineering.

We are exploring the approaches of individuals to contemplation, experimentation, communication, and decision making.

For this episode, I spoke with Dr. Jacob Beckham. Jacob is a post-doctoral associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A chemist by formal education, Jacob’s work also involves many other fields, like material science and biology. Join me in a conversation about his path in academia, communicating science, and leveraging creativity. Enjoy listening!

[music]

Louis
You earned your Bachelor of Science in chemistry from the University of Georgia, and then advanced to Rice University for your PhD in chemistry as well. As of September 2023, you have been a postdoctoral associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Could you describe what led you on a path in academia, as opposed to other scientific careers?

Jacob Beckham
Well, thank you, Louis, this is a question I get a lot, but it’s a really good one to start off with. And thank you so much for having me on, it’s real honor.

First off, I wanted to kind of set the stage for people by describing the different options people toss around when doing a PhD in the sciences. Generally, and there’s exceptions to this, there’s more options than just these three but if you want to continue doing research or scientific lab bench work, you kind of have three options: You have industry, national labs, and academia.

Industry is where the majority of graduate students in the sciences end up working. And there’s sort of a huge diversity in the jobs that people end up doing in industry, some are still in the laboratory, some are even doing a chemical synthesis. I’m from chemistry so that’s typically what I think of when people are going to these pharmaceutical companies. Some are doing product development for technology companies, some are in strategy, some are in sales. You get a really large diversity for the people going into industry. And it used to be that a lot of leading basic science research was done in the industrial sector as well back in the era of like Bell Labs in the 90s. I heard Dr. Rowland Pettit, in a previous episode actually mentioned this, some basic science still does happen in industry. But by and large, a lot of it has moved back towards academia. Really, the only sectors doing really impactful fundamental research on the industry side now are AI companies and some parts of the biotech industry. And even then a lot of companies would rather acquire a startup developing a new technology rather than develop it themselves.

Then there’s the National Lab side. So national labs are actually just this awesome middle ground between academia and industry that I feel like not enough people really appreciate. You get incredible work life balance, because everyone is working on a team. By and large, and they’re a full-blown adult, professional, they have their doctorate, they’re not a graduate student or a postdoc. Because of that, it’s a better place to keep organizational continuity, you don’t have to replace everyone, every five years. You have huge amounts of resources and money being handed around to tackle big challenges that sometimes aren’t tractable in places like academia or industry. So, I am pretty passionate about national labs, I spent about a year working at Lawrence Livermore, out in California during my undergrad. I consider that kind of the place that I fell in love with science. There’s really something wonderful about that national lab environment that I enjoyed. The tradeoff for the culture and resources, of course, is that you’re a little bit more limited as to the problems that you can work on. So, if things don’t have direct ties to national interests, or lab objectives, it’s a bit harder to justify what you would like to work on.

Then there’s academia. And frankly, when you make the pitch as to why you would want to be an academic over the other two options for logical types of people, I don’t think it makes a whole lot of sense. You make less money, especially at first, unless you start a bazillion companies off of licensed patents. The work life balance is worse. Most of the time you’ll have to move multiple times before finding a position that can be permanent. So, to be honest, when I started my PhD, I did not think I was going to end up in academia. Eventually, though, I think a few things clicked into place for me. One of my biggest strengths I consider about me as a scientist is my creativity and academia is the place where I feel like that can shine the brightest. Second, I really like being the person coming up with the ideas, the one that’s furthest upstream in the idea, you know, bog through commercialization. Third, I actually really enjoy teaching. And obviously, you get, you get to teach in multiple ways as a professor, which is what I want to do, you get to teach in a class, which I think I would really enjoy. And you also get to teach your graduate students every single day. I’ve started realizing that I really enjoyed watching my fellow graduate students encounter problems, and then find it in themselves to overcome that. I also loved like being relied on during that process. So that whole process of academically growing up and helping people to reach their full potential. I feel like I got a small taste of that at my PhD, and it made me really crave more of that. So, when I found myself like, volunteering to edit people’s papers for like, no reason I was like, Huh, okay, I think it would enjoy being a professor. Yeah, so sorry for the long-winded answer. I just wanted to make sure people understood the options, and that’s why I want to be in academia.

Louis
That was an excellent answer. I really couldn’t have thought of a better way to describe it. I mean, first of all, I didn’t even really consider national labs and it’s really interesting to learn about that middle ground.

Jacob
It is underrated as heck.

Louis
Yeah. And it’s open to a lot of people. I mean, as an undergraduate, like you said, that is a really good way to put your foot in the door, try things out. And as you know, the way we first met is you were trying something out. You went on the Rice Ignite Entrepreneurship track to learn more about commercialization of these research projects, and I’m really happy you landed on such an exciting journey in academia, and I know you’re going to be excellent teacher. You’re super creative, which we will discuss more in this.

Your published papers indicate a multidisciplinary approach converging the fields of chemistry, nanotechnology, material science, and biology. You have a significant emphasis on the synthesis and application of graphene-based materials, and the innovative use of nanotechnology for biological applications. Could you share two examples of your work that best illustrate the breadth of your research for lay audiences?

Jacob
I feel like your questions are so well crafted, like you can really tell that you dove into what I did. I just really appreciate that attention to detail.

Louis
I really appreciate you pointing that out. It takes a little work. So glad you recognized. Thank you.

Jacob
So, as I mentioned in my previous answer, I think I realized one of the things I really like about academia was that I can express my creativity and doing different kinds of projects. So, you covered it perfectly. It’s graphene-based materials, innovative use of nanotechnology for biological applications. So, I started with graphene, and then I sort of went into biomedical cell signaling and I sort of ended up doing a lot of neuroscience adjacent stuff, which is where I currently am in my postdoc.

The lab that I did my PhD in was the Tour lab at Rice University and Tour lab describes themselves as a carbon nanotechnology lab. That is super broad. But basically, if you can think of it, if it’s nanometer size, and it’s made of carbon, we’re interested in it. I joined that lab because I became fascinated with graphene. So, if you’re unfamiliar with it, graphene is a two-dimensional material, meaning that it’s literally a single atom thick sheet of carbon. You get some fascinating properties from these 2D materials. One of the big problems to graphene though, and the thing thus far that limited its commercial viability, it’s really difficult to make large amounts of material. So, our lab set about making new methods of making graphene, and we eventually came up with a pretty good one: joule heating. So, we found that if we took a carbon sample, and we float electrical current from a large capacitor bank through it, we generated heat. And even the direct passage of the electrical current plus that heat could drive chemical transformations. These transformations happen in milliseconds, and in carbon materials, they drove carbon to its most stable form, which was graphite. But since the material also cooled very rapidly, when the reaction was stopped, you could trap the carbon halfway through the formation of graphite, which resulted in graphene. This method was really interesting, for two reasons. One, you can make very large amounts of graphene very quickly, we were routinely making gram scale when other people in the world are struggling to make milligrams. And two, you can make it from almost any material, including waste materials, like rubber tires, plastic waste, and even food scraps. At one point, we had an undergrad literally just burn olive oil in a pan, bring it into the lab, and we made graphene out of it.

So, the second example, I promise, I’ll be shorter on this one. The second example was the use of molecular motors to control cell signaling. This was what you said about using nanotechnology and creative ways for biomedical applications. One of the earliest projects in the Tour lab sought to make molecules that work similarly to macroscale objects. Lately, we’ve been working on molecular motors. So, these are just molecules that spin when they’re exposed to light, and they exert mechanical force on their surroundings. So, there was a lot of work done in the 90s that showed that you could stimulate a signaling cascade, called a calcium wave by tapping the cell membrane with a micropipette. So, my work showed that you could do the same thing with a molecular size motor. This is really cool result because fundamentally, every drug in the field of pharmacology works by driving or inhibiting a signaling cascade using a chemical force. And here we are triggering a signaling cascade with a mechanical force. Functionally an entirely new paradigm in drug design. And this sort of added to a growing sentiment, especially in the field of what we call photo-pharmacology now, that you can do medicine with drugs that act by mechanical force, rather than chemical force.

Louis
That is just remarkable. I mean, the fact that you have the range, first of all, to go from just purely chemistry, but then go into material science with very physics heavy, and then apply that to biology and biomedical applications. It’s just, it’s really cool to see engineers and scientists like yourself, be creative about how they can maybe apply their work to several different types of fields. So that was a really good breakdown.

Jacob
I appreciate that.

Louis
It could be over a few people’s heads, but that’s great. I mean, it’s tough to distill this down any more simply. Yeah. Since 2020, you have authored nearly 40 papers published in world leading journals, which have amassed almost 500 citations in total. How do you manage involvement in multiple projects simultaneously? And what are your strategies to maintain your prolific output as a writer?

Jacob
Well, first off, I was, I was really lucky and really blessed to be in a productive group and surrounded by very talented peers. So, I do write a lot but I think I was only first author on maybe seven or eight of these papers. So, I mainly helped the other ones. I was just editing them or gathering data or coming up with ideas or experiments, or otherwise contributing to, you know, the novelty of the projects and making an intellectual contribution. So, a lot of that is because I had talented friends. And I do think that it’s important to manage collaborations well to invest in the people around you. So typically, I try to manage my involvement in that I have two to three projects of my own, and then a few deliverables for different projects going on all at once. So, kind of that’s really useful, because when I hit a roadblock on one, I can just work on the other and kind of keep the other one in the back of my mind, eventually, I’ll figure something out and come back to it. But both my ability to complete my own projects, and my ability to help others with their own work is fueled just by my ability to connect with my peers and coworkers. I consider it a core value for me to care about people intrinsically. And I hope I continue to be helpful, even if I didn’t benefit professionally from it. But as it turns out, I have benefited massively from it. So, in talking with people about the problems they encounter with their projects, I will very often see a way that I can contribute and take something off their plate, which will land me on their paper. And in talking to people about my own problems sometimes they do the same for me, which takes something off my plate makes me faster. So, this collaborative spirit, I think, was one of the key ingredients fueling my productivity and the productivity of the Tour lab as a whole. We talked about our work, maybe a little too much but that much dialogue and knowledge transfer overall into a really efficient group when it came to overcoming problems, there wasn’t a whole lot of waste, where we tried to reinvent the wheel. And there was a lot of helping. And I also think the last piece of that puzzle, honestly, was Dr. Tour, which was my advisor. I always like to tell this story. I was working on my thesis, and I was kind of trying to get Dr. Tour off my back, for like one of my last projects. So, I finished the draft thinking, Okay, this will buy me a few weeks. I emailed it to him at 9pm. He had it back to me fully read through and commented at 9am the next morning! I was just exasperated. So, I once thanked him for this efficiency actually. I was like, this is awesome, and thanked him and he said, don’t thank me, it’s my job. You would think it’s really easy to stay this focused and just keep your eye on the ball this hard, but it’s really not. There’s a lot of things that you have to keep track of doing science as a career. And it’s very easy to get lost in all the complexity of each project and funding. Everyone else just feels like they don’t have enough time in the day. Dr. Tour never makes you feel like that. I think it’s because of his ability to just keep his eye on the dang ball.

