21. Supporting Students and Regulating RNAs w/ Melissa Takahashi

In this episode, we speak with Melissa Takahashi, an Assistant Professor at California State University Northridge in the Department of Biology. We talk with Melissa about her research on the biological principles behind RNA gene regulation in bacteria, being a professor at a primarily undergraduate institution, helping students realize they can be scientists, and more!

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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 post-docs working to bring you conversations with members of the engineering biology community. I'm Ross Jones, a post-doc in Peter Zanstra's group at the University of British Columbia. And I'm Koke Zili, a post-doc in Fuzhong Zhang's group in Washington University in St. Louis. Today we are excited to have Melissa Takahashi, a professor in the Department of Biology at California State University, Northridge. Thank you so much for joining us today. Hi, thanks for having me. Well, let's get started with your personal journey. Could you share your path to your current role as a professor? Sure. So I did my undergraduate work at UC Davis. I got a degree in chemical engineering, and then I did a coursework-based master's program at Stanford. That took about a year. And then I actually worked in industry for about five years. And then I, at that point, decided that I wanted to change fields from what I was working in an industry and decided that to kind of gain experience in kind of a new field that going to pursue my PhD at that point was kind of the best option. So then I did my PhD in Julius Lux's lab when he was at Cornell University, and then did a post-doc in Jim Collins's lab at MIT, and then from there applied to the faculty position here at Cal State Northridge, which we call CSUN. So I'll probably default and call it CSUN. But yeah. Cool. Can you tell us about what it's like in a typical day for you as a professor at a teaching-focused university? So how is it different than institutions where you did your PhD and post-doc? Yeah. So I guess, you know, and this is just the observations I've made from PIs at R1 institutions. We teach a lot more. Our teaching responsibility is a lot higher here. And so technically, we are responsible for teaching about four classes a semester. That's what we owe. Most of the faculty try to reduce that. And there are several different ways where we can get essentially release time from teaching, whether it be through service positions or where I get my release time is from having a grant. We have like this large grant release program, and so depending on the indirect costs based on the grant, we get some release time for teaching. That's a very specific program to CSUN, but at other kind of CSUs, they get release time for mentoring undergrads in their lab during research. You can kind of buy out your teaching time with that. But regardless, it is a significant teaching responsibility. Preparing for classes and physically time in the class and then dealing with the students and things like that does take up a significant amount of my time. Otherwise, I'm, you know, checking in on my students in lab. If I have a new student, then I'm a lot more hands on in terms of the training. But once they're kind of trained, they kind of help each other out. Then I just go in and check on them whenever I'm free. And then, you know, I do have some service responsibilities as well, but that's not like an everyday kind of thing. So depending on what committees you're on, you know, it might be once a month you have a meeting or something like that. Cool. That's interesting. What are your favorite parts of the job? My favorite parts of the job is definitely the mentoring, kind of the interactions with the students, both in class and, you know, the students in my research lab, right? Like, teaching can be really hard. And so, you know, but all it really takes is like one student at the end of the semester or whatever, or even during the semester being like, oh, I really like your class or something. Like, I really learned a lot this semester, right? That kind of makes it worth it for me in terms of like the students that I mentor in my research lab, right? You know, I've had students that are like, oh, I never thought I could be a scientist before. Or like, I never thought that, you know, that that's something that I could call myself, right? Or that I could be a scientist, right? And so now they feel like they can through that experience. And I think, you know, that that's really the reason that I'm here. So for me, the student interactions are the most rewarding. Yeah, that's very informative. We don't really hear that from, you know, a research-focused university. So to continue on that, could you give us some tips for those postdoc or grad students who are interested in pursuing a career in teaching focused university? Yeah, if you're really interested in doing teaching-based university, I would, well, for one, take any opportunity you have to like teach. Just try it out during grad school or your postdoc. I didn't in either case. And so it was a lot for me to learn how to teach. So during my postdoc, I did kind of take like a how to teach workshop. And then they do have similar workshops here, and I'm sure that they do at all institutions. But those are kind of things that you have to do