Transcript:
00:06 [Natalie Kuldell – NK] Hi Raquel
00:08 [Racquel Kim Sherwood – RS] Hi! How are you?
00:09 [NK] It’s good to see you.
00:11 [RS] It’s good to see you, too.
00:12 [NK] Thanks for joining me. I’m gonna put you in gallery view so I can keep an eye on you and we’ll have a nice conversation. Thank you so much for being here and having time to talk with folks about your life in science, your career, your path, and everything else. I always enjoy chatting with you and knowing you, I’m really really very glad. Just as background, I will say that I got to know you – do you think it’s like two years ago? Three years ago, or so?
00:42 [RS] I guess like two years ago, maybe a little bit more.
00:46 [NK] A couple years ago when you were coming through the place where BioBuilder has a Learning Lab in Cambridge, and we got to talking and you expressed interest in doing education as well and so we’ve been connected through BioBuilder and through that. But I also so value your perspective and all that you bring; you’ve come in and mentored students in our Learning Lab regularly. But maybe we can start by – you can say what your current job is now, and then maybe we’ll back it up and we’ll talk about how you got there.
01:19 [RS] Okay, sure. Well, so first of all, thank you for inviting me to join you today; I’m really happy to sit and chat and tell you a little bit about myself. So right now I work for a company called VWR – the real name is Avantor – but I work for the division called VWR. And what VWR is is when you think of a company like Amazon, you go to Amazon and you can buy absolutely anything that you need for whatever you need. The VWR is kind of the same way, it’s like the Amazon of the science lab world, so if you need something for the lab you can find it on our website. But my role of the company is a little bit more specialized, I’m called a Life Science Specialist, and in my role I support the technical things that our life science customers will be using – so customers that are actually doing biology research – I support the types of technical things that they’ll be using and helping play matchmaker. If they’re having an issue, trying to connect them with the right things or start conversations with the right people to kind of answer their questions or overcome some of the common challenges.
02:26 [NK] I think it’s so interesting. I bet you most people don’t realize that when you’re having a technical challenge, you can actually call the company and get expert scientific advice and guidance. I think people tend to think that they have to turn to the person at the bench next to them or whatever,
02:43 [RS] Right.
02:44 [NK] but I think there’s so much expertise and so much talent within these companies, that it’s a great sort of first speed dial call for that. So what does your – well it’s hard to say what a typical day looks like right now because we’re all in very untypical times, but is your day – how would you say you spend most of your days?
03:05 [RS] So I will say pre-COVID-19, I would spend – I do a lot of traveling, so probably 70% of my time is spent traveling throughout my territory, so I support customers in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and then down into Massachusetts along the shore and into Cambridge and Boston. So there’s lots of biotechs in Cambridge and Boston and in Massachusetts in general, so some of the things that I’ll do is I’ll go in and meet with a customer and they’re opening a new lab and they need certain types of equipment and they’re just not aware of what’s out there to do what they’re trying to do, so I can help kind of connect the dots and say “oh you know I would recommend you consider this one.” Or “we offer two versions, but I think this one would be better for you based on the type of work that you’re doing.” So that’s one of the things that I do. On the other side, I will meet with customers that are really established and, say for example, they’re growing they’re scaling up and they’ve been working with a project on a smaller scale for a long time, and they want to know how to move to the next step so that they can do their work a little bit more efficiently. So we can talk about how we can transition the stuff that they’re doing at the bench now into a larger format or a bigger scale, and just to do things more efficiently, right. So the idea is that a customer would set something up or a client would set something up and they could walk away and then come back and a couple hours later and it’s done – that they don’t have to sit there and hand-hold it through every step of the process. So that’s a typical day. Tons of emails, so customers emailing about issues, and problems, or concerns, and then I work with other teams at the company to kind of help them, so there are folks at my company that specialize in all kinds of things, but because they don’t know, they don’t necessarily understand the science, or they don’t understand the biology, they will lean on someone like me to kind of connect the dots so that they understand what a customer or client is doing as a bigger picture. So I’m there to just kind of support the more technical things through phone, in person, through email.
05:31 [NK] Yeah so I think – I mean there are two things that come out of that explanation of your job that are probably really surprising. One is that it is so interpersonal, right sometimes people think that if you’re in science you’re very isolated and you’re on your own, but I think that a job like yours really requires a connection to people right like it’s interpersonal. Like you reach out to people, you talk with people, you guide people, so it’s not a solitary endeavor by any means. You actually need to like people and be out and working with people. And then the other thing is just the technical expertise that is required, right. Like if you’re going to be going in and talking to a lab that’s either just trying to get off the ground or is trying to grow, they’re seeking your advice so you’re very technically trained, as well.