Louis
That’s so cool. It sounds like an incredible man. And you had a lot of great points in there. And I appreciate your perspective on collaboration. I think that’s really powerful for us for a lot of fields. And having that insight into how it works in academia is great. Do you ever experience difficulty in putting your ideas into words? Is there a structured or creative process you follow to break through writer’s block?

Jacob
I definitely do. I do experience difficulty putting my ideas into words. But I don’t think I really have a structured process. I think there’s a simple rule that I’ve told a lot of my friends: if you have writing to do, it won’t get done until you make it the only thing that you have to do. So, if I have like a big grant or a fellowship coming, I will just lock myself in a room until I have at least made progress with it. I’ll still try to do maybe like one or two simple experiments in a week. But complex things like learning new techniques where I feel like I have to use my whole brain, expend a bunch of willpower, I typically table them until I’ve at least made progress on the writing. And when I really have to do writing, I will make sure to set just a few days aside where I do nothing but lock myself in a room and write. And this probably doesn’t work for everyone. I know, career writers often describe like, Oh, I need to take a walk, I need to go do something else and then come back to it. That honestly, I think it’s kind of a reaction to a common mistake I feel like PhD students make. They just put off writing as long as possible because they stay in lab doing experiments. And like generating data is like a comfort thing for them. And I totally understand that. But you’re doing yourself a disservice if you’re not like trying to plan and structure your work because it has to go somewhere eventually. And I think this is gonna often lead to a lot of waste. So, I think it’s better to begin with the end in mind, which sometimes means writing before you’ve even begun, like doing certain experiments, just identifying goals. And I also think this process sharpens the link between your thinking and writing brain and it makes it easier to write a paper when it actually comes down to it.

Louis
Yeah, I like that analogy. And I can see that you have a lot of discipline, and some people may lean on some of their other characteristics to you know, get through that wall of writing. It can be difficult and It’s really interesting learning about how each person deals with that.

Jacob
Yeah, I think it’s important to know yourself for sure.

Louis
Speaking of writing, in January of 2019, you posted your first blog on a website you created, named Distilling Science. Since then, you and several other contributors have also posted blogs aligned with its mission statement, which is to, quote, “improve communication between scientists and the public. To highlight exciting new frontiers and technology, and to empower non-scientists with information on problems of great societal importance.” At Longitude dot Site, we share a similar mission with this podcast. I’m eager to learn about the inception of Distilling Science and your philosophy regarding the importance of science education and communication.

Jacob
Man this just brings a smile to my face seeing you’d like quote, my, the website, really the mission statement. I love it. 21-year-old Jacob was so cool. I miss him.

So, first of, this podcast is a really, really cool idea. I really enjoyed the episode with Rowland obviously, because I love Rowland. You guys have some really interesting guests coming in and dropping like a lot of valuable knowledge. I really like to tell the story about Nathan Zohner, when it comes to like, describing what led me to start Distilling Science.

Nathan Zohner was, I think like 18-year-old kid in 1997, who was doing a science project. And he walked around telling people, have you heard about the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide? And they were like, No, what’s that? And he would say things like it’s been found in the body of every single dead person ever. And the Nazis used in their camps. And if you know anything about chemical nomenclature, you’ll know that dihydrogen monoxide means H2O, which is water. And Nathan Zohner just walked around telling people true facts about water and got them to sign off on a petition banning water. Just the fact that like this kid could walk around telling people truths, and dangerously mislead them made me think a lot about what about people with an agenda? What about people who aren’t being truthful? What about people who will just flat out lie to your face? What can they do? And the internet does not help because false information spreads faster, more prolifically than truth, true information online. So, all of this led me to think that in an era of growing mistrust, scientists need to talk directly to people. So Distilling Science is built on the idea that the best people to share and talk about scientific discoveries with scientists themselves. It never quite became a viral hit. And it’s been kind of dormant. But I think it peaked at the right time, I think we were able to actually do some really good work, and communicating first, some essential truths about Coronavirus and second, diving into the actual data behind both the Moderna and Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines. So, I think, at first, it was just a cool way to talk about my research and things that I wanted to study in grad school. And then it really became sort of a tool for combating misinformation. I think that the best people to communicate with the public are scientists. And I think that that link is almost maybe weaker than it has ever been. I think that social trust in general is still very low. And I think that scientists need to be asking themselves, what can we do to help this? What can we do to change this?

Louis
Well, I think you’re an excellent mouthpiece for the scientific community, because your curiosity is just overflowing seems like and you’ve had this drive to just figure things out, and the fact that you took matters into your own hands, and then shared with everyone, it’s not easy and doesn’t, you know, happen in the blink of an eye, it takes time.

Jacob
Oh, yeah. 100%. I’ve thought about various ways to bring it back eventually, but I think that Longitude Sound Bytes might take the space for me. You guys keep bringing experts on just to talk directly to the people.

Louis
Yeah, we can fill that. We can help build up. Some things, they run their course and, you know, they have their time to shine and then it’s time to shelve them, you know, hang them up a good note, and that’s totally okay too.

Jumping to question number six. Some might think fields like science, technology, engineering, and math, lack of creativity due to the black and white nature of their governing laws. However, creativity often drives breakthrough innovations in those fields. What are modern methods of incorporating creativity into research? And could you share an example?

Jacob
Absolutely. So, Louis, have you ever heard of a guy named Dan Pink?

Louis
I have not.

Jacob
So this was actually the first ever research project that I did. I watched this YouTube video in high school, called The Theory of Motivation. It was a TED Talk by Dan Pink, who has a book called The Theory of Motivation. And he basically set out to make the case that modern incentive theory so the idea that if you pay people more, they’ll do better work does not work for what he called 21st century problems. And 21st century problems encapsulate everything that you put in this question, science, technology, engineering, math, also, literally just anything that requires above base level thinking. And to make this case, he talks about some science that was done in the 1950s called the Candle Problem. You’re presented with a box of tacks and a candle. And you’re told that you have to adhere the candle to the wall. So, people will try various things. They’ll try to melt the side of the candle and stick it to the wall, it doesn’t work. And they’ll try to tack the candle to the wall, it doesn’t work. The solution is to overcome a cognitive bias called functional fixedness. And see the box not just as a receptacle for the tacks, but an actual holder for the candles. You put the candle in the box, you tack the box to the wall. That’s how you solve the candle problem. So basically, the idea is to solve this problem, you have to think about it in a little bit out of the box way you have to think creatively, to overcome a cognitive bias.

Every problem in science, technology, engineering, and math could be encapsulated as a candle problem. You need creativity to overcome it. You need to think out of the box. Science is not this like straightforward thing. You are literally trying to discover something that no one has ever done. So, you need to think a little bit out of the box. So, in science, this can be looked at as who has the intellectual fearlessness to try something new, try something creative, and approach things in ways that like they’re intrinsically motivated to approach. That fuels creativity and I think that fuels great advances. I honestly think that most 21st century jobs require creativity. Otherwise, we’re all gonna get replaced by AI pretty soon anyway.

[music]

Louis
We hope you enjoyed our episode. What stood out for me from this conversation was how passionate Jacob is about his work. The novelty of his research, and his encouragement to be intellectually fearless.

[music]

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.

 

 

 

Shem Brown
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.
Hi, I am Shem Brown, Longitude fellow from Rice University studying English. For this episode, I had an opportunity to speak with Christin Davis, who is the Head of Acting in the Department of Theatre and Dance at The University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches Acting, Movement, and Voice. We started our conversation with Christin telling me about her passion for acting and education.

[music]

Shem
How did you know that you wanted to go into theater and teaching? Were they things you always kind of wanted to do, or did the realization sort of come out later?

Christin Davis
I’d say that as far as pursuing it professionally, it was definitely a realization that came about later. When I entered undergrad at Rice, I was an English major. And I don’t really know that I knew what I was going to do. I think I had an assumption that maybe I’d teach high school English because I have had a really wonderful high school English teacher. And I was like, I love that I’ll do that. And then I kept doing plays, and I was one of the coordinators of the Rice Players. And then I think it was junior year for a variety of reasons occurred to me that, Oh, I couldn’t try to do this as like my job job. And so, there was just a shift in thought for me. And so, I decided to give it a try. And the teaching was also not something that I was really pursuing actively, like, I wasn’t pursuing a path towards academia. I’ve feel like I’ve always been good at following my nose and saying yes to things that are interesting and are working well. And that’s kind of how I found myself where I am now.

Shem
That’s awesome. I think it’s true that English degrees, you can do a lot of things with them. They’re kind of very versatile. Do you have like a favorite play that you were a part of while you were at Rice? Is there one that just like, sticks out to you? Or were they all just your favorites?

Christin
I mean, they were all really wonderful in various ways and various reasons. I think, the one that probably helped me grow the most as an artist, and sort of towards the profession was the production of the Baltimore Waltz that the Rice Players did. I think that was my junior year. It’s a really challenging show, and out of any production that I’ve ever done, like in college and beyond, it’s the one that I wish I could do again, like as a grown person, and as someone who knows, you know, has so many more skills now than I had then. It was a three person show by the playwright, Paula Vogel. And it was directed by Mark Ramont, who was at Rice for just three years. It was really rigorous. And it was really hard work. And I think it was a really successful production. So that’s probably my favorite.

Shem
Is there, and this is sort of an expansion of that question, is there a project in your professional life that has maybe resonated or stuck the most with you?

Christin
Again, everything I’ve done has been a source of growth and joy. A play I did here in Austin, I don’t know, six years ago, or something like that, called the Drowning Girls has definitely been a highlight of my theatre career. Again, another three-person show it takes place in bathtubs. And so, we were like in water for the entire duration of the show. We got to play lots of different characters. And it’s a really stylized way of telling a story. It’s almost like a ghost story. That’s based on historical fact. So that was really exciting and began an ongoing collaboration with me and a small theatre company here called Theatre en Bloc that does a lot of really exciting work in Austin. And then film wise and TV wise, working on the HBO limited series Love and Death, a handful of years ago was certainly a career highlight. It was like, by far the biggest, biggest budget production I’d ever been a part of. I got to be on set for two months, which was the longest I’d ever been involved with a film or TV production. And so that was really, again, a great learning experience and also just really, really fun.

Shem
Yeah. HBO shows are so cool. So, I actually went and I watched Fault Line, the short film, and I really loved it. I was just wondering what was it like for you to work on it with like, you know, being in a short film having it set in Marfa, which, again, like just a wonderful place in Texas. I love it. Everyone loves it. What was the experience like for you?