kind of on your own time. And like, I've done a bunch of them since I've been here and tried out a bunch of different kinds of things. But I think, one, getting that teaching experience early on, just it's all about practice in reality and trying different things and learning your style and things. So the more you do it, the easier it gets. I guess the other thing is at a teaching-focused university, I guess most of them are undergraduate focused universities. And if that's the case, I would, you know, if you're going to do teaching and research, start thinking about the different kinds of research questions. The kind of pace and the depth of the kind of questions that you can ask when you're working with solely undergrads is a little bit different. And it's purely about the amount of time that they have, right, and they're like juggling classes and things, right? So things just don't move as quickly, and then they don't have time to do as many things, right? So kind of start thinking about the research questions that you want to ask with that in mind, I think is also pretty useful. And then something I guess that I've learned for me, if I let it, teaching will take up all of my time, like there's always, you know, things to tweak and like students to respond to and things, right? But really the job is teaching research and service, right? So you have to make time for everything. I think the hardest thing for me to find time and make time for is the writing, where the it be for papers or grants or whatever. So I've one thing and I've heard this from other people, but like just trying to schedule in time and like literally put it on your calendar and like this is protected time where I'm like going to drop everything, like treat it like a meeting that you're going to go and write. I'm doing that again this semester, which is has been helping a lot. So if there is something important that you're not finding time to do, like literally put it in your calendar and force yourself to stick to that. When you were a postdoc or a PhD student, did you have undergrads work with you? And do you think that that helped out for this transition or do you think it's pretty different? Yeah, I did. I did work with an undergrad both during my PhD and in my postdoc. I think that definitely was part of the reason for wanting to do this, I think was having that experience, but then also just having the experience of like them having no idea what you're doing, right? And having to be able to explain it to them and then having to learn how to train them and learn like what kind of mistakes that they're making. Because by now we're like experts, right? And you don't even remember the days when you were trained on how to do these things. And so you don't remember like what are the mistakes that people make. And so yeah, I think that experience definitely helped. So out of curiosity, so when did you develop your interest in teaching? Oh, wow. To be 100% honest, like I had never really had an interest in teaching so much. I guess I did when I was like a little kid, you know, like when I was a little kid growing up, like, oh, I'm going to be a teacher, but like, you know, thinking like I was going to be like my elementary school teacher, right? I never really saw myself as a teacher kind of in my adult life. The thing that really drew me to the job was the mentoring aspect and that idea that I wanted to be able to kind of work with undergrads and provide them as early on the like mentoring to be able to become a scientist, right? That's the thing that motivated me. I will say that I have learned to love teaching. It's like a challenge for me that I want to like reach out to the students and make sure like, you know, how can I get them to understand this thing, right? Like and it's like I said before, it's really rewarding when they do get it, when that light bulb turns on, right? So yeah, I guess I never really saw myself as a teacher, but in the traditional sense anyway. That's really nice to hear. We noticed that in your lab, you have a lot of master's students and undergrads and you also yourself earned a master's degree before getting your PhD. So we're kind of curious if you had some advice for undergraduates thinking about what path to go on, what value would be there to maybe getting a master's instead of a PhD right away and maybe like how in your lab do you sort of interface with undergrads versus master's students? Yeah, okay. Again, to be 100% honest, I did the master's program because I had no idea what I was doing when I was a senior and graduating, right? Like I was so focused on like getting all of the requirements done and like doing all the classes just to make sure that I graduate on time as an undergrad that like I had very little foresight into like what I was going to do next. And so it was kind of just what opportunities happened. I had like talked to one of my undergrad like faculty advisors and they're like, did you ever consider graduate school? But at that point, it was kind of late on and so I was like, oh, and then I kind of was like thinking, okay, maybe that's the thing for me. But then all like the PhD applications were closed. So I applied for the master's program and even in my application, I wrote with the intent of like trying to transfer into the PhD program at that time. But when I did it, I was kind of burnt out. I had done the master's