So, welcome back to another episode of Explain Yourself.
I am currently at EntSoc17, and our first interview is with Lauren Diepenbrock.
Uh, so, say hi.
She's so brave to be our first interview here at the conference, and I'm very excited to
be speaking with you.
Uhm, so, I like to start with your elevator pitch for your current research.
Ooh, I don't really have one.
All right!
No, I mean, uh, so I work on an invasive plant pest, and so my goal is to figure out the
ecology of this pest so we can rely less on pesticides.
Uhm, right now pesticides are the primary tool for management.
Okay.
Nice.
Yeah, so that's something that's especially relevant to people and how people interface
with nature.
And that's a good, uhm, it's a good elevator speech, but I really like to make people do
this thing.
Are you a fan of XKCD, the comic?
I catch them every now and then.
I am not, like, good at following anything.
Okay, so they've developed this thing that's called the simple writer, and basically you're
going to type in a sentence like, "I study such-and-such."
So simplify your elevator speech down to, this is basically the hundred, like, simplest
words in the English language, or thousand simplest words.
So it's taking your elevator speech from sort of, like, the up here level down to, like,
you know, the everyman level.
That's good enough.
So, alright, so Lauren's research statement is: "I study a fly that did not live in most
of the world until a few years ago.
It eats food that we want to eat and is hard to control."
I love that!
That is awesome.
That is really hard to do!
But you did a great job!
That's, that's really great, yeah, and that's, and I mean, while it's not very specific,
anybody who hears that is going to have some idea of what you do.
So I like that a lot, yeah.
That's great.
I'm totally going to steal that thing.
Uhm, okay, so now that we've done the elevator speech, you can sort of expand on that a little
bit more and give us some more details, and you don't have to use the thousand simplest
words now.
All right, okay, so I'm a postdoc at North Carolina State, and I work on spotted wing
Drosophila, which is a fly.
It is a Drosophilid, so it's like a lot of the fruit flies that you get in your house
that are super annoying.
But this is actually more annoying because it is an invasive species, it's been in the
US since 2008, that we know of, it might have been here before that.
Uhm, and it uses a huge range of hosts, so it can use a bunch of stuff that we like to
eat, which for the cultivated crops would be most berries.
Okay.
So blueberry, blackberry, raspberry, strawberry, cherry.
That type of stuff.
The soft, delicious stuff.
And it lays its eggs in unripe and ripening fruit.
On the plant.
Right, so it's like the stuff that is currently ripening and the stuff we want to pick right
now, that's what that fly wants.
It has no interest in the overripe, decomposing stuff that the Drosophilids that we know use.
I was going to say, normally I think about fruit flies like in my fruit bowl on my counter,
but these are in the fields.
And that's the problem with this thing is that it wants the same fruit we want.
And so, uhm, it's been hugely - it's been a very expensive critter to control.
We don't really have full control of it.
So, the estimate is about $700 million annually for the US for management of this thing.
That includes management and how much fruit is lost.
So, like, for a picker, or for a grower, if they have, say a blueberry field, they pick
all this blueberry fruit and send it in a cold truck going to get checked out by whoever's
buying it, so like the big companies that buy it and sell it to your grocery store.
Yeah.
If you find one larva in that truck, the entire truck will get discarded.
Wow.
But I'm assuming that their their larvae, their babies, are really really small.
So how do you find them?
They are.
So the bigger - actually, ha, I'm talking about this actually on Wednesday morning!
So, the traditional way to do that is that you would do a salt flotation method.
And so, some people use salt, some people use sugar.
Basically, you make this, like, hyper-concentrated solution, you crush the berries a little bit,
and you dump the berries in there, you stir it around and let it sit for, like, 15 seconds.
And the larvae will kind of "ooch" out because all the salt water or sugar water's going
into the berry, it's a really unhappy place to be, the larva comes out, and you can count
larvae.
But you can only see the big ones.
So that's problematic, because you can only tell if it's, like, a third instar, which
is a big guy, that's like, if your fruit has a third instar, you're probably not going
to pick it, because the fruit's going to look like crap.
Uhm, but some people, if they have really good eyesight, can see the seconds.
