BioBuilder Career Conversation: Dr. Dave Westenberg Transcript

Transcript:

00:41         [Natalie Kuldell – NK] Hi Dave!

 

00:42         [Dave Westenberg – DW] Hi there, good to see you!

 

00:44         [NK] Nice to see you, thank you for joining. The Idea Accelerator is underway and students are going to be catching this recording of our conversation either in real time or a little bit later, so thank you for joining. I’m really excited to get a chance to have you talk about what you’re doing and how you got there. So, why don’t we start? Why don’t you say who you are and where you’re teaching and what you’re teaching.

 

01:11         [DW] Great, looking forward to it! Okay my name is Dave Westenberg, I’m at Missouri University of Science and Technology, called Missouri S&T for short, and so we’re the engineering campus of the University of Missouri system. And so a very great opportunity as a biologist to be able to interact with colleagues from a variety of disciplines, that’s kind of the view of some people there as a disadvantage because biology usually is the the 800 pound gorilla on campus, now engineering’s 800 pound gorilla and we get to play along and I love that the opportunities that come from that. So that’s why I’m really excited I’d love to hear what some of the projects students in this group are cooking up, because that’s something I’ve really learned to appreciate being at an engineering school that concept of innovation and trying things out and seeing where it can take you, trying to push the envelope is always always really cool.

 

So my background is I’m a microbiologist and again usually when I say I’m a microbiologist at an engineering school, what does microbiology have to do with engineering? Actually, you know, my standard joke when I first started, here I started working with a ceramic engineer, and most people think microbiology and ceramics they’re mostly thinking toilets! But ceramic engineers do a lot of really amazing stuff that I never would envision that we use for bone and tissue repair and so looking at how that interacts with living things. So my microbiology background was microbiology and public health, which certainly pays off in today’s day and age and my perspective on things that are happening, and then microbiology and molecular genetics for my PhD, and so this concept of genetic engineering, now synthetic biology, has always been a part of what I’ve had interest in and now the idea that with programs like BioBuilder and things like that where we can now take this effect biology, that was kind of saved for the the college level, now we can bring that down to all sorts of different levels because – it’s you don’t have to do it all, you just have to think, you know, it’s the ideas that really make the difference.

 

03:20         [NK] Ideas make the difference. I think I should get that as a bumper sticker! I think that’s exactly true and students come up with amazing ideas when you – at all levels just like you say it doesn’t have to be only at the college level. What do you teach at the college level? What are your classes?

 

03:36         [DW] The classes I teach right now is primarily, I teach a microbiology class so classic microbiology with a laboratory, so they learn how to work with bacteria, how to grow them, how to identify them, how to understand their metabolism and their physiology, and then we get to play with them in the lab, so that’s always good. Again it’s a more modern molecular biology – a microbiology lab – so I do some of the more genetic tools – so the things that we can do nowadays for genetic manipulation. And then I teach right now, I’m teaching a virology class, which is obviously a very timely topic, and oddly enough for the first time I’m teaching a lab to go with it. I hadn’t taught a lab with this class before but I was encouraged because we wanted to have a more hands-on lab. The thing you see at the college level is they’re kind of moving away from labs. A lot of times they’ve kind of taken that because of the cost and the time and we realize we’ve gone too far, so we’re trying to add more labs back into our curriculum to give that hands-on learning experience. So I’m learning again how to work with bacteriophages, so sticking it to the bacterial world and trying to do it. So actually today our lab is doing some genetic crosses with crossing some phages so I get to teach the students about how way back when we use phages to learn about genes and how they work, so it’s exciting to see how that works.

 

04:59         [NK] Way back when is right; that was my PhD! Was on phage work myself, so way back when.

