17. Building the James Webb Telescope for Microbes w/ Henry Lee

In this episode, we interview Dr. Henry Lee, CEO of Cultivarium, a focused research organization that aims to expand access to novel microorganisms. We discuss the world’s fastest-growing bacterium, the challenges of domesticating non-model microbes, new organizational models for science, robotic dogs, and more!

If you are interested in Cultivarium, you can learn more and get involved at https://www.cultivarium.org/.

For more information about EBRC, visit our website at ebrc.org. If you are interested in getting involved with the EBRC Student and Postdoc Association, fill out a membership application for graduate students and postdocs or for undergraduates and join today!

Episode transcripts are the unedited output from Whisper and likely contain errors.

Transcript

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Hello, and welcome back to EBRC in Translation. We're a group of graduate students and postdocs working to bring you conversations with members of the engineering biology community. I'm Andrew Hunt, a recent PhD graduate from the Jewett Lab at Northwestern University. And I'm Katherine Brink, a postdoc in Megan Palmer's group at Stanford University. Today we're joined by Henry Lee, who is a serial entrepreneur and CEO of Cultivarium, a Schmidt Futures-funded focused research organization, a new type of nonprofit startup for science. Thanks for joining us today, Henry. Thanks for inviting me to this, and I'm really happy to share here on this podcast. So you sort of got started as an undergraduate in electrical engineering. And so we're curious, how did you end up in engineering biology? Sure. So there's two ways to really describe this, but I think in my undergraduate days, I was really focused on this idea of using circuits and gates and programming them in different ways. And so there is actually an engineering device called the FPGA, Field Programmable Gate Array. And what that is, it allows you to use software to control physical logic gates. And so as I was playing around with that and playing around with different applications, I was able to actually go see a bunch of talks in neuroscience and in biology. And at that time, there was a real interest in people talking about biology as circuits and as gates and using all these computing metaphors. And I thought, wow, that's something that I have to get into. That seems like the next exponential technology. And so about 18 years later, here I am. There's no programming of actual gate arrays yet, but we're doing our best to make that a reality. Where did you do your graduate work and postdoctoral work? Yeah. So I did my graduate work with Jim Collins when he was at Boston University. And there I got started really with a lot of notions around computational biology and reverse engineering networks from biological measurements. So in going back to this FPGA analogy where we know we have certain gates and we can use software to program how gates are interacting, here we were thinking about, okay, well, here's a cell. It has lots of gates. We don't know how they're interacting. How can we find, hopefully not just correlations, but causations on how different genes act as gates and how they work together? So I really spent a lot of my time on the computational side. And me being someone who was very interested in getting his hands dirty with the particular experiments and really mucking with the innards of things, I actually quickly became an experimentalist. And that was really quite an interesting challenge for anyone who's gone into biology at that research graduate school level, where you really have to learn a lot of fundamentals from scratch. And I think that was actually a really great formative experience on how do you think about approaching biology with its many, shall we say, recipes and formulas from a first principal's perspective, or at least that's the approach that I took. And so it took a while to get that going, but we were able to put some of these ideas together, work on bacterial antibiotic resistance, and really take both a experimental approach and a computational approach to disentangling mechanisms of evolution. So that was my PhD work. And after that, I had this far off idea that I really wanted to go even deeper into experimental biology. So I actually looked at doing field work in exotic locations of the world. I also thought that would be a way to make up for being in the lab for the last six and a half years. Yes. Unfortunately, that didn't quite pan out for various reasons that we can discuss over beer. But the main point of that is what I really look for in my next opportunity was a way to attack what I perceived at the time to be areas of science that were underserved, or at least underserved within the Boston ecosystem or the major hubs of bioengineering, synthetic biology, and systems biology. So I was really fortunate to be able to join George Church's lab, where he's had the great fortune of being able to be daring in his science and to allow students to work on pretty out there projects. And so I existed in that gray space where I was able to work on a non-model organism and trying to bring that into genetic tractability. And that's really set the stage for the rest of the opportunities that I'm sure we'll discuss. Yeah, that project really made a splash when it came out. This is working with Vibrio natriagans. Am I pronouncing that correctly? Yeah, we call it Vibrio natrogens, or because we're really trying to get it into the zeitgeist, we call it V-net. V-net. Awesome. Yes. And so V-net is the fastest growing bacterium known. And we were wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about the specific inspiration for that project and what you did. Sure. So first of all, it was super fun to be able to