And so this is kind of what goes on normally at the farms.
Blueberries also have the option of, they have these really cool sorters that use lasers,
optical scanners, they can tell, like, off-color fruit, so like if the fruit's off-color or
slightly off-texture.
It is super cool!
I've been in their, in their packing rooms and I've watched it go, it's just really neat.
That's fancy.
Yeah, so that's kind of the traditional way, uhm, and traditionally in the laboratory we
would rear out fruit.
So we would take a fruit, put it in these little cups that have ventilation so that
they don't...
Basically when they're eating the fruit, they're also fermenting the fruit, so they're basically
getting themselves drunk and dying.
That's awesome!
So they, they ventilate so that everything kind of drains out, except for the larvae.
Uhm, and then it takes them, like, ten days before we actually can rear out adults.
It's good for confirming who you have, and getting an absolute number of who survived,
but it takes a while, so it's not practical for, like, a grower or a field scout agent.
So the newest method, and this paper just came out in September, and a couple of my
colleagues, I actually have to give full credit to Steven Van Timmeren on this, because he
was really the person who figured this out and the rest of us just helped write the paper
and field validate for him.
It's a paper that's in JIPM, so it is open-access.
That's cool.
So you can go and read the paper.
Yes, it is very easy.
It is written for a broad audience, which is really nice, because we want it to be applicable
to a lot of people.
So basically what he did is a salt extraction method just like we were talking about, except
instead of, like, trying to look look at this clear liquid with, like, white squiggly things
over who-knows-what background you're looking at, you can actually pour it through a specific-sized
coffee filter, like those mesh coffee filters, and for most fruit, it'll actually, you can
drain out all the the crud and kind of rinse off your fruit and all the eggs through third
instar can get caught in that.
Doesn't work as well for blackberries and raspberries because they're super pulpy, and
so they kind of go to mush and they mush everywhere.
And the biggest problem with that is the eggs get stuck in there, so the eggs get lodged
in the fruit skin, but like blueberries it comes right out.
I haven't tested cherry because we don't have cherry in North Carolina.
Uhm, but to my understanding it works really well with cherry also.
But it's great.
Like, it saves so much time, and you take this coffee filter, you put it under a stereomicroscope,
or if you were at a farm field you just pop out a hand lens.
You can see the eggs, you can see the first, second, third instars, and anything past that
you probably didn't pick the fruit.
Very cool.
So yeah, it's a really simple method, it's beautiful.
I can't believe I'm talking about it on Wednesday, because it's totally his method.
But he's talking about a different method in the same same section.
Well, I'm going to put a link to this paper in the video description, so you can go check
it out, since it's open access.
Yes, and there are some really beautiful images by Matt Bertone in there, too, which is really
helpful for scientists as well.
Yeah, so, you said that the fruit fly isn't from North America, and I believe you said
it was from Asia.
How did it get here?
Well, we're pretty - pardon me - we're pretty sure that it came over on trade routes, because
we do a lot of international trade.
And actually, that that's kind of the way that most invasive species move around is
with our trade routes.
I mean, like, in grad school I worked on invasive lady beetle species, and so, same deal, like,
you could follow the trade routes and you could see where things were moving.
Uhm, and we move stuff within the US, we move stuff up and down the Americas, we move stuff
globally.
It's really easy to it's easy for somebody to hitchhike.
And especially if it's something like a larva, a first instar larva or an egg of this thing,
they could we think they probably came in on ornamental plants.
Because they can use a broad range of ornamental plants in addition to the crop hosts.
So there's a whole bunch of stuff, and we're still kind of figuring out all the stuff they
can use.
So any plant that I might get at, like, a nursery to put in my yard that happens to
have fruits on it, could be
Yeah, it could totally be infested.
Ah, interesting.
Yeah, it's ridiculous what these things can grow on.
I mean, they've even found the larvae developing in mushrooms.
What?
Yeah, and in a new paper coming out, I don't know if it's out already or if it's coming
out soon, they can develop in, like, the compost from, uhm, like, cideries.
Oh my gosh.
It's yeah, it's crazy.
Flies are so, like, adaptable.
That's frustrating.