Christin
That was also a highlight in a different way than the HBO show because it was really such an intimate process. I want to say that was the first time that I had played a mom on screen since becoming a parent and it was my first project after COVID And so it was just a lot. And also, you know, the subject material is really quite heavy. As soon as I read the script, I was saying to someone actually earlier this week, like I got the tingles. And for me, you know, when I say that I’ve been good at following my nose to kind of figure out what’s next in my life. It’s for me, it’s the tingles, like following the tingles. And so as soon as I read that script, I got the tingles. And I was like, Oh, I would love to be able to do this. And then, in the callback process meeting, Lauren Himmelvo, the writer and director, and her daughter, who was the lead in the show, I just really, really, really wanted to be part of it. I was cast in it, and we had a rehearsal process, which you don’t always get to do for on camera work. But it was really, really nice to be able to connect and develop a relationship with Izzy, who played my daughter. So that by the time we got to Marfa, it felt like, there was really a true family feel. You know, I love low budget productions. I did several in Houston before I went to grad school, and I’m a scrappy artist at heart. And so, I love like, the creative problem-solving question about, okay, how do we make this work. And the production was, you know, low budget in that way, but also, so cohesive and so beautiful, and so family oriented. Lauren, the director, her mother-in-law, and her sisters, were there, as it’s called craft services, like the people that provide the food on set, and so cooked these homemade meals every single day. And we would sit down for a family dinner every day, which again, is not usually how things are done, at least on sets that I’ve been on. And so, it’s just really had this wonderfully collaborative feel.

Being in Marfa was so beautiful. You know, the landscape was such a participant in the film. And we had some really wonderful moments of things that we couldn’t really plan for, because, you know, you hope for the sun to set in the right way, but you never really know you’re gonna get the shot. And so, we just had some beautiful moments of nature participating with us and us participating with nature in a way that really came together. And then a couple moments with the trains that we weren’t expecting. Because we didn’t know that schedule, we didn’t know when things were going to come by. And we just happened two days in a row to get these moments where the train came by, that we weren’t expecting. So like, but the shots towards the end, where the trains going in between us that we just happened to catch that. That moment was really special.

Shem
That was so cool. I was like, how did they know that this would happen? I was like, this is just so serendipitous, it feels like.

Christin
The train was serendipitous. Yeah, I can’t remember if we had a rough idea of maybe it was gonna happen or not. But I remember us being like, we hear the train, like drive!… and you either get those or you don’t get those, and we got it, which was really, really great.

Shem
Are there any sort of like processes of other creatives in your field that you’ve admired or learned from, like approaches to, you know, people’s art, you know, style of learning any of that?

Christin
Yeah, let me think about that for a minute. I love that question. You know, I’m very process oriented, as opposed to product oriented. And I think that’s why I’m in this field actually. Because for me, it’s the process of, first of all, my place in the process and my place in being part of a collaboration that is working to make something larger than the individual pieces. And so, my rehearsal process, my developmental process, and my teaching process is all very process oriented, as opposed to we’re trying to get to this place. I feel like a lot of my approach in that way, comes from a lot of the learning that I had at Rice. I was telling my students the other day, we were having all these discussions around AI and Chat GBT. And I believe me, I understand that like, there’s a lot of value and a lot of unknown and a lot that’s worth exploring in that world. And then there’s the English major part of me that has this argument, which is like, language is consciousness, or consciousness is language, or there’s a really reciprocal and symbiotic relationship there. Like as I figure out how I use the language to communicate my consciousness, I am also developing myself as a conscious creature, and so I can’t separate those. And so, I get really worried for like outsourcing my imagination and my ability to create myself in that way to an external source. And so, I feel like that was a really big piece of learning, I took from my studies in English that has made its way into my process as like a theatre artist and actor. That combined with I did a lot of religious studies classes at Rice. And, you know, I thought about, oh, maybe I’ll pursue English at the graduate level and teach English at the college level, or maybe I’ll, you know, travel the world and become a religious studies scholar. But for me, I always needed it, to come into my brain and then come out through my body in space. And I feel like that’s what being an actor has allowed for me to do is to synthesize those two really important pieces of learning, and then bring it into space with other people. And so, a lot of my influences are actually thinkers and philosophers, you know, spiritual writers, who are always exploring how creativity is a big part of what makes us human, and how we can harness that for the good. So right now, I’m really influenced by the writer, Adrian Marie Brown. I’ve been a big fan of Julia Cameron for a long time. And then as far as the people who are actually theater makers and artists. I don’t know I don’t really read like, I don’t read a lot about famous people or stuff like that, you know, but I love. I love new work. And I love helping people create new work. And helping writers and directors understand the actor’s process in helping to develop new work. from that vantage point of like, well, this is how like, my consciousness works as an actor. This is how my impulse works as an actor, and how then it comes through language into a script, since theater is mostly still a language based medium.

Shem
That’s, that’s really great. I think it’s, it’s actually great that you don’t, you don’t have to be like, I only read theoretical stuff about plays. So I love that. My next question was going to be about your process when approaching a new role, but I want to skip over it for a moment and go to this next one, which is about whether you’ve created any sort of like habit regarding mindfulness, privacy or solitude in regards to the increased speed of information, and the sense of like, artificial urgency, which you talked about a little with Chat GPT and other AI tools.

Christin
Yeah, that’s one thing that I feel like, I am hoping that I really offer my students as well. I’m always in practice in trying to understand what the best sort of practice for an actor, or this sort of artist is. You know, if you’re a violinist or a painter, the things that you can do to practice your craft are pretty apparent. There’s also a lot of stuff that we that is not maybe as apparent, but you know, you know what it is to practice scales as a violinist. And as an actor, it can be harder for especially young actors to understand well, how do I if I’m not working, how do I practice. And so, I do spend a lot of time thinking about questions like this, but yes, for myself, as I’ve got two young kids now, and I’m married, and so there’s like, my life is very full. And I am not always at the center of it. And so, I try to wake up early enough every day, so that I get to sit by myself with coffee, and a book of some sort that feels like it’s feeding me and nourishing me sort of on the levels that I was talking about earlier. And if I get those in, then usually I feel like it’s a pretty good start to my day as far as being able to be present and centered and responsive to whatever comes my way. And that’s great practice just for me as a human. That’s also really translatable to my work as an actor or as a teacher in the classroom. But anything also, that just helps me feel in creative flow. So if I like have time to sit down and play the piano, once or twice a week, working in my yard helps me feel just connected to the flow of stuff around me and through me, as opposed to feeling like I’m the person who does this in isolation. You know, to me, the most satisfying and interesting and magical part of being an actor is the relating and the not knowing what’s going to happen between two people who are encountering each other in a space and so any practice I have that keeps me kind of open to possibility is something that I find useful.

Shem
I liked what you said about even just going out and working in the garden like feeling tied back you know, to the earth to what’s going on, rather than sort of an almost robotic like, Okay, I have this and then this, and then those are the things I’m doing next. It feels very organic, at least to me, that’s what I’m hearing. Yeah, but just circle back on your process, you know, sort of when approaching a new role or project, do you have like a sort of more formalized way? Or is it just to kind of see where it takes you?

Christin
A little bit of both. I have a lot of different ways of approaching material that I know works kind of given the situation. Let’s say it’s not an audition, but it’s like, something I know, I’m going to work on. First and foremost, I let the language work on me, and affect me how it’s ever it’s going to affect me. And then sometimes I’ll make notes about thatn or sometimes I’ll just, you know, take stock of sort of how that affects my body. Do you know the writer Helene Cixous? She has this really amazing essay called Coming to Writing. I read it when I lived in London and did a semester studying abroad there. And to me was, it’s something that helps me translate how my work studying English was actually my work as an actor. It’s very much about how writing can be an expression of the body, and then the body can be an expression of writing. And so that’s one reason I feel like acting to me ultimately made more sense than, you know, going into academia for English is because I need it to come through my body and into space. And so, I let the language work on me, whether it makes me feel a certain way or makes like, my body needs to move in a certain way. Then sometimes if I feel like I know who this person is, I don’t have to do a whole lot of brain work. And I might just go right to like imagining. Something I did for Fault Line actually, which I don’t, I think I had done this before but I spent a lot of time doing it because that a really long drive out to Marfa was, I created memories as my character around my husband, you know, who in the film has died. And so I spent the car trip just remembering our relationship. And that gave me a lot to work with once I was on set, which was really interesting. I had never done that in such an intense way before. And then I don’t know if you’re familiar with Stanislavski, who was sort of, you know, founder of modern acting, in some ways, he has a way of looking at a script or just some useful questions to ask. The question that I spend the most time on, once I’m in the rehearsal room working is this question of how do I want my partner like whoever I’m in the scene with, like, how do I want them to respond to what I’m saying? And, and this is what I teach. What that does, as the actor is that it makes it not about me, right? It makes it not about like, Oh, I’m feeling this or like, this is how this character is. But rather, I’m using the language to do something because there’s something that I really want from the person that I’m talking to whether or not I’m conscious of it. So that’s a really fundamental part of my process.

[music]

Shem
We hope you enjoyed our episode. What stood out for me from this conversation was what Christin said about acting coming through the body, into space—letting the language work on her. I just thought that was a very thoughtful, beautiful way of putting it, that idea.

[music]

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 I went to Georgia Southern University for my undergrad where I also played football.

For this episode, I had an opportunity to speak with Brian Cooper, the president of the American Flag Football League. I was curious about the vision for flag football, which is now an Olympic sport.

So, join me in our conversation about Brian’s career, his vision for flag football, and how the sport has expanded its reach internationally. Enjoy listening!

[music]

Brian Michael Cooper
I went to undergrad at Cornell. And then after college I worked on Capitol Hill for about a year and then I went back to school into the joint degree at the Kennedy School at Harvard and Columbia Law School, and then stayed in New York for 10 years. And then my wife and I moved to Houston in 2002.

Emory
Were you doing sports law in New York?

Brian
Yeah, I started at Proskauer. When I started out, I was working on matters for the NBA and ATP tour, NHL and Major League Soccer. And at the time, Major League Soccer had a relatively large antitrust lawsuit with the Major League Soccer players associations, case called Frazier versus MLS, which really was a seminal case on determining whether or not a league could serve as a single entity which would shield it in some capacities from antitrust sanction. And so, I worked on that and really enjoyed it. Proskauer is nationally known for its sports practice. Then I continued to represent sports clients as an agent. And then we came down to Houston, started a firm called Haynes and Boone and did that for about six years where I was doing non-sports work and sports work as well. Around 2008 got an opportunity to become president of the NBA G league Rio Grande Valley Vipers, then I was at Rice as a Senior Associate Athletic Director and CFO, and then I was director of sports programming at Dish Network in Denver. And then, after being more of an executive for about 10 years, I moved back into private practice as a partner at Lewis Brisbois, big L.A. firm, and led their sports and entertainment efforts there. And then went to the XFL, became president of the Houston Roughnecks. We had a pretty successful start and then obviously, we were hit with COVID really knocked out most of live sports and I became a partner at Frost Brown Todd in the Houston office and led the sports and entertainment efforts and also was a leader of our venture capital practice as well, so I worked with startup companies as a transactional lawyer.