and I was really kind of burnt out. So I decided to work for a bit. I think for the students that I have in my lab, right, and I have undergrads in my lab too as well, right? So when I'm trying to like advise them in terms of like what should they do, like what do they want to do next, I definitely have a few undergrads that are like, they definitely understand that like, oh, I'm not ready for a PhD, right? And so I think for them, honestly, the master's program gives you that time to kind of build your skill sets in terms of research, like the master's program here does a lot of like the coursework and things is meant to help you prepare you for PhD, honestly, where you're learning how to present and do things like that, right? But I've also advised them to actually consider post-bac programs. If they know that like what they want to do is go to a PhD program, right, the advantage of the post-bac is that you don't have to pay for it, right? The hard thing about the master's is that you're funding it in most places, right? You're funding the master's yourself, like tuition and whatnot. And if you know that you really want to do the PhD, you're just not quite ready yet. Like I think the post-bac actually has a lot of benefits because you get like that full-time research experience. They're trying to help you get into PhD programs and things like that, right? I do have other current master's students that they're in the master's program because again, they didn't have any time and they had like zero research experience as an undergrad, right? In some cases, they don't necessarily know what they want to do next. But I think even for trying to get jobs like in the biotech industry, right, having zero experience is kind of rough in terms of getting the job. So I think that is a good opportunity for that. And especially, I think there's a lot of undergrads right now that are facing that with COVID and with all the classes being online and just not having those opportunities to get research experience. So I think there's a lot of different kind of benefits for master's or also even for the post-bac programs. Thank you for the advice. So you mentioned that you've got training in chemical engineering, but right now you are in the department of biology. So we know that biologists and engineers think differently when approaching problems. So do you face any challenges or unexpected moments when you teach synthetic biology or engineering biology in biology department? Could you describe those challenges or moments and how you overcame them? Honestly, I actually haven't met too many challenges in terms of trying to teach synthetic biology. I think with CRISPR, everybody is kind of like already kind of into this idea a little bit, right? And so it hasn't been too hard from that aspect. I do find that even some of the faculty, so like biology is a huge, there's a huge range from microbiology, genetics, but also ecology and evolution, marine biology, right? I think the hardest thing is for them to understand what I do and they don't really get it. And so I think learning to be able to explain why I'm doing certain things and what kind of the applications and the advantages and I think learning to speak to broader biologists, I think, has been the biggest thing that I've had to do. But it's also actually very good, I think, in terms of like being able to learn how to communicate to a wider audience. And also, like for my master's students, they have committees, right? And so the different biologists around there, they just I think they have, like you said, they do have a different perspective from things. It usually comes in the sense of like, oh, this different control or that control. And so it's like, oh, I think. But I think in the end, those are all very useful. And so it's been good for me to interface with them and kind of learn a few different other things, too. So I'm going to switch the gear a little bit. We know that CSUN is a Hispanic serving institution or HSI. So how does it inform your teaching methodology? Or more broadly, what is your advice for educators who teach in a school with a large, underrepresented population in engineering biology? Yeah, so I guess I've only experienced the CSUN population, so I'm not sure how applicable my experience is across every underrepresented serving institution. But for our students, right, a lot of them are first generation college students. And so it really is true that they don't necessarily know how to navigate going to college as well as somebody that, you know, like all your parents and everybody went to college, right? I definitely find that that's true. A lot of them are also working to support their families, but also to like pay for their education. Some of them are even working up to like full-time jobs, like I've had students that are working full-time jobs and trying to be full-time students as well. So I think a little bit is kind of understanding the different kinds of pressures and things that they have in their lives. But in terms of teaching, you know, they're like little things that you can do is like things that I've added to like my syllabus is like how to succeed in this course, right? Like just things where you maybe you don't like the way you think that's maybe obvious. I think it's worth trying to explain it to them and giving them tips like that. I think also to reach out to your