I know, that's a huge problem for management, which is why we mostly use pesticides, we
have for on the production side of things we've started some practices like Heather
Leach did some nice research looking at picking frequency, and so they pick more frequently
than we even thought they needed to.
My PI, Hannah Burrack, did some work on cold management, so there's a whole cold-storage
management cold chain management that happens to get the fruit from the field to the store
and kill off most of those larvae so you won't have a problem with them.
Uhm, and you know, that's these are fixes for now, too.
We're trying to look long term, and to look at the ecology of the thing and how can we
attack its ecology?
So that's why I have a job!
All right, so you are, are you looking at the pesticides, or are you looking at some
sort of, like, non-chemical response?
So I started out actually working on pesticides, because that was what the original project
was was to figure out the optimal pesticide management regimes for blueberry and blackberry
in the southeast because we have a bit different climate than some of the areas where they've
done previous research, which, there hasn't been a lot, because it hasn't been here that
long.
So there was some work in Michigan, and then there was some work done in Washington state
on cherries.
So it was kind of one of those things, like, we had an idea, but we really needed to quantify
it, we really needed to put some numbers there that were useful for us, but also useful for
the growers and realistic for the growers.
So that's kind of the weird spot with doing this kind of research and extension is that
you do cool research, but it also has to be applicable for a grower, because otherwise,
like.
That's like what we were talking about earlier with the "so what?"
question.
Exactly.
This is that research where I get to do super cool work, but what does it matter?
So I need to be able to say, alright, well, I'm doing this and we'll see the ecology,
but bigger picture long-term, what does it matter?
And so I've kind of picked up a couple things along the way, and come up with a couple side
projects I want to be really useful.
And our lab or my PI is the lead on a huge national project, so I've moved into a management
position, I'm managing this Specialty Crops Research Initiative Program, which is super
cool because I get to work with scientists from all over the country and they're brilliant
and they know so many things that I don't know, and so I get to learn a lot from everybody
else.
And we have these big meetings.
I'll organize the meetings, and I'll organize an agenda, but I'll be like, I don't really,
like, I get what you're doing, but I'm totally not the expert on this, so could you talk?
Yeah.
And I completely agree with you.
While I have nothing against, like, pure science for the sake of science, I do think that the
immediate utility of science like what we do makes it a lot easier to sort of, like,
convince people that it's worth it, and you know, maybe makes our funding easier, hopefully
maybe.
I don't know.
Yes, and for me, I get to work with growers that are really great people, and I learn
a lot from them, so.
Yeah, so I think it's definitely more of, like, an interactive science.
Yeah, which I like.
It's more my personality.
Yeah.
And thinking about interaction, tell us how it is to work with a large group of collaborators
like that.
Because I know a lot of people think about scientists sort of, like, on their own in
the lab, but like, what is it like to be part of a cross the nation or multinational team?
Uhm, it was terrifying at first, because so I started in one position with this lab, and
then we got this money and I got approached about it, and I was kind of like, oh my god,
I don't know if I can do that.
That's a lot of work!
I didn't know if I was up for it.
But, you know, I sat down and I really thought through, and I was like, well, what a great
opportunity.
Hopefully, if I start screwing things up, she'll tell me.
So, so far we are finishing year two, yeah we're at end of year two getting all our data
together and planning our next big meeting in February.
But it's been great.
Like, we have, my PI put together a fantastic project team.
We have people that, if I ask them for something, I will get it from them.
So the data, as far as managing data, getting data from people, we have just a really good
team in place and everybody works really well with each other.
The hardest part is keeping everybody on task when we have big meetings, we have big, uhm,
we use Zoom, so it's kind of like Skype, but a lot of extension people use that.
So you can actually see each other face-to-face, you can share stuff on screen.
It's a really nice interface, it's very simple, which I like.
Yeah, there's all these apps you can put on your phone if you don't want to have a full
computer, but it's a nice way to actually see each other to share the data.
But keeping everybody to that time frame, because I don't like to waste I don't like
to waste time of my own or other people's.
So when we schedule these calls, they're an hour and a half, and I will have every minute
planned.
And I will stop people if they go past their time.