Emory
What a career, that didn’t stop there.

Brian
Yeah, and then in June of 2023, I left Frost Brown to take the leap again into sports. I’ve been president of two teams, never been president of a league. I was really excited about the opportunity to help the American Flag Football League kind of achieve what they were really hoping to do, which is really expand this game. And I think that the upside of the league is just fantastic. So, I am just really excited to make that leap.

Emory
Yeah, it’s gonna be an exciting future for flag football.

Brian
Absolutely, absolutely.

Emory
How did that opportunity come about?

Brian
I had been talking with the founder, Jeff Lewis, I met him in 2021, when I was at Frost Brown, and really was pitching him as a lawyer, you know, the legal work. We just kind of struck up a conversation, we both went to Cornell. So, we had a kind of a commonality in our alma mater, and kind of started having the conversations and about a year into it, he was talking about restarting the league as a professional league. The league had been operating previously, more so like a tournament league, where you had groups of amateur players all come together, and they play for a tournament and ultimately play to the championship, whether there’s some sort of maybe a cash prize at the end. And that’s how the AFL initially was built. It was built in a way where you also had a group of amateurs going up against a group of retired pros. And that kind of Pros versus Joes format, was used in 2017, and 2018. And in 2018, they had a game here in Houston, at what’s now known as Shell Energy Stadium, and really was a great success. They had about 8000 fans at the game, NFL Network was the broadcaster for those games and also in 2017. And then they were able to, to kind of continue that momentum. And then just like every other league in 2020, live sports were just crushed by the pandemic, and they had to suspend operations for a bit but then restarted. That’s about that time when I got to know Jeff and I started talking about the professional league. We just kind of had those conversations and they continued on and ultimately, I got more enthused about being able to see how they could really build it out and was excited to kind of help them with that step.

Emory
So now is there like a season for flag football?

Brian
This is really gonna be our inaugural season of a men’s professional league. Unlike the previous iterations of the AFFL, this league is a professional league. And so, a little bit of backstory about how the AFFL works and flag football. We logistically work with a traditional football field, it’s seven on seven. The field is a traditional field 120 yards. So you know, 100 yards to 10 yard endzone. But the games are seven on seven, which is essentially like traditional football. The only people that are missing are the two guards and two tackles. So, it’s more like watching a skeleton drill in football, or just the simple seven on seven that you also do in traditional football. The teams have 12 active players and three practice squad players. So, there’ll be 15 players on each team. And the players will be paid. Players are making anywhere between $20 to $25,000, for the time that they’ll play in our league, which is a modest salary, but it’s one that’s competitive, like the arena League, for example, is slightly less than what the players will make in the UFL. We’ve got teams in Dallas, Boston, Las Vegas, and Nashville. And so, we’ll be in those markets. We’ll have home games in each of the markets. We’ve got tickets already on sale. Still talking to a couple of prospective media partners for broadcast, but we expect to have our games broadcast nationally. We launch late April of 24. So, we expect this inaugural season to be our good season.

Emory
So, one thing that does make me excited about this is that the flag football league sounds very similar to seven on seven and seven on seven leagues are becoming a bigger thing amongst high school players.

Brian
They very much are. They very much are. I mean it’s really impressive. One of the things I love about flag football, there are many things, but one major thing is what I call the personality of it. And I mean, it’s kind of a, you know, kind of using the word not necessarily the right tone, but I mean, the personal nature of the game, sort of like NBA, you know, in soccer where you can, unlike traditional football, with helmets and pads, these players won’t have helmets and pads, so you can see them. You can see their faces. You can see the talk between the players, you know, you can see the great highlights, and that’s what I think is interesting on seven on seven and the overtime highlights in those seven, seven games, because you can see a player go up for a great catch, and you know, then that becomes a viral moment. And that player is pretty recognizable. So, I think you know, we’re gonna have that same, hopefully that same, push as well, where we can really highlight the great athleticism of our players and do it in a way that are similar where we can take advantage of social media and viral videos. We’ve got a real pretty robust right now Instagram following of about 128,000 people at this point and part of that has been built on the flag community being able to see people that they know and really enjoy watching in those, like in short form content and on those videos.

Emory
That’s great. Big personality is a great word to use, you can see a lot more personality amongst the players.

Brian
Yeah, yeah, it’s amazing. You know, NBA really bottled that maybe 30 years ago and Commissioner Stern, it really leaned into highlighting the Magic and Byrd and Michael Jordan in showing like, hey, you know, really kind of putting the focus more on players and having people get to know them. And I think that’s what we’re planning on doing with our team as well as our players. You know, getting to know them, right, getting to see those, kind of backstories, and where they came from and how they’ve developed. Those are hopefully gonna resonate with fans and people who are already interested in the sport and getting interested in the sport.

Emory
So, is there a clear distinction between an amateur sport versus a professional sport?

Brian
Yeah, I think the clearest distinction is I mean, you know, I teach a sports law class at U of H as well, just yesterday, we are in first class, we talked about the difference, you know, the amateurism, so I would just say no, the clearest form is that amateurs generally pay to play, right? They pay the fee to the tournaments, they pay to play in youth leagues, and a pro gets paid to play. That’s kind of the distinction between our past league, the tournament style league, where players paid to kind of have an entry fee to be in a tournament that ultimately may lead to a cash prize, but they weren’t professionals. Our players have signed contracts and are professional players under our league, and they’re subject to the same standards and contract terms as a pro player, you know, as a pro football player or pro baseball player where, you know, particularly like, as a professional, you’ve got additional responsibilities to your team and to the league. So you can not engage in, you know, dangerous behavior, or dangerous activities because you need to protect yourself because you are now being paid to play the sport. Yes. And there are certain nice distinctions there but really the key one, is that, you know, it’s really the salary and being subjected to a contract.

Emory
So the talent pool for these teams, is there a draft?

Brian
We didn’t have a formal draft this year, but we did have formal tryouts in all four markets. We had about 400 players show up. About a 100 in each market over the summer,

Emory
A market, you mean the areas like the…

Brian
Yeah, sorry, the markets in the four cities, our 4 AFFL cities. We started off and had our first tryout in Dallas, and then we moved to Nashville, and then Boston and Las Vegas. And in each market, about 100 players were there. And ultimately, that group of 400 got narrowed down to 32. And 32 were initially offered core team contracts, eight in each team. And within those 32 players, 11 of them have United States national flag football team experience. And so, we’ve got nearly the most elite flag football players on the planet playing in our league, including probably the most recognizable name in flag football is a player named Darrell Doucette, who goes by, his nickname is Housh. And Housh is a legend in the sport. He is the starting quarterback for the United States flag football team. He’s the quarterback of the Las Vegas team. He’s not a big guy, about 5′ 7”, 140 pounds, but he is really one of the finer football players. You know, his ability to evade tackles to his speed. It’s all really amazing. He really distinguished himself back in the 2018 game, where he caught Lavelle Hawkins, a former NFL wide receiver, right at the goal line and Lavelle had maybe about a 20 to 25 yard head start on Housh, and Housh closed the gap and caught him. And you can see that video on YouTube. NFL films did a seven-minute documentary on the flag football game in Houston, the 2018 ultimate final in Houston. And it’s really amazing to watch. It happens in about a five-minute mark. And it is really again one of the more astounding plays I’ve ever seen.

Emory
So how did flag football become an Olympic sport?

Brian
I think this has been a decade’s long group effort by many entities, including, you know, Jeff, and the American Flag Football League. The NFL, you know, has been a huge proponent of flag football for the last 10 years through Troy Evans and in his team. They’ve really worked hard to expand flag football at the youth level, at the prep level over the last 10-15 years. Initially, I think there was concern about the safety of the traditional game and that people were looking at flag football as an alternative to that sport. But I think ultimately what has really been more interesting is that it’s just developed into a greater affinity for the sport of football in general. And so what you really have seen is flag football expanding to youth, flag football expanding internationally, and most importantly, flag football expanding to women’s sport. You’re seeing a lot more women’s prep football in various states like Massachusetts and Nevada, Tennessee, where they’ve now made it a varsity sport in many states. I think that the world and the IOC and the USOC recognized the emerging strength of the sport. And its inclusion in the Olympics is just going to be fantastic.

I think everybody will get to see it that anyone can play it. I mean, what’s also great about it is that you can have a pickup game in your backyard and really enjoy it but then you see it at an elite level and it’s just so dynamic. Being able to see the athleticism and just the playmaking there’s just so many components to the game that I think ultimately flag football has the ability to really expand that, that, I was gonna say narrative but that’s not really the expand that kind of joy and the feeling internationally. I think as people see the game, they’re gonna really respond to it. And I think being in the Olympics is a great way for that to happen.

Emory
Yeah, I know for a lot of American families, flag football is like a staple for the say Thanksgiving dinner, like after dinner. Put together a flag football team, and they get to just enjoy a game with their family. So, what is the international reach for flag football?

Brian
I think the upside is incredible. Right now, about 20 million people worldwide are now playing it. The game continues to grow in leaps and bounds. I think we added about 7 million people in the last 10 years alone, it’s really taking off. I think, internationally, you see it in Central and South America. I had the pleasure of going to USA Football sanctioned tournament last summer in Charlotte, and there were teams from Brazil and Colombia, and Japan. And that was really amazing. We had couple of players from Japan come over and try out for our league. During the summer, we had a young man from Great Britain, who came over to try out, and one person from Germany. So, I think it’s like basketball and soccer. Since that is easy to pick up, it’s easy to play, it lends itself to incredible expansion. Just like you’ve seen with the soccer and basketball has grown globally in amazing ways over the last 30 years, I think that in flag football has a significant chance of doing a similar thing over the next few decades internationally.

Emory
This makes me excited for flag football’s future.

Brian
Yeah, I think you know, the excitement level to me is that just being able to see at youth level and watching young people really get excited about the sport. Now kids have numerous opportunities at the prep level to continue to play football through middle school, through high school. I think people may have thought, well, flag football is sport for smaller kids, and what happens, you know, when they get older, but they continue to play flag football, and they continue to love the sport and grow with the sport. And that’s one of the greater upsides of the sport going forward is this ability to have people be part of it for years. I think we’re extending that timetable. People now can look at it say, hey, not only can I play in high school, but perhaps I can play in college, and ultimately, I can play this game professionally. And that is a huge boost for any sport, you know, your ability to continue to play it at the most elite level. I mean, look at Esports. Esports allowed players who were skilled players at various games to continue to play and play it either in college and play professionally. That’s a big moment for our sport, and shows its reach both socially and geographically.

