BioBuilder Career Conversation: Emma McGuirk Transcript

Great. So, as Natalie said, my name is Emma McGuirk. I am currently a fourth year neuroscience PhD candidate at Brandeis University, so right now I’m a small fam at Brandeis and so, as a PhD candidate, I am in the lab and conducting research for my thesis, and so every day looks a bit different. Today I was actually doing an experiment, which was exciting, and I was testing a different protein or small molecule that I purified. So I went through all the steps of isolating a special protein that I care about, and then I used a special type of microscope to look at single molecules of this protein that had a fluorescent label on it a fluorescent label on it, so it was different colors and I could actually see it come into view and watch its dynamics with other partners that it binds to or plays with in cells. This is an in vitro experiment because it is in a test tube and I’m using just components of a living system, but separately, and so that’s kind of related to my thesis work, but I’ve done a lot of different types of research while I’ve been here. That’s kind of related to my thesis work, but I’ve done a lot of different types of research while I’ve been here. That’s kind of the beauty of graduate school is that you can try a bunch of different things and see what sticks. I do have one project and ultimately at the end of my PhD I will defend, you know, a cohesive story.

Perfect, so I’ll just move this to the side, okay. So I thought it would be helpful to do a bit of a timeline. There’s a lot going on here, so I’ll just start kind of from the left side. So I grew up in a town not too far from here, on the North Shore, called Marblehead, about 40 minutes north of Boston, and so, just like all of you, kind of took the normal classes but really fell in love with biology or started to notice that I liked the biology class more than chemistry or art or anything else, which was interesting, because at that point you’re kind of just figuring it out. You’re going to decide kind of more in depth later on, but that’s what I noticed.

Then I went to Middlebury College, which is a small liberal arts college in Middlebury, vermont, and so if you guys know Harry Potter, it looks like Hogwarts. So that was not the only reason I went, but it was beautiful campus, definitely cold, but really really beautiful. And there is where I kind of honed in specifically on what kind of science I liked, which tended to be neuroscience, which is the study of the brain and the nervous system, kind of there’s a lot that goes into it, but specifically I was just really fascinated by the brain and what we know about it. There’s obviously a lot we don’t know about it still, but I wanted to kind of learn more and at that time Middlebury hadn’t had a full major for neuroscience, so it was more of a department or a collaborative program. So I was taking classes that were in biology but also psychology and philosophy, so I really got the holistic perspective of neuroscience, which is fantastic. But what I did do there that kind of set the tone for where I was to go next was I started doing research in a lab, and so the summer after I went abroad, I knew I wanted to stay on campus and a lot of my friends were working or volunteering in various research labs. So I said perfect and I volunteered in one of those and our lab specifically focused on mindfulness and meditation. So it was a very cool thing to study.

And in the summer in particular we went out and recruited participants in the nearby towns in Burlington, vermont, the cities that were close by and we invited those participants in and actually conducted a study where we kind of rigged a whole scenario where we had them do different assessments and tests, if you will, and kind of told them that there was another participant in the other room when there wasn’t. But we wanted to test how competitive they would be or compassionate if this person was struggling or needed something, even though there was no person there. But then compared, so we compared people who did meditate, uh, and considered themselves mindful, um, to people who did not. And then at the end, um, we collected saliva samples so actually wanted to see their hormone levels, so testosterone and cortisol, which is a stress hormone, um, but that part took place outside of our hands. But it was my first taste of conducting research in a clinical setting, so interacting with people, and we were lucky enough to present our research and findings once in California.

So we actually went to Stanford my senior year to do that, and the photo on the bottom left is me and a colleague presenting our work, and the other one was right down the road at UVM, and it was there that I really determined that I really liked doing research, sharing research with other people, hearing what they’re working on and new questions they’re asking, and so that kind of told me okay, research is definitely a path I want to pursue.

What jobs are available that will get me towards research or involve research in some way, and so in my final months in college I started applying to jobs and I also, being from and around the Boston area, I knew there was a lot going on right here, so it’s a perfect place to start looking, and one of the first jobs and job interviews was at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston as a technical research assistant.

So that felt perfect because research is in the title and it was very nice because they were looking for people right out of college minimal experience, which I definitely had at the time and so I got the job there, which was a great experience. The top photo is me and a different colleague, and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital kind of courtyard is behind us. It’s actually really pretty and so it’s in. You know, right in the hospital was our lab and my advisor, or boss, was an MD PhD, so he saw patients as well as did research. So we were on the research side of his work and it was actually a really interesting work. It was in infertility and specifically endometriosis which is a serious condition in women.