I'm like, next topic.
And it's hard because, like, some of them are really really well-known scientists, and
I'm just like, "Yo, postdoc over here, cutting you off."
So, yeah, I guess that's something I wonder about.
Like, how do you how do you sort of, like, manage people so that you keep it an open
atmosphere that everybody is excited to share but you organize yeah.
I'm a big fan of agendas.
I like to have very detailed agendas where people know going into it what the goals are
of the meeting.
And so, like, the last big we just had two a round of these meetings, and I had quite
literally, I was like, you have five minutes, you have ten minutes, based on what I knew
they had been working on and how much time they probably needed.
And I touched base with the leaders for those different topic areas to see if it was reasonable
and what kind of things they needed to talk about.
So it's a lot of communicating and a lot of just making sure everybody knows what everybody
else is doing and that we have the team going.
And every year we have a big in-person meeting.
And so this year we'll be meeting in Portland some time in February.
Uhm, alright, so you talked a lot about, like, what you feel is the value of your research
or why you're excited about it.
Is there anything that you, like, really dislike or we could even use the word "hate" about
your research or any research project that you've done before?
Uhm, I think I'm in a really lucky situation to be completely honest.
I work with a really good team.
There are frustrating moments, usually it's just that there's not enough labor to get
through everything.
We've worked with a couple other research programs, which gets a little challenging,
just juggling that much that much stuff going on, that many people and interactions.
But yeah, I really just the hardest part is there's so many cool ideas.
And knowing, like, when to say no.
Knowing when to say no is the hardest thing, and you try it try it out a little bit in
grad school, because I didn't, and it was a mistake.
So I highly recommend, like, kind of thinking about what you can reasonably get done without
killing yourself or hating your life.
Okay, so you're talking about work-life balance and not being overwhelmed and -
Yeah, because I've hit that point quite a few times in the last few weeks, and I was
like, what on Earth am I doing?
That is a super valuable point.
I think a lot of earlier career young professors and grad students are starting to recognize
that.
I think maybe the traditional idea of academia or the traditional way people approached academia
was just, like, this is your life now, and yeah.
You have to take a break.
So, yeah.
Don't do research all the time.
Yeah, I mean, it's tempting because there's so much cool stuff, and like, if you don't
get in on it, you might miss out, but at the same point you just have to realize that you
can't do everything.
You do need to sleep.
Yeah, and I think, like, if you tried to do everything, it wouldn't be as good.
No, it would be crap.
And you don't want to be that scientist who just puts out crap.
No!
You want your stuff to be quality.
Alright, well.
So, we're sort of working our way backwards here, but I know that you're a postdoc, so
that means you also did a doctoral program.
Did you also do a master's?
I actually did two master's because I'm crazy.
Awesome!
Okay, so tell us a little bit about, like, your journey from, like, undergrad through
grad school and, like, why you decided to go to grad school.
Yeah, so this is I took a very twisted road to get to where I'm at.
As an undergraduate, I got to do research.
So actually, I started undergrad thinking I was either going to go to med or vet school.
So I went to University of Missouri, it's the big state college, it has the med school
and vet school, great pre-programs for both, and reasonable price because that totally
factored in.
Because my sister's older, and she went to a very expensive college, and I watched that
and was like, no, nope, not happening, because I'm going to go to, like, grad school, med
school, or vet school.
I don't know which one, but I know it's going to be something.
So I got in there and about my second year I started realizing I did not want to go to
medical school and did not want to go to veterinary school because I didn't really like my peers
that much.
I was like, they're not very nice.
They will step on you to get where they want to be, and I didn't want to be around those
people for the rest of my life.
And so I saw this lab tech job for a summer, and I just called the person, went up there,
met with them, and I wound up working on C. elegans with who Don Riddle, who apparently
is, like, really well-known for C. elegans and his work with genetics of C. elegans.
So that's it's a model organism used for genetics research and it's a nematode?
It's a nematode, yeah.
Haha!
Yeah, it's very commonly used for molecular work and genetic work because you can manipulate
its background and there are so many strains that have been manipulated and they're very
easy to get ahold of.
Huge amount of people that work on it.