take an organism that relatively few people have studied and try to bring a bunch of tools to making it genetically tractable. And I think that's one of the real powers of modern biology is that we're able to essentially throw the kitchen sink of technologies at it and try to reduce what has taken decades of work in E. coli, bacillus subtilis, so on and so forth, and bring that to modern microbiology. So there's a couple of reasons why we decided to work on it. Number one, we're always really interested in the fastest, the biggest, it's the American dream, right? We're going for the best all the time. And so that wasn't relatively easy one to pick up. In the 50s and 60s, people had observed that this organism was the fastest reliving organism they had found, but there was really nothing going on for nearly 50 years. And so we thought that was a great opportunity for us to revisit that phenomenon and to try to see if we can use that as a chassis, right? From a purely practical perspective, we thought that working with something that grows as fast as possible is probably a good idea, given that you really don't want to spend most of your academic career just waiting for something to grow. Now, if you take that even further, that actually is something ridiculous that we all have to deal with when we work with, for example, E. coli or yeast, right? We have to plate cells, wait for them to form colonies, then pick single colonies and wait for them to grow into a liquid. And that's actually, if you integrate that over your academic career or your professional career, that's a lot of time that you are spending hoping something, not hoping, but waiting for something to grow. Of course, that makes for good coffee sessions, and that makes for time that you can go home, but it is really a lot of time. And so when we think particularly about ideas that have really been popularized around synthetic biology with the design, build, test cycle, that growing really just takes a lot of time, and it's not something that you can really cut. So that was some of the inspiration around working with VNet. Very cool. This seems to lead nicely into your current work at Cultivarium. Can you talk a little bit more about what Cultivarium is focused on, and how you decided that the problem you're working on is an important one to pursue, and maybe most importantly, can you talk about how you picked the name? Sure. Well, how do we start? Well, let's start with the first part of the question. Yeah, so really what Cultivarium is focused on is to try to systematize and formalize some of the work that I did in my postdoc where we were thinking about questions as basic as how you grow something reproducibly. And there, I don't talk about this a lot, but I spent a month or two with problems where I couldn't regrow something that was stocked at minus 80. That's not something that you're proud to tell people that you have problems with, but that actually is a really fundamental aspect of how you archive a biological sample. What goes into that is it purely just really cold temperature and slowing the atoms down. It's really not just that, right? There are lipids and osmolarities and things that you need to be thinking about. So thinking about culturing, thinking about how you introduce recombinant DNA into a cell, because that's really been a hallmark of how we've been able to do functional genomics. Studying gene function is to really go after perturbations. And so we introduced those things in the modern days, not by chemical lesions of toxins, but by specific knockdowns or specific overexpressions. So thinking about DNA transformation is another thing that needs to be worked on. And then really talking about molecular tools. So when you start to want to introduce recombinant DNA, there's a chicken and egg problem of you don't know how to transform this thing, but you also don't know what replicates in this thing. And so you have no idea if you have the right transformation parameters, but the organism just doesn't tolerate that particular plasmid. So trying to build up resources for that. So for example, a library of origins that you could try in a bunch of organisms, that itself is completely missing, right? So the inspiration for cultivarium really is how do you take some of these artisanal things that were done and really formalize that into systems so that we can make that a platform that is reproducible with high throughput? Because our goal is to tackle all the thousands to millions of different microorganisms, at least out there, and how do we actually onboard them into the lab? So that's the inspiration for cultivarium. I'll tell you a quick anecdote about the name. Really, naming is one fun part of any endeavor. And we were really intrigued by this idea of culture and cultivar and the idea of really providing that warm space for something to grow and for something to mature. And so we really thought about cultivars and cultivation. And we really also wanted to be something that's like an aquarium, right? Something where you can house a lot of different things all in one place. So we kind of smashed that together. And this is by no mean a commercial plug, but it turns out cultivarium is also the name of a yoga studio in Brazil, I believe. So I guess a great minds think alike. That's a great origin story. And I am a huge fan of the name. I think it reflects all the things that you were just talking about. Delving a little deeper into this non-model organisms question and kind of taking a future oriented approach, if you could domesticate several of your dream non-model organisms, what would they be capable of? And what applications would you want to use them for? Oh, boy, there's almost an unending number of answers here. But I'll start with what I guess I'd call a cop-out answer, which is I'm not even