06:23 [RS] Yeah.
06:24 [NK] The fact that it’s both personality – it’s a group; it’s an outward-facing job.
06:31 [RS] Right.
06:32 [NK] It’s so very very technical. So that seems like a good sort of way to start to back up and say “how did you get there?” So maybe we’ll ask like did you always know you liked science? When did you realize you liked science? And then we’ll talk about how you got trained.
06:53 [RS] Yeah so I mean, I think I’ve always liked science. Science has always been my favorite subject from the point that I knew science was a topic, so probably like first grade. Yeah so I think like in elementary school, I showed interest in science, like biology and just understanding – not just biology, but just truly understanding how things work, and why things happen a certain way. And I’d ask my father a lot of questions, and he tried really hard to explain stuff to me but he wasn’t a scientist. So flash forward to middle school, he was diagnosed with cancer and he actually passed away when I was in ninth grade, but those questions that started off as a little kid, trying and struggling to understand, and like getting to the point where my father got really sick and the doctors didn’t have answers, they didn’t know what to do, we ran out of options, and really coming to terms with the fact that the knowledge in science is finite. Scientists are adding knowledge every day, but we don’t know everything and we can’t help everyone. So that kind of fueled that passion to really want to know a little bit more about human health, and science, and understand why things were happening.
So I went on to college; I went to UConn and studied genetics and molecular biology, and then I got my first job in New York City in genetics doing genetic diagnoses, and it was a good job, I did really well it allowed me to enjoy the city, which was perfect especially at that age. So I got the job and a bunch of my college friends also worked in the city, so it’s a really great time. But after a while, I feel like I needed more, and even more than what I was doing. And if I had stayed in that type of lab setting, the only thing that I could progress to do is become maybe a manager or a director – but not really a director you’d have to have a PhD to become a director – but maybe just a manager, and it’s like “okay well I can move on to manage people doing the same thing that I do: is that really what I want to do?” And I ultimately decided that that wasn’t what I wanted to do.
So from there I went on to Brown University and did my PhD there. I’m in molecular biology, biology, and biochemistry and so I was there for I guess five and a half years. My work there centered on understanding the life cycle of an opportunistic pathogen called Candida albicans, so it’s a yeast that lives on our skin. So when you’re healthy, it’s there, it’s just hanging out not really doing anything. But for people who are immunocompromised, it can cause a pretty serious and life-threatening infection. And one of the cool things about Candida, so I guess probably in high school and throughout our lives, we understood the process of mitosis and meiosis. And meiosis is a mechanism by which organisms can gain fitness through recombination, right. So we thought that Candida adapts during the course of infection, and that it can become more virulent, but we, at the same time, we see that Candida does not go through a conventional meiosis. So they mate the alpha A and alpha cells mate, but they don’t go through a conventional meiosis, so there’s not that classical exchange of genetic information to create a daughter cell that is more fit or less fit in the next generation. So because it has all the genes required for meiosis and it doesn’t really do meiosis, that’s what made me really interested in it. So how is it gaining fitness? What’s actually happening there? But because Candida is so difficult to work with, I worked with a related organism called – Candida albicans is the name of the original organism – but which was another yeast called Candida lusitaniae which is a little bit different to work with, or easier to work with I should say. And I actually found that lusitaniae does – so I actually found something completely different, and this is something that happens you know within research. You go in with this great idea, and you end up finding something else that’s really really cool, but maybe doesn’t answer that first question, so that’s what ended up happening with lusitaniae and I found that lusitaniae does go through a meiotic program, but it’s actually very different than what you’d expect; the genetic regulation is very different. So it seems like lusitaniae is doing one thing, and Candida albicans is doing something else, and what Candida albicans does is cool: they’re two diploid cells, they mate, they form a tetrapod cell, and instead of going through a conventional meiosis to go back down to their basal diploid state, they just kick chromosomes out one at a time; just kick them out willy-nilly and to get back down to their basal diploid state. And the way that they gain fitness is by duplicating parts of their chromosomes, keeping an extra copy of a chromosome, that’s kind of how they gain fitness, how that organism gains fitness, or one of the ways that they can gain fitness. So that was my graduate work at Brown with Richard Bennett.