Emory
Yeah. I started playing football when I was five and ended up playing in college. And one of the big things you hear when you’re in college playing football is once this is over, you don’t get another chance to play football in the same. But the the way you do get that feeling of football back in that competitive feeling of football, is through flag football.

Brian
Yeah, I think so that’s what it makes people to relate to the game, right? You can continue to play in the game, and it allows you to keep maintain that affinity for the game.

I’ll tell you one other thing that’s going to be important with our league as well as is that on building out any kind of entity and league, the fan engagement is very important. I’m always cognizant of how teams relate to the community, and I want to make sure our league does the same thing where we have a very reciprocal relationship with our communities, meaning we are out supporting the communities in the same sense that the community will be supporting us.

[music]

Emory
We hope you enjoyed our episode. Flag football is often the introduction to the game of football for kids so it’s exciting to hear of its growth. Brian’s story has consistently involved sports, so it was a pleasure to hear of the opportunities that sports have created for Brian. For me, this entire interview created excitement for the future of one of my favorite pastimes.

[music]

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!

[music]

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.

[music]

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.

 

 

 

 

Louis Noel
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.
Hi, I’m Louis Noel, and I will be your host today.

We are exploring the approaches of individuals to contemplation, experimentation, and decision making in scientific and creative fields.

For this episode, I had an opportunity to speak with Dr. Rowland Pettit. Rowland is a physician scientist with experience in venture capital. He is a resident physician in clinical pathology at Mass General Brigham, a senior associate at Camford Capital, and the Chief Science officer at InformAI, a Houston-based company developing artificial intelligence enabled healthcare tools.

Previously, Rowland was an MD PhD student at Baylor College of Medical and an MBA student at Rice University. I was interested to learn why he earned multiple graduate degrees, so we started our conversation with that before diving into how science is funded. Enjoy listening!

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Louis Noel
You studied biophysics as an undergraduate, then went on to Baylor College of Medicine, where you earned an MD and a PhD in bioinformatics and artificial intelligence. Why did you choose to pursue an advanced degree in business while already pursuing advanced degrees in science and medicine?

Rowland Pettit
Well, thanks, Louis, and thanks for having me on. I mean, this is this is a really great question. And it was one that I debated at the time. I mean, I definitely do believe in the value of formal education, you don’t know what you don’t know. And I have tremendously benefited from having, you know, incredibly smart people. Take the time to frame things and explain things to me. So, you know, the blanket answer is I was just curious, but the formal answer would be, I really wanted to understand the commercialization process. I had, at that point, done a good amount of medical school, and PhD graduate school. And I had seen a lot of interesting innovation potential, both in science and medicine during training, both certainly in med device coming to market, but I didn’t really understand how people thought about bringing those to market, I was certainly getting to see how people were reacting to that, how they were, you know, performing clinical trials to test it, or think about rolling it out with informed consent and bringing it to patients, or otherwise. But I just wanted to understand that. And so that’s what drove me to pursue the MBA during my MD, PhD.

Louis
I’d like to start with a high-level question. Could you briefly explain how research in science, technology, engineering and math gets funded for both public and private sector projects?

Rowland
Louis, I love this question. This is one area that I do think I’ve had a front row seat in order to see all the areas of funding throughout all stages in the process. And there’s several different ways that we could try to think about this.

So, let’s start with what I would consider more blue sky primary research for the sake of expanding human knowledge of the world. And that oftentimes occurs in academia. There’s plenty of big bio-techs and others that are doing great primary science as well as startups. But the way the majority of the world works, I would still think would be in funding in academia, which oftentimes comes in the forms of grants, then, is commercialization stage funding, which is kind of the bridge where you got a partnership between academia and industry, for some sort of commercialization with the two working together, then there’s return on investment models. So this would be kind of debt based financing, where you might get a grant that has some, you know, requirement to pay back the capital plus a little bit of interest.

And then of course, there’s another area that I’m particular interested in, which is venture capital or private equity, where you’re actually going to commercialize a product fully, and sell a piece of a company in order to realize its value.

So starting in academia, this in theory provides one of the avenues for the greatest degree of research freedom, where, you know, academics could do primary research on fundamental problems without having to be focused on some near term milestone of translation of that science or commercialization of that science. This is just science for the sake of science. And is primarily funded through the government. And the way that works is through grants. These are federal grants delivered through individual agencies. So as part of the Congressional Budget, Congress will pass certain amounts of taxpayer funded dollars that can go to the National Institutes of Health NIH, the National Science Foundation, NSF, or defense specific organizations. And based off of where they put money allocations is where those grants can fund research in those areas.

Usually, grants are reviewed three times a year, and it takes almost a year for them to get executed. So this is a long lead time. It is a good amount of money. You know, if you think about the primary grant, an r1 grant, this could be a multimillion-dollar grant to a PI for three to five years, or a certain research initiative. It’s just a pure investment in primary research. And it funds and actually is what drives the research institutes you see today.

Next would be these commercialization stage fundings. There’s a little bit of a bridge between here where we’re still in the world of grants that you don’t have to pay them back, right. They’re still primary investments in science without some sort of debt or equity-based commitment. So, these are what you might know as the STTR SBIR grants. So, these are like technology transfer grants, etc. And so, this is usually where industry and academia have partnered up, usually industry leads these grants. The idea is, you’re saying, hey, you know, there’s some technology that’s worth pursuing and has clear market potential. And so, you pitch the same organizations, this is still taxpayer funded dollars. It’s still the NIH, NSF or others. And you say, hey, we see this technology that maybe is housed in a university based off of their, you know, IP portfolio, and we want to take it to market. So, we’re going to write a grant similar structure, you still have your six-page, you know, research strategy names, but you also add a six-page kind of market commercialization strategy of saying, here’s how we’re going to bring it to market.

And if you win one of these grants, it could be they have like phase one grants, which is really, you know, smaller grants, 250k type grants for prototyping, or initial, kind of proving out your thesis. And then those can enable phase two grants, which would allow you to fully commercialize the product. And this is an exciting Avenue, because it provides really cool opportunities for small startup companies to be able to pay, you know, big academic research institutions to have access to either their technology or some of their researchers on a part time, you know, grant funded basis to commercialize this together. This is not free money, you know, if there’s definitely reporting necessary, and you have to, meet your milestones and do what you said you could do, but there’s no necessary interest on this payment, you don’t have to pay it back.

And then finally, and this is the one everyone likes to talk about, and it’s one that I’m very interested in, like participating in is the world of venture capital and private equity. Right. So this is a very specific mechanism for funding science. It does come with some constraints, right? So the idea here is, okay, you have some product that you think is not just making an incremental change, this is making a substantial change, that can drive serious market return on the order of not just, you know, principal return, but maybe 10 times the principal return, then you would attract venture capital investors to come to the table and be interested in partnering with you on product development.

So, when you partner with a VC firm, what you’re essentially doing is you would say I’m going to take this technology, I’m going to form a company, right? And you’re going to sell a piece of that company, and all of its future revenue potential, etc. As an equity to this institutional investor. For price. This usually comes with maybe that institutional investor taking a board seat on your company, or kind of getting to participate in other ways. But the main idea is that you have engaged in a partnership that will last until you have some liquidation event A K when some other company buys you and buys out their ownership percentage, or you have an initial public offering, and the public kind of buys out the shares of your company.

Louis
That was fascinating. You’re clearly very knowledgeable about this, and I thoroughly enjoyed learning about them. Let’s shift from the business side and the finance powering the innovation to the science behind it. And you’ve also been working in this as a physician scientist, you are involved in cutting edge research, and particularly involved with bioinformatics and artificial intelligence. Could you share an overview of those fields and your current work within them?

Rowland
Yeah, absolutely. This is something I’m very passionate about. This is, I think, the cutting edge in terms of what will meaningfully drive change in the life science and biotech ecosystem for the near future. And anybody that interested in a STEM field, I think, has to absolutely take a serious consideration to getting this skill set.

I’ll take a quick aside here, when I was a medical student and was able to join the Ph. D. Do the MD Ph. D training, it was honestly kind of scary at the time, computational biology, bioinformatics. These were like big bad, you know, math and coding-based skills, which I hadn’t really touched in a long time. So it was kind of scary. I had to put a little bit of elbow grease, learn how to code, learn statistics, you know, learn these bioinformatics pipelines, you know, physics-based approaches to understanding protein folding, or whatever. All of that was fascinating and a little bit of an uphill battle. But very exciting and totally worth the time spent. It has enabled me now to sit at the seat of being able to utilize the top technological advances for anything I want.

These are areas that are so exciting and so meaningful in terms of building, meaningful applications for patient care, that if anybody’s interested in science and medicine, I have to encourage it. The thing I’ll put there is that it is more accessible than ever, I have to stress that if you are interested in these fields, you’ve got your own personal tutors, right? I mean, you can go on Chat GBT or Perplexity and just say teach me to code teach me to implement this biostats package, right? You know, anything you’re interested in doing, you got your own personal tutor to where this is a much more accessible field. And I would encourage anybody, even without a math, or physics-based background, like I had to, to learn about it. And of course, you’ll be responsible and need to understand that, but you can learn it in a much easier way.

Louis
I completely agree. I think one of the superpowers of these technologies is not just the you know, science and outcomes it brings, but it is going to empower and democratize this previously higher institution technology to all sorts of people like you mentioned. So, I think that the person perfectly reasonable and, you know, our duty as scientists and engineers to talk about the positive implications that’s gonna have for all sorts of people,

Rowland
I mean, we feel the exact same way. I do view that this is going to be where a lot of the most exciting innovations are currently happening and will happen in the next 10 years for innovation. The basic idea is computational biosciences, those are the areas you need to focus on. It’s really the compute side of understanding how physics, chemistry, biology, applied to health, human disease, agricultural science, you know, etc. So that’s how I would define those fields.

Louis
You clearly have a lot of ideas about this space in your formal education certainly has powered dot. For example, you recently gave a fascinating TED style talk about organ transplant decision making processes. Could you share your process for contemplating ideas and preparing talking points that resonate with diverse audiences?

Rowland
Yeah, sure. And thanks for looking at my LinkedIn and finding that talk. It was one of the projects that I’ve consulted on pretty extensively and one of the ideas that came out of medical school that I pursued and pitched several times and got that STTR kind of commercialization grants for is for improving informatics within transplantation. It’s a very complicated problem that we’ve been working on for several years.

I was invited to give a TED style talk. it wasn’t TED, TED style talk to the kind of the transplantation main conference this past May. And part of that is that they hired a coach to help me prepare this talk which was unbelievable experience. they hired Coach that does all the TED style coaching as well, to help walk me through what that process might look like. I’d love to share here just for anybody that’s trying to prepare a talk.