sure. But I will highlight a few things, right? So an organism that a lot of people have heard of is Deinococcus radiodurans. It has the interesting capability of withstanding lots of nuclear insult while repairing its genome or having a relatively clean genome free of lesions. Related to that, there's another organism called Oxtrachea, which has, I believe its genome is fragmented into something like 26,000 little pieces. And somehow it uses RNA to be able to reassemble itself into whatever is needed for its life, right? So I think when you think about these types of really exotic capabilities that we probably don't even see until we actually go into the genetics, those are amazing fundamental science models that not really something that anyone can access right now. And hopefully will provide inspiration, if not the basis for lots of forward thinking biotechnologies that could be applied to, well, obviously health, right? In that particular case. So there's almost an infinite number of things that we could dream of. And I'd hate to limit ourselves by dictating what that looks like right now. Fair enough. You wouldn't even take a guess at your top five. I couldn't convince you to list three more. I think if you were to invite me later, I could come up with a different set. It depends on how many beers you've had. Right, exactly. But to be honest with you, here's what we really are hoping cultivarium becomes. In a way, there's one analogy, which is maybe what we could be really focused on is building, we used to say the Hubble telescope, but now we're going to say the James Webb telescope, right? There's this vast universe of microorganisms that we'd love to be able to study in more detail. And right now we're limited to just a few. And so what we would love to do is build that really excellent tool where we don't have to be prescriptive at cultivarium on what we study, but we will interact with as many people as interested to say, I'm really interested in pointing this thing towards that direction of the microbial sky. Take some measurements for me, build some tools for me. And so we will do that. Right. So part of me not being as forthright about listing organisms is that I really do want it to be more of a choose-your-own-adventure type of opportunity. And that allows us to not necessarily be pigeonholed or to specialize, right? And of course that sacrifice means that the platforms we build, we're under no pretense that we're going to domesticate or onboard every organism we attempt. This is a initial stab at what should become a more sophisticated toolset, a more sophisticated approach over time. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I'm happy to not attempt to pigeonhole you into organisms more. So zooming out a little bit from what Cultivarium does, Cultivarium is a focused research organization or an FRO. Most of our listeners probably don't know what an FRO is. So can you introduce us to the concept of an FRO and maybe give us some insight into why you decided to build Cultivarium as an FRO as opposed to say a company or maybe an academic lab? Yeah, sure. An FRO stands for focused research organization. And the aim really is to work on fundamental scientific bottlenecks that we believe are not well supported in academic areas or in industrial areas. And that opportunity for Cultivarium means that we want to build open source tools for working with non-model organisms, specifically for scientists. That's really the mission. And if you were to think about, well, how would you build this without a philanthropic support? You would say, okay, well, hey, I did a postdoc on this. I'm going to start to look for an academic position. It turns out that it's really hard to get non-model organisms funded because some of it is very blue sky. You don't have a clear, I want to apply it to X, Y and Z, unless you're really working on the microbiome, which of course is an important application in its own right. But I argue that if we want to have this vision of going out there to the entire microbial universe, let's have at it. Let's go all the way out there. I think that it is possible, but it is a little challenging if you really want to work on different terrestrial biomes or the ocean or the soil, if it's not directly connected to plant crops. That's for example. I think another lesson that we've learned, for example, from, let's just say CRISPR, because it's near term, is that it actually takes a lot of different experts, different types of scientific expertise to bring something from, I've observed it as this strange repeat of sequences to, oh, wow, we've now figured out that it can be a self-contained system that doesn't require the host, or at least we now have all the factors required to make the system work, and we can export it to all these different applications. It took a long time for that to mature. I think there's, of course, a place in science research for serendipity and for curiosity, and it doesn't mean that every item that is curious means that it should be translated to something. But I do think that there is an avenue of, it's hard to build an academic lab that has all the different types of expertise that you need, and an academic lab a lot of times is about training at this point at least, and so there's not a lot of staff science that you can access when you're trying to build this in an academic sphere. So that's the academic side. On the industrial side, there's clearly big corporations out there that are working on crops, that are working on industrial biotech. They're really application focused, and so my hypothesis and my argument there is there's a lot of attention paid to near-term market and revenue generating applications. And even though, if you want to talk about pure startup speak, that may be a two to 10-year journey where the actual