And I just started out washing dishes and making agar plates and keeping colonies alive.
And then my end of my junior year they said, hey do you want to do research?
And so I wrote, like, a small grant with their with the help of the lab manager and the professor,
and it was an internal grant, so they have a life sciences undergraduate research opportunities
program there, and it's awesome.
And I was able to get I was accepted for that summer and my senior year, so I was able to
do this whole research program, develop a project, do the project.
It totally flopped in the end, like the data looked great, and then we decided to get a
couple more runs in before we tried to write it up, and then it all just went, nothing,
like, nothing was consistent.
So you know, I learned how to handle failure at a very academically young age.
That's super important, though, yeah.
I was really frustrated and I was like, seriously, what?
What?
Come on.
But then from that work I'd actually been recruited to do a PhD in biomedical research.
And, uhm, I made it about six months, and I realized I absolutely hated it.
So I started this program, I met just some of the most interesting people I've ever met
in my life, because there's a huge diversity of backgrounds, people from all over the world
in this program.
We had 20 students in that class, and I still talk to most of them, which is kind of cool.
But I just hated it.
I was like, this is not what I want my life to be.
And so as it turns out, I was in New York, upstate New York, Syracuse area, and Syracuse
has a really education program, and their science ed master's program is at the time
it was the second-best in the country, so I thought, you know, maybe it would be fun
to teach.
So I applied, I got in, I did my master's in science ed, and then I went back to St.
Louis where my family is because free rent.
And I taught high school in the biggest high school in St. Louis for 2 1/2 years.
Freshmen chem, gen bio 1 and 2, and AP bio.
Is that what people would call, like, an "inner city" population that you were working with?
Yes, for the most part.
It was a really interesting mix of students, because you have you had kind of the two extremes,
and the school didn't really offer a whole lot as far as, like, resources for teachers.
Yeah, it it's one of those things you look back on.
I'm glad I did it, because I learned a lot about teaching, I met I saw a totally different
side of life from what I knew, and I'm actually my students when I left to go back to school
they got me they made me get on Facebook so they could keep in touch.
So I've kept in touch with a lot of my former students.
And it's really fun to see where some of them have wound up.
Like, I a student who recently finished her PhD in biomed, a student that's a pharmacist,
a student that runs a YMCA youth education program.
Like, there's just they're doing cool things.
So it's nice to see where they wind up.
But yeah, then from there I was like, I was kind of just, I was bored.
Teaching's fun to a point, but mentally I had, like, no nothing, I was just like, my
brain is, like, not functioning.
So I started applying to grad schools and I got a phone call one day from Walter Tschinkel
at Florida State, like THE fire ant guy, literally he wrote the book "The Fire Ants."
And we wound up talking for a while, he'd seen my application packet and he said, all
right, I'm going to offer you an opportunity to come down here for graduate school.
And he always starts his students off with the master's with the option for a PhD.
And so I got down there, and it was really cool, because he said, you can do anything
you want as long as it's on ants.
And I, too, had to TA through that, so I, yeah, did a lot of teaching.
But anything on ants is such a huge, oh wow.
It was really fun.
So it was cool because I tagged along with him, I tagged along with a postdoc, Josh King,
who's now faculty at UCF, University of Central Florida.
And when I was working with Josh one day, we were digging up these ants to send off
to a developmental lab, and they were trapjaw ants.
I'd never heard of a trapjaw ant.
They were really cool!
And I had all these questions and Josh just looks at me and is like, I think you found
your project.
Yay!
Because they were all natural history that we didn't know, and so, for two years I dug
up ants and I studied their seasonal natural history and that was my master's.
It was really fun and it's kind of cool to see all the projects that have come since
on trapjaws and like the different trapjaws and some of their mechanisms and how they
do what they do and it's just, like, so fun, it's just a cool ant.
Yeah, and while I was there I was able to hone in on what really interested me, because
it's a big ecology program.
And so I knew I didn't want to stay for my PhD, because it wasn't exactly, I really wanted
to go to, like, entomology insect ecology, and so I started applying to programs, and
I actually got back in touch with a professor I had for an undergrad course, and I was like,
so at the time I actually met my now-husband the day I accepted at Florida State, so we
long-distance dated for two years, and I was hoping to try to get back to somewhere nearby
so we could actually see, uhm.