 

05:05         [DW] The way we used it way back then is different, but the same techniques apply. So they learn the same things, you’ll learn those important elements. But then I also teach a freshman class for our introduction to our biology department for our students, and I dabble in a few other different things here and there. But exciting. Yeah the one thing I don’t teach anymore that kind of brought us together was I used to teach a biological design and innovation class, and I really enjoyed teaching that for a while, but as the needs of our department, I shifted towards some of these other classes and another colleague has taken that over. And I love what she’s done with this class; she’s broadened the scope a little bit. I kind of – that’s one of the challenges in college sometimes you get too narrow. And I stayed in just synthetic biology, and as important that is sometimes students need those broader perspectives. And so she now teaches it every week they do little mini projects and thinking different areas, and then they spend their semester working on a project but what’s, I think most impressive to me, is she’s bringing in the kind of things that you do, brings in people from St Louis to come in and talk about what it is to be an entrepreneur: how to do funding, how to create a startup company, how to write grants, how to write patents, all that kind of stuff. So they’re really getting the bigger picture that actually really excites the students; they never think about it. They think “I’m in a discipline.”

 

06:40         [NK] No, it’s absolutely true. I think we have in our mind a very narrow view of what it means to be a scientist and do a science or an engineer, but there is all that other aspect to it, there’s you know the entrepreneurship, and then there’s the legal aspects, and the communication pieces to it, and the design, and it is an incredibly wonderful sort of starting place for all kinds of career direction, so that’s really exciting! That’s awesome.

 

07:07         [DW] I think that’s a great lesson for your students too. You may feel uncomfortable at first, but watching this – how they develop the skills – our college students are struggling the same way. They have the same challenges.

 

07:21         [NK] That’s true, it’s absolutely true. We all have our sort of comfort zone and then we stretch beyond that, and that’s a little tough, but good. So did you always know you wanted to do science?

 

07:33         [DW] That was, yeah. Yes and no, you know. I always had that interest in science growing up, but never really thinking – you don’t think as a kid that you can get a career in science.

 

07:43         [NK] Right.

 

07:44         [DW] If you’re good, I should say I wasn’t a very good student, so I didn’t have the GPA to prove it, but I always had that interest. But if you have that interest, you usually direct it to oh you go to medical school or you go to vet school or something like that – you don’t think of science as a career. Oftentimes, you don’t realize all the companies that need the scientists, and so I never had that view in my head about this. And so I went to college to be a veterinarian and so that’s the kind of thing, you grew up thinking. I know I loved animals. I wanted that aspect of it. But getting to college, this is when I learned that there’s so much more that you could do, and you can’t major in pre-vet. If you major in pre-vet, you don’t get a vet school, what are you? So I picked microbiology for the silly reason that well microbes make you sick and make your animals sick so I want to learn about the diseases, but as soon as you get in and see the opportunities that are in the discipline, I never turned back to veterinary school at all. It was that microbiology touches so many different things in our lives that I realized the value and it wasn’t just disease, which excited me because I don’t want to work with anything gets me sick so I want to have something there. And so having good professors that could mentor me and kind of steer me in the direction, now that you’ve learned about these things think about the applications; don’t narrow yourself to these things. And actually you saw my background at Woods Hole, that was a reminiscence for this year was supposed to be the 50th anniversary of the microbial diversity course at Woods Hole. And my professor for my undergraduate days taught the course when I took it, so I was looking forward – we were going to catch up at Woods Hole this summer and revisit all those fun times. But having a professor that recognized that I really had that interest and I had the broad exposure that you should go into a field like microbiology in a direction that be creative about all the diverse things you can do with microbes, which I think people overlook and I think that’s the cool thing about synthetic biology now is we have new ways to tap into that diversity. Knowing that there’s a gene out there that’ll do anything you want to do, you just have to improvise.

 

10:11         [NK] Yeah, exactly! Yeah.

 

10:12         [DW] So I had the interest, but I never really considered it as a career, and it took that motivation and, like I said, it’s what’s cool is now you see this happening at the high school level that you can learn these things earlier, that there are careers beyond the standard. You’re either going to be a medic, you’re going to go be a doctor, or an engineer, right. If you’re if you’re really smart. And engineering is so broad.

 

10:41         [NK] Yeah, absolutely.

 

10:43         [DW] That’s the thing, but if you have those broad skills, they can apply in so many different ways.