12:37 [NK] Yeah, amazing. It’s so emblematic of how science and PhD work is, right. You go in with one idea you think “got it! this is fascinating!” and then you’re like “oh but wait” but eventually it wraps up; you generate new data, new information, and that’s what you have to do with a PhD. I think it’s really interesting also with your career trajectory that after completing an undergraduate degree with a you know science degree, you can get a job and you can work in science, but that then to do more discovery based science, to be sort of driving the research yourself, that’s where the PhD exploration has to happen. And it sounds like you had good experiences all the way through and learned a lot. I know PhDs are roller coaster rides because you’re trying to learn something new; it means you don’t always know how to do it, so it has its ups and downs, but that’s pretty great. And so maybe I’ll ask along the way, did you have particular mentors, or experiences, or things that encouraged you to keep going, or change direction, or I guess you could also say if there were particular things that really discouraged you and that you had to overcome?
14:06 [RS] Yeah so I think watching my father – so okay when I was a little kid and I’d think of scientists I wouldn’t think of someone like me. Like I wouldn’t think of a woman, I wouldn’t think of a black woman, I mean you don’t really see someone like me as a PhD level scientist. I think it kind of matters, and when I think back to my childhood, the school system that I came up through is not the best school system. We were considered inner city; one of the years that I was in high school – there are two high schools in my town – one of them lost accreditation, so our high schools were not really good, so I had a lot of catching up to do when I got to college. I think I was really lucky though. So after my father passed away, I had a teacher – a biology teacher – his name was Mr. Hackbarth and Mr. Hackbarth saw that I loved science, saw that I loved biology, and just kind of took me under his wing and said – he didn’t say to me but, I knew that he was just like taking care of me and looking out for me – so he learned about a biomedical research apprenticeship program at UConn when I was in 10th grade, and he thought that it was perfect for me, so he did all the work behind the scenes to get – he asked some of my teachers for letters of recommendation so I didn’t have to do that part, he got all my my transcripts for my grades so I didn’t have to do that part, and then he pulled me aside and he’s like “all you have to do is write your personal statement and I’ll call your mom and talk to her about it” and he’s like “I’ll help you write your personal statement.” I was like “okay.” So I did it, and that experience was truly transformational.
So I went to UConn for a summer, I worked in a research lab and that was my first time being exposed to scientists. Yes, they didn’t look like me, but I did not know that there was this whole other world out there of creating knowledge besides being a doctor, and being – there’s something fun about basic research where you can use your imagination and create. When you’re a physician, you can but a lot of it is truly following a protocol; you can’t go off script because you’re dealing with someone’s life, so you have to be you have to follow the rules and be very very careful. But when you’re at the bench and creating knowledge, it’s a creative process. Thinking things through, imagining things, putting pieces of puzzle together, designing experiments and testing them. So being in that lab over the summer, I got to see that live and in action, and that was transformative. So we worked on a plant wall sugar called fucose in a plant called Arabidopsis, which is a common model organism. So I worked with – his name is – Gary Vanzen and he showed me stuff – I wasn’t putting it together because I was so young and because I didn’t have the background from my not so great high school, but it was still just seeing a completely different world I knew that this is probably closer to what I wanted to do. Medicine is awesome, but I’m a softie, so I don’t know if I could do it because of the emotional part of taking care of people or taking care of animals.
So then I worked in a lab in college for a little bit, and then when I went on to grad school – so a lot of people think about graduate training with bright eyes, and thinking that it’s beautiful and wonderful and easy – so academically I found grad school to be completely fine, like I could get my A’s, I could study I could do really well that way academically. But the part that no one really prepares you for is like the emotional part, the loneliness part, up until this point in my life, academically I could study and get an A and it was no big deal, right, like this is just accepted this is the norm. But when you’re doing research and things don’t work out and you think them through and you can’t overcome those challenges, it’s really hard. It’s really hard. So it’s like facing failure and facing the psychology of repeating and trying things over and over again. So that was probably – so I learned a lot in grad school, I got a lot accomplished, but I also learned a lot about myself. So I left there as a much more confident person; much more feeling like I have a little bit more control over my path, and knowing that I’ll be able to persevere and get through challenges. So based on my experiences just growing up as a child from an inner city school system – and you didn’t ask this question but I’ll just talk about it anyway, so I got involved with BioBuilder because I spend a lot of time volunteering whenever I have an opportunity because I think it’s important for kids, for young people to be exposed to what’s out there. If I hadn’t had that opportunity when – if Mr. Hackbarth hadn’t found that opportunity for me in 10th grade, I don’t know when I would have learned about being a scientist, like I don’t know. It probably wouldn’t have happened until I got to college because in my town, there are a lot of minority folks, but no one left, no one stayed there and had a career in sciences or anything like that. So I knew that I had to leave my community to see that so, yeah.