Yeah, so anyways I got in touch with this professor and I was like, this is what I want
to do, do you have anybody?
Because the website wasn't very good.
And she was like, by chance we have this, like, new professor.
And so I emailed this new the new professor who is Debbie Finke, and she's awesome for
insect ecology.
I emailed her, we got along really well via email so I came up for an interview and she
offered me to come do my PhD, which was cool because I was her second student, so I got
to, like, develop a lot of my own stuff, like find my own research sites.
It wasn't a very established system.
So I had to figure all that out in tallgrass prairie.
I was going to say, that's both fantastic and scary to be the first one to, like, establish
your research site.
Yeah, and there was a lot of questions where you're like, when you go into your exams,
like, so why'd you pick this?
Did you control for this?
Yes, yes, I have this incredible insect ecologist as a mentor, so she already asked me all these
questions.
So yeah, I studied lady beetle ecology in tallgrass prairies for grad school, and in
part of that looking at the impact of invasives, so the 7-spot and Harmonia axyridis, the multicolored
Asian lady beetle, on native communities in these tallgrass habitats.
So we looked at native prairie, so it's always been prairie.
Those are really hard to find, by the way.
Yes they are!
We've talked about that.
Yeah, yeah, and in restored prairie sites, which are slightly easier to find, and then
tall tallgrass agriculture, so fescue, so you had an ag control.
And so we were looking at the lady beetle communities and a couple of resource factors
and the impacts of the non-natives.
And then I got really interested in invasive species ecology, I thought, that's really
cool.
I wonder how this works in an ag setting?
And it turns out, like, if you ever want to fund a lab, you should have an ag bend to
your work.
For sure, yes.
Yeah, and so then, like, this, when I was graduating there were just a handful of positions.
For some reason there were very few postdoc positions that year in anything I was interested
in.
And so, this one opened up, and I was like, wow, that sounds super cool, that's, I mean,
I know nothing about pesticides, but it's an invasive fly, it hasn't been here that
long, there's probably lots of stuff I can do, and so, the professor actually wanted
somebody to start before I was technically defended.
So I emailed her and I introduced myself and who I am, what I was interested in, and I
was like, I'm really interested in this position, but you want somebody to start on this date,
this is the day I defend, are you flexible?
And she emailed me back a little bit later, and she was like, absolutely, send me your
application.
Yeah!
Yeah, and so I interviewed, and I actually interviewed in that, like, gap.
So you submit your dissertation, you usually have, like, about a two-week gap between that
and your defense.
So I went for my interview during that period, which everybody thought was crazy, but I was
like, what else am I going to do?
It's two weeks.
Am I going to sit on my butt for two weeks?
So I went down there and it was basically my practice run of my defense.
Uhm, and I loved it and I was just kind of waiting waiting waiting waiting waiting.
An hour before my defense I got a job offer, so I walked into my defense like, I got a
job!
That's so awesome!
Yeah, I really, I lucked out.
It's been a really good fit and the lab's been a really, it's been a good opportunity
because my advisor's also had two children in the time I've been there, so I've gotten
to step up into an advising capacity a little bit and work with the students more.
I've gotten to do some international travel, gotten to, you know, just have a whole bunch
of cool experiences that I probably would never have had otherwise.
That's awesome.
And I think, your story is a good example that, like, just ask, right?
Like, put yourself out there, don't be afraid, like, if it's at all interesting to you, just
go for it, because, like, your energy and your passion are going to be what pushes you
into the things that you want.
So, yeah, I like that.
And I figure, at this point, I know enough scientists to know we're all a little awkward.
So we're backing up a little bit further, and you told us that you wanted to go to school
for science, but not anybody else in your family is a scientist?
So where did that inspiration come from?
Why did you want to be a scientist in the first place?
Oh, honestly it was the only thing I was interested in!
So, I mean, I, like I was saying, I grew up in a small town, and there was a lot of woods
to play in, so there was a lot of things to play with.