 

10:49         [NK] So many different directions! I think it is a great foundation for so many things. But you touch on a point that I think comes up over and over in conversations like these is that there was a mentor. There was somebody that said “think about it this way.” Or “have you tried that?” Or “can I put you forward as a candidate for this?” So mentorship is incredibly important, right. And it sounds like you remember your mentors well and think about how they guided your career, right.

 

11:20         [DW] Yeah.

 

11:20         [NK] And I know you think a lot about mentoring students now. Do you have any mentor-mentee stories that you want to share?

 

11:31         [DW] I think hopefully, I have lots of them and several that will stand out and they keep replacing each other along the way. But you’re right, it’s not always – sometimes we think of that direct “here you should do this” and sometimes it’s just being there, you know, trying to be there for the students and I think about a lot of students that were in my shoes. They came here, the law students want to go to med school and they looked at med school but they’re looking for things to do in the summer so you encourage them: “think about doing a summer research project at a university.” And so one student that stands out in my mind right now that I follow on Twitter and Facebook and we stay communicating a lot and I love to see how her career is progressing. Starting on that route even until graduation from college, she was still ready to apply to med school even though she had all these great experiences but she finally went back to the lab and said “no this is me! I’m the lab person.” And then she applied to PhD programs. She’s just doing some amazingly cool work, and I think the most rewarding thing for me too is I love to see student success, but I love to see that ripple effect and see what she’s doing as a mentor starting much earlier. So I think during covid, she was doing virtual tutoring with elementary and middle school kids because she was stuck at home, “okay let me do something valuable” and doing those kinds of things. So those are the kind of stories that really excite me that I didn’t know her. She didn’t work in my lab, she’s just in my class, we just had these conversations off and on and said “think about these things.” And seeing how these things – that really your impact is you never know where it’s going to be. And so we have to kind of look at it that way. And so sometimes we look for that mentor being that person that we’re always talking to. It doesn’t have to, it’s just that person that kind of helps you along.

 

13:29         [NK] Yep! Right place, right time, right message, and it suddenly is like oh wait! It’s absolutely true and the ripple effect is very real. I think that is so true and so gratifying. It’s just lovely to see; it’s one of the happiest things about working with students and in these fields.

 

13:50         [DW] Yeah that’s exactly it. Being at a university, I know I’ve never grown up! Because the students never get any older, and there’s always a new crop that comes along and they all have their different challenges. And that’s the thing I never want to try and encourage students to be a clone of me, you want to help them find their interests. I’m talking to a student right now about their project in their virology class, and again trying to promote them doing outreach. I’m having the new project for two weeks to develop something for outreach and the student came up and said “here’s a project idea I’m thinking about, is this too far out of our field?” And all I can say is “no! As long as it’s connected in some way, shape, or form.” Because sometimes again we have that narrow definition of what it is, and I don’t want to be narrow. I want to give them the chance to – I tell them “this is for your community and however you want to define it? It could be your friends, your family, your town, your school, whatever you think is where you want to have the impact.” I’m having them do that and so giving them that freedom because every year, it’s different. Every student is different. And always keeping that mind. You don’t know where they’ve been and what their challenges have been, so you need to make sure that they get those opportunities, I want to be a Beronda Montgomery. I love Beronda from Michigan State does some great work on mentorship and this idea of don’t be a gatekeeper.

 

15:27         [NK] Right, right! Open the gates!

 

15:34         [DW] You hear the words in a conversation – we talk about pipelines of things. And I still remember a presentation talking about pipelines are dangerous though, because pipelines, you get a leak and you can’t get it back in. I’d rather talk about pathways rather than pipelines.

 

15:47         [NK] Yeah!

 

15:48         [DW] Because how do we get people on them, because you can get off the path and come back to the path.

 

15:53         [NK] Right, right, right. Because once you’ve leaked from the pipe, it’s really hard to get back on the inside!

 

15:58         [DW] I say that in my lab all the time.

 

16:01         [NK] That’s a really really good way to think about it. So with pathways, that actually connects really well to something that I also think you’re extraordinary at which is outreach and connection to broader communities. I know you do a lot of work with ASM – American Society for Microbiology – and other organizations and communities for outreach. Do you want to just say either why it’s important to you? Or a project that you’re working on that you’re excited about?

 

16:27         [DW] Oh sure yeah! I mean outreach and I don’t when I think about it I don’t know. You wonder why I got into this stuff and, like everything else, I mean my daughter’s my inspiration for everything I do. And when I started getting into outreach it was more kind of how to connect with her a little bit. And so I actually got started involved with teachers. And American Society for Microbiology used to do something called Teacher Science Day. We’d have our big general meeting and they would invite local teachers to come to participate in the conference. And they would have small groups working with faculty to build connections and so I did that and from my conversations with the teachers, I just realized how many needs they have. You know, how much work they do and how they try so hard to make these things connect. And that really raised a passion for me to how can I give back to the teachers to kind of help support them. I was just looking for fun activities to do with my kid, and that just kind of opened my eyes to the challenges feature teachers face. And we were talking about this earlier today, in the current environment how much work they’re doing, and the value that they’re contributing and the struggles they’re facing, so the things we can do to alleviate that. That was actually before I started my faculty job. So when I became a faculty member, I sought out those opportunities. How do I connect the local teaching community? And then it kind of grew from there. So my role with ASM was with K-12 outreach, providing resources so that teachers could have access to the tools that can help them teach topics better or define more creative ways to learn things. So to me, it was all about providing that support to people that I respect tremendously more and more every time. I think as I got to work with them, that respect just grew greater and greater. But it’s still all fed back to my daughter in some way, shape, or form. So a lot of things I did was to kind of go to her classrooms and then I can go to her classroom, I might go to other classrooms too and make those work.

 

So now my latest project I’m trying to get a handle on is actually an offshoot of what we’ve been doing. Working with you in BioBuilder has just been so valuable to me because it helped me teach my classes but also provided me resources I could share with the teachers, but then it connected me with the Building with Biology community from the Museum of Science who has another collection of activities, and so now I’m in the process of – I was selected to be what we call a Faculty Engagement Fellow. So for the next year, I’m going all around the state of Missouri giving presentations and outreach type stuff, and I’m trying to transform some of those activities to the online virtual environment. And so I’m trying out some of the stuff I normally do face-to-face in the classroom or at an event, and making them accessible virtually. Actually my first trial will be the week after next to see how that goes but I’m in the process of trying to make these things. So seeing what you’re doing with this group gives me a lot of hope and I love the – I think I guess another group you’re doing stuff using that, what’s the thing you use for storytelling?

 

20:04         [NK] Yeah, it’s called Twine.

 

20:09         [DW] So I learned about Twine, so I’m trying to find out a way to to engage that because I love that idea of telling stories,

 

20:16         [NK] Yes, yep.

 

20:17         [DW] and inspiring things. There’s a student – graduate student – that’s working on stuff in addressing disability and equity issues, and she’s done some really cool Twine stories that I’m really impressed with how that works, and I’m not sure I’m creative enough to do that, but it’ll be fun to play with.

 

20:41         [NK] Yeah! I bet you’ll find a deep well of creativity as soon as you get going in it because I think that storytelling is at the heart of so much of what we do and the choices we make, right. When we get into the lab or when we’re you know out in society or all those things, it’s something that you can tell the story of like “oh here’s a choice which way do you go?” So I have great confidence that you’re gonna knock it out of the park with that as you do with all the rest! I have just loved having you a part of the BioBuilder community. You’ve brought great talent and resources and community to this. It’s been a joy. You’ve taught for us in the past, many many workshops for teachers and I learn a lot from working with you and love it as well. Are there any sort of ‘I wish I knew then what I know now’ kind of things that you might tell your high school self or your early college self?

 

21:42         [DW] Yeah and a lot of it is don’t doubt yourself. That’s something that we sometimes do, again that is narrowing yourself in a box and saying “well this isn’t for me” or whatever type of thing. It is that just being confident if you’ve got the right idea, be confident to follow through on that. We all suffer from that imposter syndrome that “I don’t really belong here.” But there’s always going to be a lot of people out there telling that you do belong, so look for those people. Look for the people that remind you that you belong here, this is the path down so don’t question yourself. Which again I did. I said I wasn’t a very good student in high school but it wasn’t that I wasn’t smart or into that, I didn’t have that confidence to really go the directions I wanted. So be confident and again don’t talk yourself out of things. I think more things we get we talk ourselves out of. A colleague that has a quote now I can’t remember what is but “most of the things we fail at we don’t realize how close we were to success.”

 

22:52         [NK] That’s so heartening! I think it’s true; I think it’s so true. Wow, what great advice. I think especially as a young person, you are always looking for signal and noise, right. A signal that I belong here, a signal that I’m good at this, but there’s a lot of noise in it and like you say you’re really close to success – closer than you realize.

 

23:16         [DW] And we tend to focus more on those negatives and we miss the positives!

 

23:20         [NK] Absolutely

 

23:20         [DW] Just listen to those positive voices in your life; they’re out there. There’s someone out there telling you “you can do this,” so listen to those voices and block out the others.

 

23:29         [NK] Yeah and then it goes in and then your own voice tells you you can do it.

 

23:34         [DW] Sometimes you gotta know to let go, right. You can’t just keep beating your head against the wall but in time you don’t let the naysayers get in your way, and that was the hardest thing again with the BioBuilder and trying to do this biodesign stuff, is that students are so quick to shut themselves down: “oh I can’t do this, it doesn’t exist, it’s not out there.” No you just say if you got the idea and you’ll be amazed at what way and it may be through some circuitous route that’ll get you there, but eventually there’s a solution.

 

24:06         [NK] Yep, yep. And back to what you were saying at the beginning, that by being in an engineering school, that notion of trying something and you’re getting closer and closer to a solution is at the heart of engineering; it’s in science where it tends to be quieted down. But I think that that’s really what engineering brings, is this chance to just iterate on it, give it a try, see if the prototype works and if it doesn’t, learn from it!

 

24:31         [DW] Yeah and the importance of prototyping, that to really test it out. I think like right now, with all the stuff going on, I’ve got a lot of colleagues that’re moving into different types of covid related stuff. And when I first heard their ideas, in the back of my head I’m saying “I have no idea how that’s gonna work.” But I’m not gonna say that, I just say “yeah! Great! Let’s go for it and let’s see what you have.” And watching how those projects evolve because you’ve got to try it out say “oh that’s not gonna work; let’s try a different way.”

 

25:00         [NK] Yep!

 

25:00         [DW] That’s the famous Edison quote, you know, it took him 800 tries to make the light bulb and just 799 times how it doesn’t work right.

 

25:09         [NK] Right! Absolutely!

 

25:14         [DW] It’s just a different mindset.

 

25:15         [NK] Absolutely. Well that is a great sort of note to end our conversation on, and I actually see there are two students in our waiting room. So I’m gonna invite them in,

 

25:26         [DW] Oh, let them in!

 

25:28         [NK] and they will perhaps have some questions for us.

 

25:33         [DW] Awesome.

 

25:34         [NK] Yep. They’re joining, we’ll give them a second.

 

25:38         [DW] Great

 

25:39         [NK] Hello!

 

25:39         [DW] Hi there!

 

25:45         [Anna Praticò – AP] Hello!

 

25:46         [NK] Hi! You can unmute, there are only a few of us here. Hi Jessica! Nice to see you. So I’m Natalie and Professor Dave Westenberg is here.

 

25:55         [DW] I’m Dave Westenberg.

 

25:57         [AP] We had some general questions. It’s not specific yet because we kind of started recently, but we started a week later, like our Accelerator Program started September 28th or something like that, and we pretty much started like two days ago, so is this gonna give us like any type of disadvantage if we’re like not really caught up on everything yet?