The first thing was to think about who my audience was, I’ve looked at the technical details of this problem I’ve talked to, you know, just friends and family and neighbors. And so I’ve kind of over the years gotten a sense of what resonates with different people, what are people interested in? Who are you talking to? What do they understand? I truly believe that there’s not that big of a difference in anyone’s intelligence that you’re really talking to. So it’s really just about getting people up to speed, and trying to help them quickly get through the key points of information. So that they can be at the same understanding and then think through rationally what, what might come next.

Second is, you got to start with a story, if you’re going to try to draw somebody in. You want them to relate. So either a personal story about you in this case, I think what I focused on was just trying to understand what my background is, is why I’m particularly interested in the problem of transplant informatics, why I think that could drive incremental change, and why I’m personally invested in it. These would be the pieces of information that should be intentionally thought about and conveyed very simply.

the other thing would be to use analogies, a really good analogy can totally drive your point home. In the case of transplant informatics, we settled on the analogy of Google Maps. So the idea would be saying, hey, you know, we didn’t really know we needed maps, or Google Maps or whatever you want to use. But as soon as we had it on our iPhones, you know, for, you know, people love using it, right? It didn’t stop us from charting out our own course in the head. But it gave us real time, information of what different courses might look like in terms of time to get their traffic problems along the way. And it would be updated in real time, right? If new information came to the table, it could give you a new route that you might not have thought of before, because that might be the most appropriate route, given the different considerations, right. The other piece of information, that analogy that was helpful was that, you know, you still stay in the driver’s seat, Google Maps isn’t driving you there or picking your route, it just is giving you the most update real time information for your consideration in your decision making to get from A to B, right.

This was the analogy that we thought would resonate really well with the clinicians in the room, because they would be able to think, an information dashboard with high quality, granular decision metrics that integrate all the data available would be helpful to understand which organ goes to which recipient, while still keeps them in the driver’s seat and make an ultimate decisions, and provides insight into how those decisions might be made. A really good analogy can really help bring a diverse audience with different, you know, technical backgrounds to the same place in terms of understanding your problem and why you’re interested in it.

So last thing is you got to speak slow, you know, when you’re giving a formal presentation to an audience, it is never a problem to have a pregnant pause. Speak slowly, and to let people think through what you’re going through and what you’re presenting at the table.

Louis
Thanks for sharing, Rowland. Those are certainly tips. I think we all can implement. I certainly will. I really liked the analogy how that can drive home and the Google Maps when was really good. Like when you said that in the talk, I immediately grasped it. And I think that’s an excellent way of helping to have a diverse audience understand the point you’re talking about? You don’t seem to have much trouble with the words coming out. But is there ever a time when you experienced difficulty putting your ideas into words? And is there a structured or creative process you followed to break through writer’s block?

Rowland
Yeah, I think this problem has been solved, again in 2022, which adds up to I’m not gonna lie. Well, I do view that writer’s block, at least for me, in my experience, it’s not so much that I don’t have ideas. The problem is when I write down an idea, and then immediately start to try to edit it, then I forget the next ideas, right?

And so, what I like to do whenever I have to really do anything, write applications to med school, PhD MBA residency applications, when I am thinking about writing a grant, particularly for grant writing, right? Or when I’m trying to do like an investment memo for a company or if I’m trying to think through, you know, friendly, but polite criticisms of companies, right, if you just try to start writing, you’re not gonna like your writing tone, you’re not gonna like your style, you’re gonna be thinking of ways that you could say things more politely or more friendly or more warmly, right? And you’re gonna get stuck.

And so the one liner is like, and this is kind of cheesy, but this is what I do. I put on dictate either on my phone or on my computer. I put on dictate open a Word document. I just close my eyes and I just tried to answer the question, right, to try to write it all out and just kind of word vomit. I don’t care about grammar. I don’t care about structure. I just do it.

And there is a strange way to I just copy that in the Chat GBT and say structure my thoughts right I just literally say structure these thoughts are or edit for grammar edit minimally edit for clarity and content, you know, whatever, whatever it is charged up to you perplexity those are the two that I kind of like Bard is getting good now too. So just copy it in and edit it and then boom, it comes back with your raw output now in some structured way, and sometimes the way they structure it, I like, and I think, okay, that is good.

You know, previously, I relied on friends, family and parents to do this, where I would send people texts and just bother the heck out of them saying like, Hey, can you edit this email? Can you edit this paragraph? You know, I’ve got this grant, you look at this, whatever. And that was high quality feedback. But it took time, right. I could sit there with BB perplexity chat GBT and just edit for hours and just say, iterate, iterate, iterate. And so, that’s what I think is the key to writer’s block. Close your eyes, hit dictate, word vomit, write, and then say structure my thoughts, and then go from there. And then you’ve got stuff on the page, it’s much easier to write when you’ve got stuff on the page, because when you’re editing, you’re not creating new content.

Louis
I love it. I’m personally a huge fan of dictation. I really think there’s a power of dictation that we haven’t unlocked yet, you know, the idea of talking to yourself. I think is very powerful. I wholeheartedly agree.

Rowland
Yeah, the last thing I’d say there is, I think maintaining a healthy and active network is incredibly important. People in social capital is the best thing that you can maintain and should be protected and also intentionally maintained, and every interaction you have with people is kind of building that.

[music]

We hope you enjoyed our episode. What stood out for me from this conversation with Rowland was learning the details of how finance and communication are vital factors to the advancement of science. I was also excited to plan on trying out Rowland’s many tips for improving my communication and writing abilities.

[music]

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.

 

 

 

 

Joanna McDonald
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.
Hi, I’m Joanna McDonald, a Longitude fellow from Rice University, studying music composition. In this podcast series we are exploring the approaching of individuals to contemplation, experimentation, and communication in scientific and creative fields. For this episode, I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Nina Kraus.

Dr. Kraus is a professor and biologist at Northwestern University (https://brainvolts.northwestern.edu/) and in our interview, we talked about her book, “Of Sound Mind”, which she describes as her love letter to sound. We started our conversation off with Dr. Nina Kraus telling me about noise, defining what it is and how it affects us biologically and emotionally. So, without further ado, enjoy listening!

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Joanna McDonald
I read your book this summer. And as a sound artist, as someone who works with sound all the time thinking about how to shape it, how to tell a story with it, learning about the external and internal processes of how we hear was so interesting. But there was one chapter, particularly chapter 11, where you’re talking about noise and sound inundation and sound pollution. And I wanted to talk to you about noise. So, could you give like a brief summary or description of what noises?

Nina Kraus
Sure, Noise is a huge, under-acknowledged, issue and problem in our lives. Sound is invisible. We often don’t realize that it is such a pervasive and such a huge force. So, for example, as we think about noise, there might be a truck sitting outside your window, and you don’t even know it’s there. And at a certain point, the driver will turn the ignition off. And suddenly you’re aware of the silence. And you often take a breath of relief. Even though you weren’t aware consciously that this noise was going on. It was affecting your body and your biology. And so this is what I think is really important to think about. You asked me to define noise and how I think about it. By now, most people know that very loud sounds can damage our ear. But I’m not talking about that. We know that. I’m assuming that people know that. But I think what people really don’t know is that moderate level sounds really do affect us biologically in all kinds of ways. I think of noise as unwanted sound, often unnecessary sound.

So, if I back up for a minute and think about the biology of sound processing in the brain, and one of the points that I think really comes through or I hope it comes through in my book is how holistic the processing of sound is. When we think about sound processing, it engages multiple biological systems in our body. So our cognitive, what we pay attention to, how we remember, how we think. Sensory. How we process the information from each one of our senses, how we combine the information from our senses, our emotions. Sound is enormously important for engaging us emotionally. Movement. So, our motor system. By definition, sound is movement. It is particles in motion. And we create sound by moving as I’m talking to you now. I have to move the air and create sound. And also, our viscera, our gut. You know, have you ever noticed that your appetite is a little off when you’re in an airplane?

Joanna
Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Nina
People thought for a long time, they assumed that the reason for this is that the air is drier. So scientists who like to measure things, and did some very controlled experiments. And what they discovered is, it was the sound that affected our appetite.

Sound has always been an organism’s warning sense. It’s our alarm sense. Sound is our alarm sense. That’s also one of the reasons that sound and memory are so tightly, tightly aligned. Let me stick for a minute to this idea of sound as our alarm sense. Do you sometimes feel stressed? Do you sometimes feel anxious?

Joanna
Sure.

Nina
Well, these are important psychological feelings. And we know that anxiety, and depression are mounting in our world. Again, I’m a biologist so I think of things in terms of biology and biological evidence. I do believe that our noisy world in part is responsible for the feeling of disconnection that we have. You know, in the same way as when that truck turned off as ignition and you relaxed. I think we’ve all experienced sitting in a kitchen and having the refrigerator cycle off or having the air conditioner cycle off. We don’t realize that these sounds are there until they’re gone. Because we don’t realize these things, we need to make a conscious effort to reduce the sounds that we do have control over. You know, do I really need to know, every time my neighbor locks and unlocks their car door? Every time that happens, you know, I have a biological response and it affects my ability to concentrate, and it makes me feel more tense. It’s harder to keep things straight. Because you know, ideas need space, they need quiet, to form and materialize.

Joanna
What you said about ideas needing quiet to formalize is actually a big part of what our podcast series is about. And I’m so glad you mentioned that because I know for me as an artist, as someone who’s creative, I have to have quiet to create or to have a creative flow. So, how important do you think that quiet or silence for contemplation is? Or maybe completing a project or creative project or collaborating, or maybe just like getting work done? Can you talk about that?

Nina
Yeah, with pleasure. I think there’s really something to the idea that quiet and silence can help us but I don’t think of quiet as the absence of sound. You know, because we can be in a backyard or woods, I think I do some of my best thinking outside where I can hear animal scurrying, and the wind blowing, and there are all kinds of sounds. So I think it’s important to think about: what are the sounds that are the most distracting and upsetting?

Joanna
So, it seems like there are sounds that are healthy and sounds like noise that are unhealthy.

Nina
Well, also does the sound have meaning? You know, part of having a sound mind is when we make a lot of sound to meaning connections. Sound to meaning connections are, in fact, tremendously important and many of the sounds that affect us biologically and that get in the way of our ability to sleep and to think our sounds that have very little meaning, like the sound of an engine or a sound that doesn’t have a particular message. It’s often an industrial sound, or a technological sound, or a sound of fluorescent lights, or computers, all of these things have this inherent sound that we don’t realize consciously is there but is affecting us.