And I didn't really recognize it as science per se at the time, I mean, there's like,
bones of a rattlesnake that you played with or like, a frog that you found dead in the
house...
So I was the kid that was interested in all those things and how things worked, and so,
uhm, my parents recognized early that I really liked science.
And I was really lucky because they bought me a microscope, like a kiddie microscope,
and they bought me a whole bunch of, like, chemistry, so again, we lived in Florida,
so all of my science stuff had to stay in the garage.
I had all these chemistry kits, my dad made me this little lab bench.
And so I had all this stuff, like, most kids don't get this, but it was really fun.
And I kept bringing the things from the woods that I found, look at them under the microscope,
and play, like, with my little chemistry sets, and I was obsessed with Mr. Wizard.
Like, I had every single Mr. Wizard book ever, and that might be, like, way too long ago
for you to even know that name.
No, I know who that is, yeah.
That's such a fantastic opportunity, I'm glad they encouraged you to do that.
I mean, I'm lucky, like, my parents actually really encouraged us to follow things we were
interested in.
And, uh, so music and science are the only two things I've, like, ever been good at.
I didn't know, because I didn't have anybody else in science and I really didn't have anybody
outside of my science teachers growing up, I didn't know what other opportunities were
out there.
And so like, I tend to take all the opportunities to go out and talk with student groups when
I can to say, hey, there's all these cool opportunities and things you can do.
Because I didn't know.
I thought you had to go to med or vet school if you were good at science.
Like, that's what, you know, how else you going to know that?
Yeah.
Is there something that you wish you had known, like, about grad school or about, like, becoming
your own researcher, like, you wish you had known that before you started?
Like, if you could go back in time and tell younger Lauren?
See I learned things the hard way a lot of the time.
Uhm, definitely that whole saying no thing that we talked about.
I was really bad about that in grad school, and I was like, yeah, sure, I'll do that.
And I wound up taking on a lot of responsibility, which in the end a lot of it turned out to
be good, but sometimes it was just, it was more than was reasonable for a graduate student
at the time.
And I roped in my free labor of my spouse for things, and yeah.
I would I would highly recommend that whole take a little time for yourself.
I suck at it.
It's something I'm still working at.
And, uhm, also, what do you think is the thing that you still need to work on the most as
a researcher?
Is it that, or do you have something else?
Hmm.
Probably learning to hold my tongue at times.
I'm really bad at it.
It's something that I've never been good at, and it was, when I was teaching high school,
one of my biggest problems because I didn't see eye-to-eye with a lot of administrators.
Uhm, so yeah, learning when to say certain things and not to say certain things.
Or how to say them?
Yeah, I'm not very tactful.
I can totally sympathize with that!
Yeah, so that's something I was never really taught, it's something I'm working on.
So, you are, are you just giving a talk here, or you're like moderating a panel and you're
also judging the the student talks.
So like, how do you sort of approach coming to conferences and, like, is this the only
conference you come to, or do you like to go to, like, a lot of different kinds of conference?
So it always depends.
This is one I consistently come to.
And normally I'm much more prepared than this year.
This year I am extremely unprepared.
One of my two talks is not done, one talk I finished last night.
Yeah, so, but in all fairness, I've been doing a lot of other things this year.
I like to have everything organized before I get here.
Like I kind of like to come in with a basic plan of attack of what talks I want to go
to, what sessions I want to go to.
Uhm, and I usually have all my talks ready beforehand.
But not this year.
So I did look at the schedule ahead of time.
So yeah, this morning I judged a session, and then this afternoon I have a couple meetings
and a couple mixers and other social things to do.
And yeah, tomorrow looks a little crazy, but uhm, I got to find some time to finish that
other talk.
I do try to go to the branch meetings when possible.
I really like them, they're I think as a student it's getting harder to go to those because
the funding's less and less.
I think as a student it's actually the best meeting you can go to.
Like, there's a lot of great stuff here for students, but it's such a big meeting.
So the branch meetings allow students to have more one-on-one time and more quality interactions
with people.
That would be nice.
But yeah, there's very limited funding to travel.
Yeah, when I was a grad student, we always had money to go to Northcentral Branch, but
I always played Linnaean Games, so that paid for my trip.