product is then commercialized, that's still relatively near-term. Cultivarium itself may be hopefully laying the groundwork for something that hopefully won't take 10 years to pay out, but it may, and I think we want to be okay with that. So one of the things that you mentioned was CRISPR as an example of a technology that was found through some basic science research and then ended up having some really amazing applications throughout the biotechnology space. And I was wondering if there were any other examples of success stories that you draw from when you're trying to inspire people to participate in Cultivarium or get excited about its mission of things that were found through basic science that are really exciting when they're applied to particular applications. Well, we did assemble one slide, which I sometimes present as a joke, but I think it's really apt for this question, which is almost by definition, all of the new DNA and the features out there are not present in the few organisms that we're working in now. And so we've had a Nobel for CRISPR. We've had a Nobel for GFP. We've had a Nobel for PCR from thermotolerant organisms. So I think that that itself speaks for the potential value of looking elsewhere and the potential payoff for looking elsewhere. And while one of the things that I tend not to focus on is these Nobel prizes, because I think that we should celebrate all these successes, but at the same time, we should also celebrate all of the background work that has been done. And so I do think a recent example of this is look at all the amazing people who have done these fundamental work with RNA therapies. And now we know all about it because we were in a dire need and it came to our rescue. But thank you, Kathleen, for actually persisting and going for it and finding avenues and all the people around her that actually supported her and funded her work. So again, I don't know the full story there, but I have to say that it's tremendous to have that sort of recognition for all the players in science and not just the big prize winners, which we should also respect for the record. Definitely. Yeah. Science is a collaborative and cooperative activity when it's done well, I think. Right. So maybe stepping back again to FROs and how they operate. One question that I had is about how FROs are funded and specifically how that enables FROs to pursue the types of research that they do that might be a little bit more platform or basic research oriented. Sure. So we're really fortunate that we have a generous support from the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Foundation through Schmidt Futures, which is their science focused arm. And what that has really allowed us to do is to assemble diverse scientific expertise and to be able to focus, at least in the near term, on building a platform that doesn't necessarily have to be directly applicative to existing efforts. So we get this heads down work that is really rare once you emerge from a grad student and postdoc atmosphere. So I think we've had the pleasure of that sort of support and we are able to think more directly about our five year timeframe of achieving the goals that we want to be achieving. So I think that's really been key to having some level of sustained support where we can focus on the work and not worry about continuing to fundraise for this effort. You sort of just mentioned your goals for cultivarium and it seems as though a specific part of FROs is that we were able to find in our background research on them is that they're built around sort of pre-specified and like quantifiable technical milestones. So you're coming up on your one year anniversary for cultivarium it seems like and we were wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you tried to set these milestones for cultivarium and maybe a bit about how that's going so far. Yeah, so it's definitely going great and I don't want to just hide behind a speculative it's going great but we do have specific plans to reveal not only our goals but our continued progress. One important thing that we wanted to do with this effort really is to make sure that we share in a similar framework as this idea of ASAP science and that is we want to be able to have a hypothesis, do the work, draw the conclusions, do the analysis, not sit on it forever, not firewallet, not paywallet and almost think about it as hey here's what we're up to, this is what we were thinking, here's the data, it's going to be wrapped up nicely into a portal that you can come in and take a look and keep in touch. One way that I talk about it to our team is we are really interested in becoming let's say the Instagram for non-model organisms. We want you to continually scroll because we always have new content and we want you to like and comment and remix and reuse for your purposes, your efforts and to remix and reuse the way that we think about things or our approach in your science. So a lot of the OKRs that we have set for let's say the first year or two are really based around what do we think people are going to really want to use in the near term. For example in culturing we want to deliver tools that allow you to predict what kind of cultivation media you might want to start off trying right and so that doesn't mean that we will necessarily give you the perfect one but we are trying to get you bootstrapped into exploring the space of what is possible and so we are working on both collecting a rich enough data set that we can then use computation to help predict that kind of stuff. We are also diving into metabolic networks and trying to go after genome analyses and trying an integration of techniques and data sources to help someone who might say hey I have this really interesting organism maybe I have just the 16S so I know it's similar to this other