But let me get back to your question about really thinking about being creative, and your oral environment. First of all, people really differ. We all have very different brains and our sound minds are really different. I know this is a fact. I measure people’s responses to sound biologically every day in the lab. We’ve done this to 1000s of people. And you know, everyone’s response is different. We all have a different signature. We have made different sound to meaning connections in our lives. So, some people are able to concentrate into work and to be creative in places that another person might find objectively noisy, and that’s just the way it is. But I think that it’s important for us to be introspective and to think about, well, what is it that we need? I know some of the things that I need are like, I need sleep, and sleep is a very, very important part of, I think, the creative process. At least I know for myself, when I sleep well, a lot, or enough, I think better. This may not be true for everyone, but sound and noise can get in the way of a healthy night’s sleep. The fact is that we are primed to make connections with sound, and especially if you are a developing organism, you know, you’re making these connections, you know, children learn to make sound meaning connections very, very quickly.

Also, I know for myself, some of my best ideas come to me, while waking. You know, like, as you kind of go between a dream sleep state, sleeping state and waking up, and one of the things that I really learned during the pandemic, was, you know, I, unless I really need to, I don’t use an alarm clock, because again, who wants to be alarmed awake? Right? And, you know, it turns out that you train your body really well, I wake up more or less the same time every day anyway. But I’ve learned, if I don’t want to deprive myself of that time, as I am just waking up, and there are no other distractions, so it’s quiet for me. And I am in between dreaming and wakefulness, and that’s a time when, when ideas and connections just come to me. So, I’ve learned that and I’ve learned to change my life in a way that enables that.

I started out saying that our hearing system, our hearing brain, and body, you know, this is a huge, interconnected process. Of course, if there is unwanted sound, or meaningless sound, or disruptive sound, alarming sound, that is going to affect not only your appetite, but your ability to think and to remember, and to combine information from your senses, to hear the details and nuances and sound that you may want to as you’re playing back a recording that you have created. You know, all of these things are so very, very important. And I think that the very first step, and I hope that your podcast is a step in this direction, is people need to become aware, they need to realize that this is an issue. You know, I mean, I live in a neighborhood where the lawn machines that go on in the fall in the spring. We can hear when a neighbor’s a block and a half away with their leaf blowers or whatever. It’s not the company’s fault. It’s, you know, it’s us, you know, we pay for these services, and we should not be paying for these services. There are ways of keeping a lawn, however you would like it, in ways that are not so noisy. And people just need to know that it’s an issue, that it’s a problem. And so, becoming aware of this, I think, is something that I hope that your podcast will do.

And I try my very best to pull together information, what we know about other species and how they depend on sound, to do their creative activities. I think most people really want to do the right thing for themselves, for their health, for their ability to think, the ability to create for their environment, but they don’t know. And so you know, having information and biological information about how animals and creatures including plants, and trees, know, vibration, this is this is a very important part of natural life. So being aware of these things is, I think, is a really important first step.

Joanna
Yeah, I love what you’re saying about people wanting to do what’s good for themselves and for their health, but they don’t know how. And I’m kind of curious. My generation, like Gen Z generation, we are an anxious generation, for lots of reasons. I wonder like, how much the sound inundation that we’ve grown up in has also affects that. Could you maybe talk about what might happen or what might be some results physiologically, emotionally, of a generation of like my generation for example, growing up with way more noise than people my age might have grown up like 200 years ago?

Nina
Yeah, I think it’s a real issue. And it’s one where I just kind of feel like, I want to get out in front of the bus that is going to kill your generation with noise, with technology with…Don’t get me wrong, I depend on technology for the work I do, I have huge respect for the medical advances that we have made. But again, it’s a matter of thinking about how we spend our time. So, if I know nothing else, as a biologist, it is that we are what we do. How we spend our time really, really matters. And if we spend all of our time on our electronic devices, for example, we are less connected to each other personally. And there is much more to connection. I mean, you as a composer and a musician, you know that a live performance is a very different experience than a recording.

Joanna
Absolutely.

Nina
So we are depriving ourselves of these live performances with each other. And we also we need to practice. So, your generation isn’t practicing. You’re getting more anxious about even being with people and talking to people, because you don’t have very much practice doing it.

Joanna
That’s so true.

Nina
Talking to each other is tremendously important. And I think that we are depriving ourselves of the development of the biological systems of the whole generation and of the generations moving forward.

Think about this; our technology is stealing our thoughts. If we are in line at the supermarket, or at the airport and so right away, you’re checking your phone, and you know, say, oh, I can get some work done while I’m standing here. And so you’re interacting with this thing. So you have lost what can go on in your mind when you think. You know, what if you just sat there and thought. You know, I mean, these technologies are stealing our thoughts. I could be thinking about this next book I’m working on. Or I could be just looking at the interactions between this and that person next to me. Or I can just be letting, you know, you said before the idea of letting your mind go where it needs to go. So, creating environments for yourself, where you’re letting your mind go. And you’re not letting some technology steal that time and steal your thoughts and steal your privacy in terms of your creative and non-creative ideas. I mean, letting your mind just work.

[music]

Joanna
I hope you enjoyed our conversation about noise. What was helpful for me to learn from our interview was what noise is: noise is sound that is absent from meaning.

I also learned how much noise is connected to the technology we use and how both noise and technology can distract us, stress us, and steal our internal dialogues, all of which are crucial to incubating creative ideas and problem solving.

Dr. Kraus said something I think is important when she mentioned how many aspects of everyday noise we encounter have solutions if enough people first become aware of the noise and hear it, and second, understand its harmful effects. So, I hope this episode can be the start to realizing how much noise is really around you and then what role you might play in reducing unnecessary, unwanted noise in your life, and consequently, in the lives of those around you.

[music]

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.

Suggested articles by Dr. Nina Kraus:

Leaf blowers – A small part of a larger movement Evanston should lead:
https://evanstonroundtable.com/2023/05/17/guest-essay-leaf-blowers-noise-mental-effects/

Keep it Down: The dangers of human created sound:
https://www.pressreader.com/usa/los-angeles-times/20211012/281762747437865

Hearing Too Much in a Noisy World:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/hearing-too-much-in-a-noisy-world-11631296563

 

 

 

 

Dominique Dulièpre
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

Hi, I’m Dominique Dulièpre, Longitude fellow and graduate student at Rice University studying Electrical and Computer Engineering.

We are exploring roles, projects, and approaches of individuals to experimentation and contemplation in scientific and creative fields. For this episode, I had the opportunity to speak with Peter Denton.

Peter Denton is an associate physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where I interned as an undergraduate. He studies neutrinos; Neutrinos are among the most abundant particles that have mass in the universe. These particles almost never interact with other matter which makes them difficult to detect. Trillions of neutrinos from the sun stream through our body every second, but we can’t feel them.

Join me as I engage in conversation with Peter Denton about the current works toward the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment.  Enjoy listening!

[Music]

Peter Denton
After I did my bachelor’s in math and physics at Rice, I did a PhD at Vanderbilt, in physics, focusing on theoretical particle physics. That just means looking at particles, the kind of the smallest things, and then in looking at them in the most extreme environments, to see how, you know, our understanding of them breaks, if it is correct, is it not correct. I studied that at Vanderbilt in Nashville.

So right now, I work at Brookhaven Lab, which is on Long Island, near, near-ish to New York City. There’s a number of programs for undergraduates and graduates, international high school students as well, to come to Brookhaven lab, and I think some of the other labs do this as well. We bring in just a huge number of students each year, at different levels, to engage with scientists, but also with like, the hardware, like the state of the art, you know, whatever machine, to run little, experiments. You give them little projects, and sometimes it is actually contributing to research, but sometimes it’s just getting a feel for what it is, because, a lot of people don’t understand, I find, really kind of the idea of what research is. It sounds like you’ve already gotten this experience a little bit. People kind of understand, like, what a business is, or like, what a doctor or a lawyer or things like that, what do they do, like there’s TV shows about them. So, we all kind of have some vague idea of what these things are, like the research is different from those things. And it’s very hard to understand that without experiencing it. And so even if it’s in kind of a very simple, confined, and you draw a box around a little problem, and you say, Okay, go work on this problem, it still provides the experience and it’s different from doing your math and physics and engineering homework in school, whether in master’s program or in undergrad, or even in high school. Those homework problems, you know, it’s a well-defined problem. There’s a beginning, there’s an end, the answer is probably in the last chapter of your textbook, but in research, there’s no guarantee there is an answer. I just come up with an interesting question. How do I do that? You know, I don’t know. It requires some level of creativity. In fact, I would say that being successful in research is largely creative efforts, very similar to the arts. And then you have to generate a new solution out of, out of the ether, so to speak, see if this works. They obviously have to have the technical skills in terms of math or hardware or whatever, to execute it, and see if it maybe be the homework problem for you, you know, you’ll do it in a day, because the procedure of things are well defined. And so, once you understand there is a solution, and that it is achievable, then that makes things much simpler. But that’s why I think these research programs for students are so essential, even if a person doesn’t become a research scientist, just to have an understanding of what that looks like.

Dominique
I certainly believe that also provides them the benefit of getting first-hand experience. So, they can certainly hit the ground running after graduation. They essentially have the direction, whether research or industry.

Peter
Exactly.

Dominique
Can you tell me a bit about, briefly, your experience at DUNE? And how would you describe your experience at Fermilab?

Peter
The U.S. is building a particle physics experiment. It’s the biggest particle physics experiment in the U.S. called DUNE. There’re also other names like LBNF, which are associated with it, but we can just basically call the whole thing DUNE, like the movie, a novel, but it stands for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, not a desert planet and space. It consists of a number of separate components that are, each of which by themselves would be considered their own experiment in a typical thing.

The primary part is at Fermilab, which is a national lab outside of Chicago, where they have a big accelerator complex. So, they’re used to accelerating particles to very high with low energies, to get a lot of oomph, so they can do a lot of cool stuff. And they have experience with that. And they’re going to have to redesign that in a number of ways. And then they’re also building separately, a very big detector. But typically, the detectors are like in the same place as the accelerators. But for these kinds of experiments, these kinds of neutrino oscillation experiments, you often put the detector like several states away. So, this detector will be in South Dakota, in a former gold mine. So, they dug very deep, they dug out a lot of gold, and then the gold extraction kind of stopped. Of course, they’re looking at that relative to the price of gold and they said, Alright, we’re done with the mine. And basically, as soon as that happened, physicists jumped right in and moved in. And there’ve been experiments, smaller experiments there for years looking for different things because being underground is advantageous for a number of reasons. But now that they’re fully out, they’re prepared to start building huge underground caverns and stick giant detectors in there. The underground caverns are actually mostly done. I think they’re about 90% excavated. I think the target completion date is late January.

There are these two separate parts that compose what is DUNE. Now my role in it is, I would say, somewhat peripheral. I’m a theorist. So, I’m not building things, I am not very good at building things. But I think about things in different ways to put things together in ways that people haven’t thought of before. And so, a lot of that is related to DUNE although some of it is related to other experiments and other physics topics.

Dominique
What exactly are neutrinos?