students a little bit more in terms of if they didn't do well on a first exam or if they if you notice that like, oh, they haven't turned in any other assignments or something, reach out to them pretty early on and see if you can help. Because sometimes they they're also afraid to come and talk to you or they don't know that they can. And so just making that effort to like reach out and then sometimes that's all it takes for them to come back and kind of get the help that you need. I think a big thing now is putting in a lot of like active learning activities in your teaching and not just kind of standing up and just lecturing straight and early, you know, like reading off the slides or just write straight, like delivering material. I think active learning plays a huge role. And I don't think that that's limited to underrepresented populations, right? I think that's good for everyone. But yeah, I'm constantly trying new things in my classes. It's like every semester I tried something I try something else. And some of the things I keep, definitely the active learning stuff has been helping, I think. But trying to find exactly which activities I would try something else every semester until I find something that I think works. I still haven't quite figured out the best of everything yet. But yeah. Yeah. Thanks for your effort on that and sharing that with us. We're curious about you mentioned a lot of your students have to work and it's also a bigger institution. Is this going to be the case? I was working in my first year and then I had to kind of stop doing that so I could start doing research and it was mostly unpaid for credit work. I guess I was curious in your institute, what sort of opportunities are there for students or resources for paid research work? Is it harder to come by? Are there similar kinds of summer programs? Or do the students have to mostly go to like R1 schools for those types of things? We don't have too many paid opportunities for undergrads. There are a few programs that are set out to kind of help students kind of, if they're interested in research careers or pursuing a PhD, we have a few programs where they can apply to and they get stipends and things to help with tuition and whatnot and then they're put into research labs. Those programs are small, it's not like tons of students can get into those things and yeah we usually do in terms of sending them off to have them apply to the summer research programs at R1s is a thing that we do encourage them to do. If we're lucky and you get a grant and you have money and you can put some money aside for undergrads to do research, then faculty do that, but that's only if you're lucky enough to get a grant to be able to do that, but not everybody does. Thanks for sharing that. Hopefully, if anybody is listening, they can now know about those programs and take a look. So what do you think that stakeholders in the field and perhaps trainees specifically, a lot of our audience hopefully, could do to promote DEI, especially within the engineering biology field? Yeah, that's a tough one. I guess my general feeling is that institutions and people in power are kind of more open to these DEI initiatives now and so they want to implement some of these things, but I'm sure you've realized that institutional change is really hard and slow. But I think there are still a lot of things that we can do. I think it's important for students to just be active in student groups. If that's the thing that's important to you, be active in the student groups and make sure that your voices are heard. Something that we implemented here in the department is that we now have an undergrad and a master student representative at our faculty meetings. So they get to hear what we're talking about and they also get to share their opinions. But they have to go back and report to the undergrads, but that only happens if the students are involved and they want to take part in that. That idea came from another faculty that had experienced that at some other institutions. That is a thing that's happening at universities and I think that's important to do. So those kinds of things are like making sure your voices are heard to the people above that maybe can have a say in some of these decisions. But I think also kind of going in the other direction. I think more outreach is really important. Just trying to get into K-12 science classes and things like that, I think that still is very important. And I think that that's a thing that has been going on for quite a while, but I think that is super valuable. I think mentoring programs are also valuable. Just having peer mentors for students to talk to, because like I said, with teaching and stuff a lot of students are afraid to come to talk to the faculty. So as much as I want to help them, they won't even come talk to me. So I know you guys have started that mentoring program, I think that's really great. But just even more opportunities, even if it's for high school students or just incoming freshmen or whatever that are trying to figure out like, oh, even if they signed up for a major, is this the major for me? And like how to navigate all of that stuff. I think that's also very important. And it helps, I think, in all of these kind of bigger picture DEI type of movements. Melissa, thanks for bringing up that we have a EBRC sponsored mentorship program going on at