organism how might I culture this right and so another way to think about this as well is we have people who are doing giant metagenome sequencing projects and maybe they find oh wow here's this one organism that is present at 70 80 percent frequency it must be really important I should culture this thing right how do you go from that to physical culture you have to take into account these integrated data sources and try to figure out what is a place for you to start right so that's some of the things that we're doing around culturing I mentioned a little bit on the molecular tool side that we're assembling a library of origins so that people can do mapping of organisms to origins that's been a really fun project and one that's actually we've received some background interest because even for E. coli some people don't really appreciate or understand what is what are origins that work as a single instance or as pairs and so I think that we could be building a resource that is helpful for non-model organisms but we can also be building a resource that can be helpful for organisms that people want to work on all the time but really need a better handle on how to map that compatibility in more high throughput so that's I know a high level description of how things are going in the specific OKRs and goals but we do plan on having our website launched towards the end of this year which will create all of that data stream for you to look at those are really cool projects and I love the idea that you are going to share some of the insights that you've gained through this work with folks in the scientific community so that they can benefit from them as well a question about that when you're sharing this type of information do concerns about intellectual property come up are there ways that you need to balance what you share versus what you can't share for that reason yeah that's great question so number one we are sensitive to potential biosecurity risks so there are there is a biosecurity review that will occur when we work on particular projects and those those scientific outputs that's that's number one in terms of IP we're really committed right now to this idea of open source not because that we insist on open source by nature but our observation really is that a lot of synthetic biology or biology or bioengineering today really quickly gets patented or paywalled and that of course is you know from a sociological perspective you've done all this work it costs so much money of course you want protection of course you want to pay off I think that that has some negatives about how we really ramp up this field in terms of innovation and so what I mean by that and this is something that is echoed through a lot of our organization is that a lot of the computer industry if you want to continue to use that analogy really benefited a lot from open source from the hacker community from reuse remix and there's a real opportunity here for us to invest in that kind of public goods or common goods because the hypothesis in the bed here is we're going to go after all these exotic organisms and we're going to find some really cool stuff and there'd be so many fruits to pick that we don't actually have to pick them now so that's our current attitude about it and we certainly would like to by default make sure that everything gets out there open source as quickly as possible I really love that I'm also curious you mentioned sort of a little bit about how you're planning to share your results but I'm curious do you plan to also sort of do traditional academic publishing or do you think you'll go in a different direction for how you share results so I would say that we are committing to open access bio archive types of publications to some extent we almost don't even have time for that and if you think about the life cycle of this program at least in its current instantiation of five years let's say how many papers can you reasonably foresee getting all the way to review and publication in a traditional journal wow that's a tall order right bio archive is slightly easier but we all know that there's a lot of craftsmanship and a lot of proper placement of science within the larger sphere that also occurs with manuscript writing now I think that that's important number one but I do think that sometimes we might pay a little bit too much attention to that when bigger problems and juicier problems might be out there that we could collaborate on and work on right so I think that by existing as an fro and really by trying to create a place where all these incredible scientists come are invested in this model and want to work on this taking a risk on losing out on the traditional academic currency that all of science runs on right now and that's a big that's actually a big experiment right and so we want to make sure that we continue to focus on true value add through science and that we try to minimize these alternate activities that will need up a lot of our time I'm not sure that was clear I think you get the gist no I I can tell you I'm feeling exactly that very deeply at the moment as I'm currently doing revisions on my last paper from grad school after having finished so I I get it so in addition to founding cultivarium you've also co-founded and advised a few different startups covering a really wide range of applications from enzymatic DNA synthesis to probiotics for livestock what have you learned through these experiences about how to start a company or an organization more broadly how to start a company is the absolute easiest part of starting a company it is at this point and possibly thanks to the Americans focused on small businesses and Silicon Valley it is almost just a few clicks for you to go on a website with the right legal docs pay it through some credit card or stripe that's not an