So, and if you haven't seen Linnaean Games, totally go check it out, it's awesome.
It is, it's like bug nerd bowl, it's fantastic.
I love it, it's all sorts of bug trivia.
Yeah, and it's really fun because students have to go compete at the branch level, and
then they compete at the national level if you make it past the branch.
Sort of, the top two teams from the branch come.
So it's really fun to watch, and it's just amazing the knowledge these people have.
Because I never felt like I knew that much, but I was always like, I can answer a couple
questions!
Yeah, so, I, you just try to come in prepared as much as you can, and as far as the other
meetings, it's kind of whatever I get invited to talk at because I'm on a budget, so if
they're going to pay me to come, like, my trip to Australia a couple weeks ago, was
like, yeah, but I have no money, so can you pay for it?
So I got to go give this talk at, uh, the Australian Entomological Society meeting,
which was really it was a neat meeting, it was a totally different set up than what I
was used to, so it was it's cool to see those.
And the interactions were great, I met a lot of people who have interests similar interests
and, uhm, they're really worried about this fly that I work on, so I had a lot of good
interactions there.
I wind up going to a lot of the grower meetings and talking to a lot of commodity crop meetings.
So like I'll be at the strawberry meeting in January in New Orleans, and right after
that I'll be at a meeting in Savanna, it's a regional grower meeting.
And that's awesome because that means you're actually communicating your science to the
people who need it.
Yeah!
Which is really fun, because, like, they have different interests and needs and questions,
and it's a different approach to presenting your data.
So I really, I actually find those talks the most challenging talks to put together because
I can science, like, I can talk at the level of most of the people that write the literature,
but that's not the level that I need to be communicating it for to be effective.
So I'm actually, and I'm seeing this more and more when I write my talks for these meetings,
is I'm actually trying to take these talks to be more approachable, too.
Because, like, my spouse is with me at this meeting.
He's not a scientist, so he sat though some talks this morning and was like, I have no
idea what they talked about.
And so I've been trying really hard to not do that.
And that's why we do this, because I think that it is important for everyone to talk
more like a normal person and less like a robot or, you know, "scientist" or whatever.
Yeah, we're not really trained to do that, and I understand, like, looking at the judging
forms, like, oh yeah, well that's kind of why we talk this way, because this is what
we're taught to talk like.
So maybe we need to think about revamping some of that.
But yeah, it's really important to think about your audience when you're putting these talks
together, make sure it is appropriate.
Yeah, and uh, final question to wrap up, so what is next for you?
Hopefully a faculty position.
I mean, I've been interviewing, uhm, I'm waiting to hear back on my most recent interview,
so we'll see.
I've got at least another year that I can be a postdoc if need be.
NC State has a max out of 5 years as a postdoc, which is fine.
Like, I don't, I would love to have my own lab.
It's better than being trapped in a post, I know there's a lot of positions where you
can just get stuck there.
A lot of people will bounce postdoc to postdoc to postdoc, like I was talking to a guy earlier
who's quite literally he's been 10 years of bouncing.
It was like, financially that's not an option.
It's just not an option.
I have student loans to pay!
Yeah, well I wish you lots of luck with your faculty position search, I know those things
are becoming less and less available, but you obviously are very passionate about this
and totally deserve a good position.
Let's hope!
And I so much appreciate you coming and speaking to me and allowing my audience to, uhm, learn
more about, you know, how entomologists do things, so thank you so much!
If you liked this video, don't forget to like it.
If you didn't like this video, please share it with someone who would.
And if you'd like to support The Roving Naturalist, don't forget to hit the subscribe button and
the bell icon so you can get notifications when I publish new videos.
You can also follow me on Facebook and Twitter, and I'll see you next time.
For more infomation >> CBC NL Here & Now Friday November 24 2017 - Duration: 1:02:17. 
For more infomation >> 몬스터 대학교 MONSTERS UNIVERSITY 웹 예고편 - It All Began Here (한국어 CC) - Duration: 1:05. 
For more infomation >> Vote here: http://polar.fjallraven.com/contestant/?id=1050 - Duration: 1:34. 
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét