Natalie Kuldell (00:03):
Hi, Christine. (Hi there.) Oh, thank you so much for joining today. I’m so happy to get to talk to you. We have known each other for quite a while and you are doing wonderful work now. Why don’t we start there and then we’ll back it up. So maybe introduce yourself, say where you are and what you do.
Christine Rodriguez (00:23):
Great. Well, I’m Christine Rodriguez and I am a professor of the practice of Fairfield University. I teach in the Biology Department and I specifically spend most of my time teaching nurses who are, our students who are training to become nurses, in microbiology.
Natalie Kuldell (00:39):
That’s amazing. I think Professor of the Practice is a term that when we’re in academia, we kind of know what it means, but I’m not sure a lot of people outside of academics know what that distinction is.
Christine Rodriguez (00:56):
It’s a very interesting job because I basically I’m a full-time professor and my job is more about teaching. And so when you become a full-time professor, that can be a job that’s balancing between teaching and research. But I get to spend my time only teaching and that’s something that for each person is kind of a fun journey to figure out where your balances. And I always thought that I would love balancing research and teaching. And in the end I found that my teaching gets to be mostly about teaching, but also about teaching in lab. So I get to have a little fun doing lab experiments, but also have fun doing a lot of teaching. So it’s found out to be a really interesting job for me that I really enjoy.
Natalie Kuldell (01:36):
That’s amazing. I think it must’ve been in the water when we were together at Harvard, because I feel like it was the same thing for me: this balance of being able to teach and being able to use, you know, be at the bench as well.
Christine Rodriguez (01:50):
It’s fun to play and do experiments.
Natalie Kuldell (01:53):
Absolutely. So you teach nurses mostly. How has that, what do you find interesting or notable or special about that?
Christine Rodriguez (02:03):
That’s a great question because I actually didn’t ever imagine. If you had said, what are you going to teach? I never would have thought I was going to teach microbiology to nursing students. It wasn’t specifically a one specific goal that I had, but I stumbled across something that I truly loved. I had an interest in genetics and also in little tiny bacteria and yeast. And I spent most of my time in graduate school thinking about little teeny tiny cells. And because I spent that time thinking about them, I thought a lot more about bacterial diseases and things that make people sick. And when I found an opportunity to teach in a biology department of Fairfield, I started by teaching some general biology classes, and then they said, Hey, we really need someone to come teach this microbiology class for this large group of nurses because nursing schools are very high in demand right now.
Christine Rodriguez (02:58):
It’s a fantastic career that balances science and also community service and working in caring for people. And I found that by working with these students, it was so exciting to me because students would come into a nursing program are very focused and they say, I’m coming in as a nurse. I want to be this. And I’m going to take the classes I need to make that happen. And the class that I teach is a required course for all nursing students. So I’m well aware that when students come to me, it’s because they have to, but it’s kind of my job during the whole semester to make them appreciate microbiology and understand that it isn’t just about things that make us sick, but it’s also about our normal health and about the things that are normally in our body that are trying to help us out.
Christine Rodriguez (03:45):
So it’s understanding the good guys, the bad guys, the immune system and everything all in between. And during a time of COVID, especially, it’s been a very meaningful career because it’s important to me to take these nursing students on a journey of understanding what this virus is, how do we basically look to stop it from spreading? How can we communicate that to the public? So I’d say that in the end it’s been a very meaningful group of students to teach even before COVID, but during COVID it’s been extra special, I would say.
Natalie Kuldell (04:18):
It’s extraordinary. I think as teachers the opportunity to inspire students who will go off and do great things in the world is such a joy. And if you’re working with nursing students, so the line is so clear for how the world will benefit from having good, trained, talented nurses out in there. What a wonderful thing, and boy, you certainly do come at it with a love of those little microbes and a scientific way. I think that’s absolutely true.
Christine Rodriguez (04:51):
I try to make students realize that they’re, you know, we start off the semester where most people’s perspective on what a bacteria is the germs and the thing we were supposed to avoid all through our life. By the end. I usually try to bring them around to realizing what the things are that are helpful too. And I think that you know, there’s so much that can be explored with it that we often ignore because we can’t see it. And also because we think of them that make us sick. So yeah, having the balance of understanding the good guys and the bad guys, I think is helpful.
Natalie Kuldell (05:22):
And, and your understanding of those microbes comes from a PhD, as you said, and a research experience, a research background. Do you want to talk a little bit about how, what you’ve done and where that’s led you?
Christine Rodriguez (05:38):
Sure. You know, when I was in high school, I found myself really loving science and I was really thinking that I wanted to go into biology in college and also to specifically be pre-medical. In my track, I found myself loving biology and anatomy and physiology and just how things worked. And when I got to college, the thing that really got me excited was my sophomore year when I took a genetics class, that was part of my biology coursework for, for a biology degree in college. And I found myself asking a question at one point with my professor, where we were learning about basically how genes get expressed and used in the cell. And so I, you know, they’re talking about a little detail about when little RNA is made in the nucleus of how they need to get little things to happen to them, and then leave the nucleus.
Christine Rodriguez (06:32):
And I thought to myself, I don’t understand how the cell checks off a little checklist of all the things that need to happen to this RNA. And without going into the specifics, I basically just raised my hand and asked my professor and said, well, how does the cell know that all these things happen? You know, like how does that work? And the professor gave me probably my favorite answer ever, which was, “We don’t know. We don’t know how it happens.” And I think in science is probably the most profound thing that we can all admit is rather than pretending that we know something, say if we don’t know something, that’s where the excitement is. Right. And so the thing that he said was, “We don’t know, and that would be a really cool PhD.” And I ended up getting so excited by that I thought, “how is it possible that in any of these thick books and we don’t know this information.” And it led me on a journey to starting to take opportunities in my summers to do some research, to give that a try. And I quickly found how much I love working on research questions. I ended up looking for a graduate program that was looking for those questions and ended up in a lab, working with you, actually.
Christine Rodriguez (07:45):
So we were working on those very questions and it specifically drew me to work into a lab. In graduate school that was asking the question that I wanted an answer to. And I’m excited. I always tell my students now when we get to that topic in class, that I actually discovered part of the answer, I got to answer part of my own question. And that was a very fulfilling thing as a scientist to say, I figured out a part of that answer, not the whole answer because science is a community of people figuring things out together, but I figured out part of the answer.
Natalie Kuldell (08:20):
Amazing. So, I mean, your journey seems so joyful, right? Like you, you have you know, subjects that you found interesting. You had an opportunity to ask questions and then to do research, to answer some of those questions and now to teach in that very topic area that you found so interesting. It’s a joy, right?
Christine Rodriguez (08:48):
It really is, you know, people ask me about my job and I really have a smile on my face, you know, because I really love that. I get to think about things I found interesting ever since college and at the same time to share that inspiration with other people. And I hope that by being there to inspire students that each one of them, they don’t have to go study what I was interested in and they just need to find something they found
Natalie Kuldell (09:13):
Interesting. So exciting. I heard a student saying the other day, “well, you know I’m looking for a job that I don’t hate my Mondays.” I’m like, “you shouldn’t hate any of your days in your job.” Now, I understand wanting to relax on the weekend and having fun on the weekend. But when you get to your job, if you’re finding that you hate your Mondays because there’s work to do, then maybe that’s not the job to be continuing to aim towards. There are other jobs. But you’re never guaranteed to love your job. It’s very fortunate that you do.
Christine Rodriguez (09:52):
There’s definitely parts that are challenging, but I would say that it’s balanced out by getting to work with new students every semester. And each of them have their moments where there’s having their own successes or their own little challenges themselves. And, and I like to think that by working with students, I kind of have become more empathetic towards some issues that pop up, you know, real life happens and gets in the way sometimes. So we can bounce back and keep moving forward with our study.