19:50 [NK] Yeah. So much of what you said is so resonant. I mean, I think the notion of graduate school as a place where failure is part of the training and be okay with the idea that you’re gonna have to go through a lot of things that were wrong in order to get to the thing that was right, and to have the emotional resilience for that is really hard. To be able to separate the failures at the laboratory bench from feeling like it’s a personal thing I think is part of what so many graduate students need to to figure out and cope with; it’s a big part of the graduate training, so yeah. That you pointed that out is really important. The thing that sort of makes me feel like things like what we’re doing now and the things that we work on with BioBuilder and with all the outreach that people are doing is to show the path, right. And to know that you need to have people to help smooth those bumps to get on the track because you don’t know; you don’t know what you don’t know. And if there’s nobody in your hometown that you know has ever done the kinds of things that you want to do, or you that you might not even know you want to do you, It’s hard to go on that path when there’s nobody showing you that that path even exists. So people like you who who come in and teach with BioBuilder and the idea that we try to put in with BioBuilder training that it’s not about being right, it’s about being creative and being imaginative and then working hard to solve the challenges is so much at the core of what practicing scientists and engineers do so you’re a wonderful model that way!
21:40 [RS] Thank you.
21:40 [NK] I realized that I did not ask you at all, where was your hometown?
21:46 [RS] Oh so I grew up in Meriden, Connecticut, so I live in New Hampshire – New Hampshire, Manchester—New Hampshire right now. So it’s, I don’t know, it’s like two and a half hours away from here. Little blip on the map!
22:04 [NK] No, no, an important place. That’s very, very cool. I’m not gonna keep you too much longer, we have covered a whole lot of things, but I did want to ask you about how your experiences with BioBuilder have been, what you see, are there anything particularly memorable about people you’ve interacted with or things that you’ve done with us? And then any last bits of advice or words of wisdom that you might have. So let’s start with the BioBuilder piece: what kind of BioBuilder experiences have you had and what do you remember most?
22:35 [RS] Sure and I’ve volunteered as a TA, I’ve volunteered as a mentor, oh there’s been so many experiences. Just in general what I’m always impressed by is the amazing ideas that students come up with. The way that they approach their ideas and how to design and build. I’m just always blown away by how smart the students are. I look at the ideas that they come up with, and I would have never had those ideas when I was at their stage, so I think I’m always impressed by that, but I also feel lucky to be involved with these students as they are thinking about science, finding their passion in science, and hopefully moving on and staying with science. That’s what makes me happy about being involved there, maybe a little bit selfishly, but I mean that’s my motivation: to remain engaged and to continue to mentor and hopefully do a little bit more teaching in person at some point.
23:41 [NK] That’s great. I think your story really illustrates that there are bumps on this path, and there are times where it gets really really hard, and you do really need people – you need individuals to be there to say “I’m gonna make this easier for you” right like your teacher said “I’m gonna put everything together, all you need to do is write your statement, I’m going to talk to your mom” right like people who will help sort of drop the speed bumps,
24:09 [RS] Yep!
24:09 [NK] and smooth the lessons that people find or the things that might put you off path and stuff like that. Are there any sort of like wrap up words that you would like to share or thoughts? I agree, I think the students are amazing. The students have so many great ideas and the future is bright if we can leave it to them.
24:32 [RS] Yeah so words of advice, I think that we often doubt ourselves and doubt our capacity, and I think that if you work hard and put your mind to it, you can get it done so if you know if you want to stay in biology, if you want to study synthetic biology or whatever, if you want to go to medical school, just because there’s no one around you that looks like you or just because it sounds like it’s hard doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try. So I think that’s one thing that’s important and then also really important: don’t ever be afraid to ask for help or support. I didn’t get to where I am by myself. There are people that I still call and can still talk to if I need support and help, and I’ve learned that it’s important to ask for help when you need it. So if you start this path and you start to struggle, don’t be afraid to reach out to someone and ask them for help. I know that if you reach out to Natalie five years from now and she hasn’t heard from you five years from now, she’s still going to jump in and support you and help you. When people want to see you succeed don’t hesitate; let them help you. So that’s my advice.
25:51 [NK] That is brilliant! I couldn’t agree more. And it is a change in mindset, right,
25:57 [RS] Yeah.
25:58 [NK] to be able to ask for help, and that it is a sign of strength, not a sign of weakness. And that people really do want to help. I think that that is great knowledge that you get after you’ve learned it and that people would not necessarily know at the outset. I think it’s brilliant! Oh Racquel, I’m so happy to have had a chance to talk to you. I think your story is really going to resonate with a whole lot of people and be very meaningful, so thank you for taking the time to talk.
26:31 [RS] Yeah! Thank you for inviting me, I’m happy to share.
26:33 [NK] Oh, thanks all right. We’ll talk soon!
26:38 [RS] Okay, take care. Thanks.