 

26:20         [NK] No, no I mean all the material is on Canvas and you’ll be able to watch at the pace that you watch. We are moving towards a culminating showcase of people’s ideas that involves making a two-minute video presentation of ideas, so I don’t know if that deadline is something that fits with your plans or not. But that would be the only piece that if you didn’t have a video ready for that showcase, then that would, you know, that that day will have gone, but you can of course submit a video and we would include it.

 

26:58         [AP] The second question we had, because we’re on the same team, is I was looking at the seminar for Monday, and there’s this activity called tech tokens, and it required some type of kit, like I wanted to do the activity but I didn’t have the stuff, or the coins, or whatever that was. So what should we do instead if we don’t have that?

 

27:21         [NK] So Dave and I were just talking about that whole suite of activities called Building with Biology. BioBuilder worked with the Museum of Science and there are digital resources online; there should be links to it on the Canvas site that you might be able to download the cards that are involved, but I don’t know. Dave do you have a version of tech tokens that’s more digitally friendly – remote learning friendly?

 

27:45         [DW] That’s actually the project I’m working on right now. It’s not quite there yet, but I’ve learned about this thing called a Miro Board, if you’ve heard about that. And so I’m trying to see if I can put the tech token sheets on a Miro Board, and then people can use stickies to drag instead of the tokens, because the tokens are basically like little poker chips. So printing out those, I’ve done that in a lot of context, just print out the sheets and then have people use anything to apply their investments into the different topics. And I also see a lot of people do it by using them with – there are ten of them I think, there’re ten different investment things. I’ve seen it done just use four or five, too depending on what you have available to you. But to me the most valuable part of it is the role playing. There are these role-playing cards where okay you invest for yourself, but then think about how someone else might invest, so they have these different characters and you read about them and see how they would invest. I love how the mind works when you start thinking like someone else. I think that’s the most important part of that activity, is this is how I think I want to think, but how would I try and picture how someone else would think. So I don’t have I don’t have my Miro Board set up yet, but that’s kind of the direction I’m taking it. But if you can get access to the cards, print them out, and do them in some way, I think that’d be fun and say don’t skip over the role-playing part.

 

29:20         [AP] Yeah, okay! I don’t know if Jessica had any more questions,

 

29:24         [Jessica Hou – JH] Oh I’m just wondering, so when we present our ideas, I checked on the calendar, is that next week?

 

29:30         [NK] It’s supposed to be next Friday, is the video and then even if yours is not yet ready, it would be great to have you attend so you can hear other students’ projects, because they’re always incredibly creative and it’s inspiring, right. Like it might have some relevance to the project that you’re working on, too, so yeah. It’s always an exciting culmination. It’s amazing how far people get in just a few weeks, so even if you are not completed, you might still want to just present your early stage idea. Nobody will expect a fully formed, ready to have a million dollar NIH grant awarded kind of project! You’re intended to put out an idea that you think is important and that’s interesting to you.

 

30:20         [DW] Yeah, even just talking about your basic idea can be valuable. I can talk from experience: I’ve advised an iGem team for over 13 years now, and we rarely are to the point where we have a project. Our projects never compare to the winners, but that’s not what’s important. It’s important our group had an idea, and they still go, and they still present. And the value of it is that community that you’re being a part of. You’re part of a really valuable group of students and so don’t miss out on that opportunity just because you don’t think you’ve done enough. You’ve done plenty. Just thinking about the ideas is the step in the right direction and you’ll find support and encouragement from the others in the group.

 

31:10         [AP] Okay. Those are all of, I think our questions. Do you have any more Jessica?

 

31:14         [JH] No, no. that’s about it.

 

31:17         [AP] Thank you!

 

31:18         [JH] Thank you so much!

 

31:18         [NK] Thank you for stopping by!

 

31:19         [DW] Good luck!

 

31:23         [NK] Thank you, awesome.

 

31:25         [DW] All right.

 

31:26         [NK] Thank you.

 

31:27         [DW] And those are the things that are always on their minds.

 

31:31         [NK] Yep, definitely!