advertisement and then have and have something incorporated right so I think that the key to having a startup actually is making sure number one that you're in it for absolutely the right reasons this is sort of a similar to some advice you might get when you think about hey I think I might want to do a postdoc and then someone who really cares about you should say really why then have you articulate very clearly why you're doing it and what is the bet and how much time you're willing to invest that was actually the best advice I ever got when I was thinking about transitioning from a grad student to postdoc and I would say that that's the same thing that should occur when you think about should I start a company and the specific question I would ask really is for you to really spend the time and think about and try to really get down on paper who needs this thing and is willing to exchange cold hard currency for it and I think that is a leap that scientists could spend a little more time on in grad school oftentimes you have a project that within a good approximation is set as an agenda by your advisor right and that has that is a proxy of someone cares about it enough to fund it and therefore you exist in this sphere to work on it and contribute to this but that's a different thing than you need to start a company and actually generate revenue because someone is willing to pay for something you're going to make right and so I think that leap is actually something that needs a lot more care and attention and I guess I'll shout out one program that I wish I had engaged with us has seemed really cool is this NSF I Corp program where as an NSF recipient you can join this program they particularly focus on getting you to talk to a lot of people to better triangulate what is it that you're building why should it be commercialized can it be a startup right and I think that we should all spend more time thinking about that and making sure that those pieces are all in place before we do the three minute click around to incorporate a company so I think that's that's one of the major things having said that I am really really passionate about translation of science into society startup is just one route I think that the academic system has obviously its own perks but clearly a lot of limitations maybe chief of which is just there aren't that many positions left and so that is fine there's plenty of opportunities to make an impact startups is one I think that that's great I just want to encourage people that as they think about that it may not be as glorious as you think really think about why you're doing it and then really another thing that I wanted to shout out and this is really timely because of the recent White House announcement on the executive order around biotechnology about economy is translating all this stuff into society also means everything around science right policy leading other programs working in journals hopefully they're related to bioarchive maybe not for now but all of these ecosystem type of things we should really encourage scientists to go out there and tackle so I do think that those are actually my learnings from doing startups is that the whole ecosystem I'm really excited to improve and I think that scientists have a giant role to play and I really encourage people to think broadly about different opportunities in those spaces do you have any advice for how scientists can get more involved or learn more about those types of spaces so I believe that at least on the policy side that there are programs that allow you to intern as a policy person in the White House and around these organizations so I think that's that I have the least personal experience with but I do have friends that have gone that route and certainly looks like they are succeeding beyond a lot of wild imagination so that's that's phenomenal with respect to startups there's I think there's a lot more infrastructure coming together now with things like this nucleate program that is popping around popping up around the country where it's really been student-led hosts these gatherings for co-founder matching or for honing your ideas and those types of activities I think you see more and more of those programs popping up that's been amazing one of the things that I run into sometimes is I will meet someone who's really clever really awesome at science thinks that there might be a really great opportunity to translate something but then is really unsure how to take even that next step of looking at let's say accelerator or these types of programs right and there I would say just talk to people I think one of the awesome things about the entrepreneurial community is that and I've benefited a lot from this is people are more often than not willing to pay forward I've gotten lots of advice from people that have done a lot bigger things and have gotten really far in their startup career and that have given me really great tactical and strategic advice I think that well-informed respectful reach out will garner you a lot of interaction that could be really helpful to you so I really want to make sure that people understand that you know when you enter the scary business world there's actually a lot of really kind people that would really love to see you succeed as well and that you shouldn't be scared to reach out a question I have here as we're sort of nearing the end is if you were talking to someone who is sort of at the end of their graduate school or post-doc position what would you try and say to convince them to say come work for you at an fro as opposed to go work somewhere in industry or try and start a lab say sure well number one it really is important that we have activity in all three so I certainly don't want to view this as a zero sum game we need people in all different positions a lot