Natalie Kuldell (10:20):
Absolutely. I think being a teacher with empathy and understanding what it is to be a student and the challenges of being a student is such an important way to set up your classroom and make that feel like a community and a caring community of learning. So that’s great. There must have been bumps. There must have been challenges along the way. It can’t have been such smooth sailing. You know, when you were young, did you see people like you who are in this path and you said, that’s what I want to do? Or maybe you never met a challenge you couldn’t take.
Christine Rodriguez (11:00):
That’s a great question. I think that when we can reflect back on our careers, you can see a path that happened and you can say, this is clearly why I became this, but when you’re 20 and you’re trying to figure stuff out, it isn’t always as clear. Right? And you feel like, well, maybe I’m just taking this opportunity because it’s the only one I have. I would say that my personal journey was often very steered by wanting to get experienced at teaching. And I really knew, even once I decided to go to get a PhD in science, I actually knew that I really wanted to teach. And by going to a school that was a school very focused on research. You know, sometimes that wasn’t as much of a career that was emphasized, I would say. And I’d say that because I had the conviction that I knew I wanted to teach, I basically thought to myself, well, I’m going to go take every opportunity that I can.
Christine Rodriguez (11:57):
And so I would say that for me, it became, how do I find opportunities to teach while at the same time fulfilling my responsibilities as a researcher. And so I found the creative moments where I could do that. And then when I finished my PhD, you know, and I had gotten a few opportunities to be a teaching assistant in a lab class, or one time I went to go help an AP biology teacher at a local private school, you know, just opportunities to work with students to say, do I like teaching? I need to find out what things I like. As I found more and more how much I’d like to working with students, then I took an opportunity. A few years after I graduated with my PhD and was working in a postdoctoral research group. I got an opportunity to teach full time in Harvard college to teach the introductory students, the genetics class.
Christine Rodriguez (12:50):
And I was helping to teach the labs. And it was a whole training of how to become a college professor kind of just all at once. And, and you know, the, as I like to say, the fancy professors who had been there for a long time were the ones coming into lecture, but I was the one kind of running the class and running the labs and hiring teaching assistants to the sections. And it was a big training kind of all of a sudden, and it didn’t scare me away from it. It made me kind of interested, but I thought, wow, this is, I can’t believe they’re trusting me with all of this, but, but I think that it does show that there’s times you need to take that leap of faith of saying, well, if I want to be this, I should try it.
Christine Rodriguez (13:33):
And I’m a firm believer in that, that if you want to become a veterinarian, go try working with animals. Not just when puppies are cute, but when animals are sick, you know, if you want to go be a surgeon, you should go shadow a surgeon and see what life is like. You know, I think that the more that we try things, we can then say, “Oh, I’m really glad I saw the hard parts and the easy parts.” And, and just got to know it because I think it’s easy to get caught up in what I think it is rather than what it really is.
Natalie Kuldell (14:07):
Absolutely. There is no substitute to actually giving it to, you know, try it on for size, because like you say, the thing that we think it might be, and the reality of it, they have a really big gap and you better know that before you start to pursue it more
Christine Rodriguez (14:24):
And doing some research opportunities in college in the summer was a huge game changer for me, because my first experience was in a lab. I’m working with doing genetics with mice. And I found that number one, I love doing research. Number two, I love genetics. And number three, I don’t ever want to work with mice again. Cause I didn’t like it. I didn’t like going into a room filled with mice. I did it just didn’t enjoy it. And so I studied bacteria needs. So I got to do the things I love, but if I didn’t know that I might have signed up to work in a lab for five years and not realize that I didn’t like
Natalie Kuldell (15:00):
That. So again,
Christine Rodriguez (15:02):
Trying it out and not just saying, if I don’t like one part it’s all done, it’s more, Oh, I like this. I don’t like that.