CSUN. Coke Z has been leading setting this up. And I was wondering if you could just tell us a little bit about it and then we could discuss it for a minute before we move on. Yeah, sure. So the program EMOMP is designed to collaborate with institutions so we can bring more people to the engineering biology for the student population that don't have the access to the resources. So hopefully by doing this, we can promote DEI in the engineering biology community. CSUN is our first school that we collaborate with. Currently, we have 11 undergrad students with 11 mentors with the EBRC members. So Melissa, I want to throw this question to you. So I know some of your students are in the program. Could you describe how is their growth with this program or in general, what is the beneficial aspect of this program to them? Sure. Yeah. So three of my students are in the program, got master mentors, two masters students and one undergrad, all of which are interested in joining PhD programs and also interested in the general engineering biology field. From what I understand, they're meeting with their mentors once a month-ish. They're also paired. So there's a group of four, essentially, two mentees and two mentors. And then they meet individually and then they meet together. And I think that what they decide to talk about is driven on an individual basis a bit because my master students are in that process of applying to PhD programs. And so they talk to their mentors a lot about like kind of in the timing of like with their applications and then interviews and things like that. So I think that that's been pretty helpful. My undergrad actually is also applying to post-bac programs. And I think so that has also been helpful. But I think for the undergrad, I think she's gotten a lot out of just kind of being able to talk to somebody that's kind of been through the PhD and advantages and things like that, you know, questions that they don't even like the undergrads here don't even think of asking like what it's like because we don't have any PhD students here. So they don't they can't like see what that's like. So I think it's really valuable for that. I haven't been able to contact the other students on the CSUN side here. I mean, maybe I should follow up with them and see how that's going. So far, the students in my lab, I think, are enjoying it. And sometimes, you know, I think having more more of like a peer mentorship than, you know, having faculty mentorship can help. They're just like more comfortable asking certain kinds of questions. And then for me, sometimes, you know, it's like it's a little bit more fresh and you're in like the PhD students or the postdocs minds of like, OK, what did I do for that application? Right. I think so. It's a little bit more kind of relevant experience. So like learn from. But I think it's a great idea. I hope it continues. Yeah. What do you think is like an ideal time for, let's say, grad students or people working in research to be trying to reach out to and connect with undergraduates in particular? Should we be talking to undergrads that are sort of later and, you know, thinking about grad school kind of imminently or talking to them when they're very early on in their programs? I think the earlier, the better. I don't know that they'd want to sign up for like a four year mentorship program. I don't know that they'd know. But I think maybe not necessarily just a mentorship, but like just kind of an outreach in terms of like, hey, this is a thing that you can do. Right. I think in the biology program, a lot of our students are pre-med or, you know, something like nursing, pharmacy, whatever other professional thing may be. But a lot of that is because they don't know. Right. They've never had that interaction with a scientist or somebody that does research for a living. And so all they know are the doctors and things that they interact with when they're younger. Right. So I think opening their eyes up to that a little bit earlier in terms of I think it is valuable for in kind of their last year in their programs or kind of the start of the last year to be able to have that help in terms of like, OK, what are my next steps? How do I navigate? Like, even if it's like applying for jobs or just graduating is scary. And so just having somebody to help navigate the next steps, I think, is useful. I think many audience, they are very interested in this. I hope they will find this very helpful. OK, switching gear. So now we want to talk a little bit about your research. So iron regulation is ubiquitous and play critical roles in organisms. And your lab is studying the RNA regulation. So could you tell us a little bit more about the new tools your lab is developing and their applications? Yeah, so my lab right now is looking to understand kind of more natural mechanisms where RNA is involved in bacteria. And so we're looking specifically at small RNA regulation. Well, so it turns out that a lot of the small RNA regulation in bacteria is related to controlling antibiotic resistance mechanisms or kind of virulence in certain pathogenic bacteria. And so we're really interested in understanding that a little bit more. And so we're kind of coming at it from two aspects, one where we're trying to develop kind of more genetic circuits and things to be able to detect the sRNAs in bacteria. And so we know that these regulation mechanisms