So some of the things that I worked on was actually collecting samples or going up to the infertility clinic, getting samples, processing them. The infertility clinic, getting samples, processing them and then culturing cells with some of these samples to try to differentiate different cells and study the disease actually in a dish and in cell culture using stem cells. So that was super fascinating. Also, cell culture is a big skill and technique that you probably have heard a lot about. So it was great to kind of build my skill set, learn a ton about what it’s like working in a real working lab in an academic hospital. But ultimately, while I enjoyed that, I, about a year and a half in, decided okay, this is great, but definitely not what I want to do long term. So I started to kind of look at other avenues and actually the second conversation that will lead to my second job happened pretty serendipitously.

I was with my family and there was a family friend at the table next to us and we got to talking and he worked at Sanofi Genzyme, which is now, I think, sanofi. Worked at Sanofi Genzyme, which is now, I think, sanofi, but previously Genzyme out of Framingham, and he said there was an opening in neuroscience and so I wasn’t super seriously thinking of leaving until, you know, that opportunity came up and it seemed like the perfect opportunity and thing to try, and actually the person I met with first was Lisa Stanek, who you guys also heard from, so it’s very full circle. But I interviewed with her and the team over at Sanofi and specifically in the genetic neurologic disorders and diseases area, and I really loved kind of everyone I met and luckily I got the job and so I was there for almost four years as well, so I was moving around. I actually have.

My next slide is to do with that job, because I thought it was pretty interesting you guys might want to see. So, as I said, I worked my way up up, started as a research assistant, then became an associate, I think.

Ultimately, by the time I left it, the title was scientist which is a neurodevelopmental disorder of the nervous system which involves kind of cognitive impairment and various executive functioning problems, and then ALS, which you guys may have heard of. It’s a neurodegenerative disorder of the motor neurons. So my job was mainly in characterizing the different mice models to see how similar are these mice to the disease and if we have possible treatments or therapies whether it was a drug in the food that they ate or an injection like a type of medicine, enough of a kind of repair going on that maybe this drug therapy would be worth pursuing, kind of, you know, in the next stages or for human and clinical studies. So that was kind of. The ultimate goal was to see if we could identify anything that would help real people and translate what we were doing to humans. So some of these apparata I guess, or activities I did, were the rotor rod. So in the blue is kind of basically a mouse treadmill. So that’s a test of mobility. We just we put the mice on this rod that rotates and we measure the latency to fall. So if they’re, you know, having trouble moving or with coordination, they’ll fall faster than normal mice. So that was one of the things I did a lot, which is funny because you have to be pretty quick to catch all the mice and so they don’t run away. You can kind of see them trying to leave. So that was interesting to figure out. The second thing so in the orange is called the team is so you put a mouse kind of in that first horizontal tube and have a kind of block at the end and have it choose, with a reward, either the right or the left, and that is a test of memory or spatial learning. So mice that are impaired in that will not really care which direction the reward is at and you’ll be able to compare between that and controls.

It is cool it is. It’s so interesting to think about the assays that you use with animal models because the students are going to. The students here have done some assays but from you know bacteria to understand how the bacteria are doing what they do or if they’re doing what they do, and they are very different than these kinds of behavioral kinds of assays. But that word assay is used throughout. Right, it’s just used to say what’s happening, it’s a test of something that is happening. So I think that’s that’s really. It’s such a different way of assaying the behavior and the the biology of these systems.

Yes, no, absolutely so great question. I think so. As you can see, I really liked my job at Santa Fe, but as I was going on and kind of as the years went on, I was beginning to see where my future was going or what it would look like if I stayed where I was. So most of the people I was interacting with had their PhDs, but, as I said in high school, would have had no clue that that’s what I would want to do until being in those roles where you see it all around you. So as I was going about it, I think something clicked or something happened here. I’ll just have a quick sip, okay, we’re just talking to my different colleagues.

I think I made the decision of, I think, grad school if for my future career and if I want to open more doors down the line, maybe have my own group, I would need the higher degree. So that was really my decision to go back, because I loved my job and I’m still thinking about the return and what that could look like. Excuse me, that’s okay. So I think it was just, yeah, the moment of seeing or thinking about my future and how to open more doors. So I applied and actually interviewed with Brandeis in January 2020 oh gosh so, oh my gosh, losing the voice.

But anyway, that brought me here and fortunately I was able to start grad school despite, you know, the pandemic and what was happening, oh no, it always happens when you’re busy talking.

I know always happens when you’re busy talking. I know I know, yeah, let’s see. So anyway, that’s what brought me here. I’m in my fourth year now and have done a lot of great things took some classes, um ta’d a little bit so teaching assistant and actually got to teach my own course. So I do have one slide on that.