Natalie Kuldell (15:08):
They can learn along the way, what it’s like to be strategic within each of these fields. That sounds so great. Wow. So we’ve had the chance to do research together. We’ve also had some chance to work together on teaching. You are a
Natalie Kuldell (15:27):
joy to work with and you have taken some of the BioBuilder content and made it your own in, in your teaching. Do you want to just celebrate a little bit about the wonderful course that you teach there at Fairfield. Do you want to mention that?
Christine Rodriguez (15:40):
So I was very happy to take your course with BioBuilder because I got a lot of inspiration myself because I saw a bunch of teachers coming together who wanted to learn how to teach this cool, new idea of sharing engineering and biology with students. I personally came to biology from the love of understanding how nature works and saying, how does a cell normally do the things they do? That was what the question was when I was in college that got me excited and I really never saw myself as an engineer. And I knew because I knew engineers. That is a whole different way of thinking. And I told myself, Oh, that’s just not the way I think. And when I attended your workshop, that was one of the things that excited me the most was it tapped my brain into a thought of, Oh, this is really cool.
Christine Rodriguez (16:32):
I didn’t know that I could think that way. And it got me excited enough to say, well, maybe I could get other students excited about it too. And so it basically took the combination of understanding and appreciating biology and getting excited about what you could do with it. And that to me, was what BioBuilder was all about. And so I decided to take the idea that you did in your workshop and make a class out of that. And I made it a class for college students who don’t normally study science. They might be a business major or a psychology major, or a religion major and need to do one science course in their career. And so I have this course for them and they basically get to look at what happens interesting in nature and get inspired by it. So I call the class bio inspiration innovations inspired by nature.
Christine Rodriguez (17:26):
And the whole idea is for them to explore kind of the cool things that are out there already with your bio builder students, I’m sure have really thought about and to say, what if we could imagine some cool innovation that we could do after we look and study these things and they use the bio builder principles to kind of work through and make those cool black boxes to kind of imagine little actions that could happen. And, and it’s just a very exciting class for me because I get to be inspired by what the students come up, but then I got to get to guide them through it. Now they never get to the point where they do the actual science at the bench. They basically stop at the point where they come up with their idea, but they do it as a group and kind of as a community. And it’s, it’s fun for them. And it’s very fun for me.
Natalie Kuldell (18:13):
That’s the joy that I find in BioBuilderl too. I find so many incredible ideas from our BioBuilders, their community, our students are just so creative and, and ambitious, and it is really exciting to, as you say, sort of see what they come up with to enjoy the process that they go through and, and to, you know be inspired by them. It’s great.
Christine Rodriguez (18:41):
I think to me, the fact that you can what I sat in the workshop and I was with teachers who taught chemistry and, you know, in high school and I, I myself taught biology in college and you can be with different people who think of the world in different ways. And to basically in a, in a few conversations, learn from each other’s experience and kind of build upwards from there to me was just very exciting because I think as we get older, we think more and more detailed about the things that we do and the more we can take a step backwards and say, wow, I’m an expert in one thing. But if I talk to someone else, who’s an expert in another thing, imagine what we can do. And just looking at things in a different way and appreciating that. And I definitely found in my own career in school, that the further I got more and more detailed, like in a PhD studying something, it’s not that you get smarter at more things, you just get really smart at one thing really, really specifically. And the more that you can be humble enough to say, Oh, I know so much about this, but my friend down the hall knows a lot more than I do about this other thing. I’m going to go talk to my friend about that. I think that’s a good thing to learn as well.
Natalie Kuldell (19:55):
Absolutely. I think collaborations are they make the work better and they make the job better. And I have so enjoyed being able to work with you. In so many ways, Christine, it’s been a pleasure. You’re really somebody I admire so very much.
Christine Rodriguez (20:14):
Well thank you for getting us all excited about this different way of looking at biology. To me, it really reawakened my own excitement to look at the way that you could change things with biology instead of, you know, there’s the joy of studying how things work and there’s a whole new joy I have, again, of, of how we could use nature to figure new things out. So I love it. So thank you for helping me with that too.