exist, but we don't necessarily understand the details of which stimuli or things are causing the sRNAs to be transcribed. And how robust is that transcription? What does the profile of that look like? And so we're trying to develop mechanisms to be able to detect that and see like, OK, now can we just add a bunch of different stimuli and see, does that trigger this sRNA? So that half is kind of a little bit more understanding what's actually going on in the bacteria to help kind of understand the bigger picture of these resistance mechanisms and whatnot. The other half is to actually try to combat them and so to try to counteract. So let's just say that the sRNA is transcribed. Let's throw something else at the bacteria to kind of counteract that regulation that's happening. So trying to design molecules to bind to the sRNA so that the sRNA can no longer go and bind to the mRNA and perform that regulation. So those are kind of the two main branches that's going on in my lab. Well, that's certainly very exciting. So I want to zoom out a little bit. So what's your vision in terms of the RNA regulation related research in this field in the coming 10 years? You know, I'm not I'm not very good at the whole big vision thing. But like, I think my hope is that, you know, RNA has gotten lots of recognition and attention with the mRNA vaccines. Right. So it's it's a little bit more of a household name kind of thing. So I hope that we can continue that momentum and that it's a little bit of education and kind of more mainstream things that people understand, kind of that power of RNA regulation a little bit more. And a lot of that comes with understanding and education. So I hope that that kind of continues because the research is always going to happen and there's lots of cool stuff going on. So I think it's just a matter of getting people to to know that and understand. Yeah, definitely. It's really cool. So as a proud woman professor in engineering, in biology and science, I'm sure that you are an inspiration to a lot of your students and people that you know. Do you have any advice for women interested in science and engineering? Yeah. So I guess to be honest, like, I didn't really realize how important representation was until I was here. And like really kind of like talking to students and things like that. So it is really important and it can be really hard and depending on where you're at and what kind of department you're at. There are not a lot of women like the percentage of women or female faculty in departments can be pretty small. But I think one is just to to realize that the fight is worth it, because there are a lot of girls out there that are like looking up to us and like that that it matters to them. Right. But I'm also realizing that, you know, it takes a lot of support to get support from your other the other women faculty or other women in your in engineering or wherever in general. Right. Like we have here like in the biology department, we have like a female faculty like happy hour that, you know, meets, you know, maybe once a month or sometimes a little bit more spread out than that. But like, you know, it's just time to get together. Right. We also do like a writing group. So I've told you that I've kind of set aside time for writing. We're doing that this semester with some of the other women faculty. So just kind of creating that community and creating that support system for each other. Right. You know, like going out to lunch every once in a while, just to at least, you know, have that outlet and talk to each other. I think that that's really important. And if you don't have that maybe in your department, like just branch out, I'm sure, you know, like branching out to some of the other departments. I'm sure that there are other women out there that want to kind of support each other and then in whatever organizations. Right. To I think that you can find that out there if you really need to. I know maybe there's a lot of Zoom fatigue going on right now. But I think Zoom is also great in the sense that, like, if you need it and you need to reach out and get in touch with people in other parts of the country or the world, like that's there, too. So I think it's worth trying to kind of form that connection and create that community. I think it really helps. I hope all the women colleagues in the audience are taking notes. So thank you so much for joining us today. It has been a pleasure talking with you. Before we wrap up, do you have anything you'd like to promote? No, I don't think so. I guess I just would say, you know, that if there are students out there that are interested in more teaching focused institutions, I'm happy to talk to you. So feel free to reach out. So how can we reach out to you? You can email me. My email, I think, is on the CSUN website. If you look up CSUN Biology, you'll be able to find me. Great. Thank you. And thanks again for joining us. Thanks, Koxi, for co-hosting. Thank you again, Melissa. And thank you to you, too, Ross. Yeah, thanks for having me. It was a good conversation. Thank you. 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're a student or postdoc and want to get 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 rest of the EBRC Spa podcast team, Katherine Brink, Fatima Anam, Andrew Hunt, David Mai, Heidi Klumpi, and Rana 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.