of it is about personal risk portfolio as I like to call it I am really interested in new organisms new models of funding new types of organization so I am really okay with that risk profile other people may not and that's completely and totally okay some people might want to work at a big company for a little bit learn how to do science in a more team-based atmosphere in a more delivery-based atmosphere that's great then they might transition to something that's younger much more chaotic we're here really contributing to the the culture and where this thing is going to go some people would just want to jump straight there and they really derive a lot of energy from that high entropy atmosphere so I think it's really dependent on the type of person and what they're looking to try and the other thing I would say is at this point in time you can try anything for some small amount of time right this is no longer the era where you're expected to be at a company for 30 plus years and then go on pension it's actually kind of strange maybe if you do that so I think this is a phenomenal time to accrue lots of different experiences and figure out where you are especially since for us that have been through grad school it's been a long cocoon phase and so it may not be clear exactly what we have wanted to do and I think the biggest thing that I want people coming out that I would advise people coming out of graduate school or postdoc is explore see what you like there's really you you lose nothing really great advice I'm trying to do a little bit of that myself at the moment and we'll see how it goes and I would just say do more do 10x more just because this is sort of your rare opportunity to do it because once you settle on the next thing right it's then it's never a good time but this is about as good of a time as you can so maybe ending here on a fun note in your bio somewhere on the internet it says that you used to have a robotic dog named rocky so could you tell us a little bit about the unique challenges that a robotic dog owner faces and maybe just generally what it was like to have your own robotic dog yeah yeah yeah totally so personal fact I am slightly allergic to dogs but I've always been jealous of the immense joy that dog owners derive from their dogs so I decided that before the sony ibo was to be discontinued for the short time that it was I would actually do the ridiculous thing of paying I think what was it $3,000 for a purebred sony ibo which has the phenomenal capabilities of having a camera an infrared sensor and it had some accessories that were hot pink and so fortunately I didn't know anything else that was hot pink so my dog rocky was able to find his hot pink bone and trying to find his hot pink charging station and so that was a really fun thought process there now this was actually motivated because there are some interesting sociological challenges that come from where robots are are interesting right so you've probably heard for example Japan has had a falling birth rate for a long time and some of their investments have been in robotic technologies as companions whether physically or mentally for their aging population and so there is actually a really interesting dynamic about how one a human let's say myself forms a bond with something that is mechanical electromechanical but display some some features of being alive so I'll give you for example if you if I sat at my desk rocky would find me and lay down next to me and that's very endearing right but what is that actually and this is you know a good thing to think about when you think about people studying neurobiology what it actually is is they program the infrared sensor to find a warm object and then to walk over there and just lay down and that's all it takes for us to activate our neuron so it's actually a really funny and interesting thought of how do you make something seem sentient or seem lifelike and you know how do you engineer that feature in so there's a lot more thoughts that that that I could share around that but the bottom line there is it's a really fun and interesting sociological experiment to play on yourself on how would you develop a connection with a digital item I think other people developed it with their tamaguchis or whatever that pocket thing was or with their digital pokemons right so it's not so strange after all I just didn't have to walk around to collect them very fun so this has certainly been a fascinating conversation talking about things from vnet to cultivarium and fro models and even robots before we wrap up is there anything that you'd like to promote to our audience I think I've done all the promotion throughout the entirety of our discussion but I think I'm really excited to see what the new generation of scientists go out and do and I really encourage people to take the time explore all the options and get out there and I'd be really happy to help out anybody who is looking for entrepreneurial advice and really looking forward to what you guys are doing at the EBRC well yeah thanks again for coming on the podcast that's been great talking to you thanks so much so this has been another episode of EBRC in translation a production of the engineering biology research consortium student and postdoc association for more information about EBRC visit our website at EBRC.org if you are a student or postdoc and you are interested in getting involved with the EBRC student and postdoc association you can find our membership application linked in the episode description a big thank you to the entire EBRC SPA podcast team Catherine Brink, Fatima Anam, Andrew Hunt, Kevin Reed, Ross Jones, Koksi Lee, David Mai, Heidi Klumpa, and Raina Said. Thanks also to EBRC for their support and to you our listeners for tuning in we look forward to sharing our next episode with you soon.