Peter
The neutrino is neutral, so it’s electrically neutral, which means it doesn’t interact, in the same way that electrons interact. Electrons interact with everything. That’s why we can do chemistry, we can build semiconductors. We can manipulate electrons super well and do all kinds of cool stuff with them. Neutrinos, now so much. The neutrino, even though it’s electrically neutral, doesn’t interact very much. In physics, that’s what we think about is how does stuff interact? And exactly how does that happen? How likely is it? And like, what kind of angles and kind of energy do they come in with and go out with and what’s the probability for this to happen or that to happen, whatever. We calculate all this stuff. Now, there’s two other particles I mentioned, like an electron called the muon, and tau. I like to think of them as like the fat or cousins. Electrons are like the skinny little kid or whatever. And then about 200 times heavier is the Muon. And then another factor of, I think about 20 times heavier is the Tau. But at the fundamental level, they’re all kind of the same thing. But it turns out that because their masses are different, they act a little bit differently. So heavier particles can decay into lighter particles, if that’s allowed by certain rules. So, the muon and the tau, they decay fairly readily. So, they’re not stable. So that’s just hanging around. Electrons, obviously, just hanging around because there’s nothing lighter for them to decay to, they’re pretty light on the scheme of things. So, when a neutrino interacts, it will produce either an electron, a muon or a tau and since they look differently, we can measure them in a detector. We build detectors that are designed to say, oh, electron interacts this way. Muon, because it’s heavier, it does something different. And tau also does something different.

Dominique
So, there are multiple sources from which we can detect them. How much information can our detectors at DUNE actually provide in terms of differentiating whether they are coming from Earth resources or stars supernovaing?

Peter
Yeah, yeah. Good. So yeah, exactly. So, there’s a lot of sources of neutrinos. I mentioned nuclear reactors. That’s how the neutrinos were discovered. They’re also produced in the atmosphere, there’s a kind of background radiation raining down on us. It’s not, it’s not great for us, but we get it all the time. This is just part of life. And they’re also produced in the sun quite abundantly. Occasionally, stars run out of fuel, and they explode and turns out that produces a bucket load of neutrinos. And how do you know, you know, when you detect something, first, you have to know it’s a neutrino and not another particle. Right? That’s, that’s, that’s the first problem. And even once you know that, you say, well, where’s it coming from? So, there’s a bunch of different techniques and when you design your experiment, of course you design with these things in mind.

DUNE’s primary goal is actually detecting human made neutrinos. So, from a controlled source. So, what they do is they, they smash particles together at Fermilab near Chicago. And this produces a bunch of a bunch of particles, which eventually produces neutrinos. So that’s basically anything you produce is going to produce neutrinos. So, this is how the source at Fermilab works. It’s just producing a sort of what we call a beam of neutrinos. It’s kind of broad, but it’s most of the neutrinos go in the forward direction, along some axis, which is hopefully going to be pointed correctly at South Dakota. And the thing about this beam is that well, okay, so on your detector, you have some 3D sort of spatial reconstruction, and you can kind of tell where, because you see all the secondary particles going in one direction. So, they’re all going up or down or left to right or whatever, well, you know where Fermilab is. So, they should be going in a way that corresponds to coming from that direction, they should be going west-ish. And that if all of a sudden, particles are going west-ish, you know that the neutrino that you just detected came from Fermilab. Obviously, you have to get the direction exactly right. In addition, the beam is pulsed. So, it shoots neutrinos for a short period of time, and there’s an empty spot. You also have the timing information. So, you know how far away it is how long it takes for them to get there, you count for that, and it’s it has to come in this small-time window here and not in this big-time window here. There’s some duty factor of, where basically, if they come in this big chunk of time, then you know that it’s not a neutrino from Fermilab. So, you combine this information and then you do some statistical things, and you say, we are 99% sure that this is a neutrino from Fermilab. But there’s other things as well.

So, if it comes from a supernova, like you mentioned, those neutrinos tend to be lower energy than those from DUNE aside from Fermilab. You have a different detection strategy in the first place just for how they look in the detector, but also DUNE will see a lot of neutrinos, hundreds to 1000s in a timespan of like two seconds. Well, normally the rate is like, you know, I don’t know, one a day or something like that from Fermilab. It’s very rare. It’s not very often. So, if you’re seeing, you know, a couple of day, or whatever the rate is, and while you’re checking your watch, is there another one going to come today or not, but then you all of a sudden see in like two seconds, you see, like 500 neutrinos, and they’re not coming from the direction of Fermilab. They come from some random direction. They’re lower energy, but they’re all coming from kind of the same direction. Then you think, that must be a transient burst effect. That doesn’t necessarily immediately mean it’s a supernova, but you can combine this with other information and put it together. And if that happens, there’s actually a number of neutrino detectors around the world that will see it. They’ll send out an alert. You can actually sign up for this online. And I recommend anybody does this. It’s called SNEWS. S, n, e, w, s, the Supernova Early Warning System. And you can just sign in, type in your email address. They never send an alert. The last supernova nearby seen was in 1987, there’s not been one since then. We are waiting patiently. It’s been 35 years, we think we’re due, but you know, that’s not how these things work. But then the point is that we’ll get into neutrino information from a supernova, before we get the information via visible light. And that’s because outside the supernova, there’s a bunch of dust until the neutrinos, because they don’t interact very much, when I said they’re little, they just truck right through it, they just come through it at very near the speed of light. But the visible stuff, it kind of bounces around for a while. So, the optical telescopes won’t see it until potentially hours later. So, there’s this like, really small sliver of time, and you need that neutrino information, and you get that you then use triangulation, you then use pointing, use a variety of different things. And so, we’re pretty sure there’s a supernova, you know, near-ish nearby, in that direction, everyone with a telescope and that means you at home with your telescope, or binoculars or your eyeballs should go look in the direction that they say, and see if you see, suddenly a new star appear in the sky. Because that’s, that’s possible. And that has happened before, but now we have the capability to know in advance. That’s never happened before. That would be just an amazing thing. And DUNE will play a big part of that for sure.

Dominique
I like to think of it as you snooze, you lose – the ability to observe.

Peter
Yeah, that’s awesome.

Dominique
Which was the precursor to a black hole in a white dwarf. So, it’s pretty important.

Peter
Yeah, exactly. So, supernova can form a black hole, sometimes, we don’t really know very well how often that happens. It can form a neutron star, which is like a really compact bunch of neutrons and stuff, basically, that’s just super energetic, and doing a bunch of crazy stuff. And seeing these things form, in some sense, would be amazing. I mean, there’s so much, so much to know, and we’d love to be able to get at, but you can never do these kinds of things at the earth. So, we have to use astrophysical environments to do this. And neutrinos play a huge role, provided that you can detect them, and they’re a pain to detect for we’re building bigger and more sophisticated detectors all the time.

Dominique
What are some upcoming milestones or experiments that you’re most looking forward to?

Peter
Yeah, that’s a great question. There’s a couple of things coming up. There’s currently experiments like DUNE. So, DUNE is expected to turn on in the next, let’s say, five-ish years. But there’s experiments that are doing a similar thing right now. One at Fermilab, it’s called NOvA and there’s another one in Japan called T2K. And they’re doing the same thing, but with less precise detectors and less powerful beams. And so, they’re putting out results. They haven’t put out results in a couple of years. So ,I think they’re hopefully due, so I’m crossing my fingers, they’re gonna put up something soon. And they’re measuring stuff, you know, not nearly as well as DUNE will, but we’re still getting information. And they provide indications for what kinds of things to expect at DUNE. Oh, maybe, maybe the numbers are a little bit, you know, maybe the parameters are a little bit more this way so, you know, we should have that in mind. DUNE, measuring the things we want to measure. DUNE will be a little bit easier or a little bit harder. So, I’m hoping that with the next data release from these current, what are called long baseline neutrino oscillation experiments, that they will start to migrate towards each other. Do they migrate more towards the one or the other one, you know, how does it work? You know, I don’t know. I mean, this is its research, right? We don’t know how it goes, could go in either way. And I think that’s something that I’m anticipating for some time, and I’m very much hoping that they will come out with something soon.

Dominique
What advice would you give to young scientists aspiring to pursue a career in physics?

Peter
Obviously, you’ve got to do well in your classes. You’ve got to learn differential equations, linear algebra, and so on. Maybe more math, depending on what areas you’re interested in. You have to learn programming. There’s very few physicists who have successful careers without pretty good programming abilities. I am not saying you have to be like a computer scientist and writing your own compilers or whatever. But you know, high performance computing, using supercomputers. This is a standard tool of physics today. You’ve got to learn that stuff. And also getting involved in research by doing some research things as well, there’s a number of opportunities there.

I would say that some of the biggest problems that young scientists have, where things start to go awry, is in and I would say in two kinds of main areas. One is, in having an awareness of what a career in research looks like, it doesn’t look like a career in business or in, you know, other professional careers like law or medicine or whatever. It’s a very different kind of career trajectory. And it’s a little bit different in every field. But you know, just very briefly kind of a standard career trajectory, as you get a bachelors, of course, you go to graduate school, you get a master’s and a PhD that may be together or separate, then you do postdocs. This typically involves moving, quite possibly moving around the world. I’m American, but I did my postdoc in Denmark, because that’s where I got a postdoc. You do one, two, three, some number of those, these are each a couple of years. And then you get a hopefully a, you know, permanent tenure track job. So, there’s some kind of trajectory, there’s some kind of steps that you have to accomplish, and also looks a little bit differently in different countries, in Europe, in different places, it follows a different trajectory. That’s one thing.

The other thing is what are often called like soft skills. Networking, giving talks, writing. You think, Oh, I’m getting into physics, because it doesn’t involve people and sometimes that’s very nice. But that’s, of course not true. In order to be successful, you have to network, you’re just the same as your friends going into finance, or engineering or whatever, you got to go out and meet people and make a good impression. And make sure they remember you. You also have to give talks, this is a big part of the job, you stand in front of a room of 30 people or 100 people or 300 people and tell them about your research. And they’re gonna ask tricky questions, and you got to be able to answer it on the spot. And people who do this, well leave a good impression on the audience. And maybe one of them when it comes time to hire somebody decides to hire you. That definitely happens. Also writing and we write a lot people who can write good papers that are easy to read, it makes a big difference. And people remember those people much better than you know if you struggle with it a little bit. So, you know, I spent time in literature classes in school because I liked it. But I also got a lot of practice writing, and it’s definitely paid off a lot for me. I don’t think you can get by just taking only math and physics and be fine. It is necessary, I would say to have a successful career in particle physics, to be able to write well to stand up and speak in front of people and to network well.

[music]

Dominique
We hope you enjoyed our episode. What stood out for me from this conversation was how much information neutrinos provide about our universe. Supernovae Early Warning System, SNEWS for short, can inform us on the life and health of the core of our sun before its light makes its way to us. The SNEWS can even inform us of supernovae. In the transition to black holes or neutron star. It can even lead to the examining of the essence of dark matter and dark energy for scientists.

[music]

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.