Transcript:
00:01 [Natalie Kuldell – NK] Hi, Patricia, how are you? Can you hear me okay?
00:08 [Patricia Silveyra – PS] Hi. How are you?
00:09 [NK] Hi, I’m great. So good to see you. Thank you for joining for this Idea Accelerator office hour. It’s just great for me to have a chance to talk to some of my favorite people and, to also have you guys just share a little bit about what you’re doing and how you got to do what you get to do from a professional in the field. So it’s so nice to have you on, so maybe you can just introduce who you are and where you are and what your lab does.
00:45 [PS] Sure. Well, thanks for having me, first of all, I’m Dr. Patricia Silveyra. I am an associate professor and the director of a core facility named the Bio Behavioral Lab, but I also have my own research laboratory where I study mechanisms of lung inflammation and lung disease, such as asthma with a particular focus on how this disease manifests differently in men and women and how hormones can make this disease worse or better in men and women.
01:20 [NK] It’s so wonderful. There really have not been – there hasn’t, in the past, been enough attention on the differences between men and women in disease and disease outcomes. And great that you are focusing on that. Did you say where your lab is and where you, where you teach and work?
01:38 [PS] It is at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.
01:43 [NK] Very good. Yeah, it’s a wonderful place. I know that you were highly recruited there and they are very lucky to have you there. So you have a lab group and you run a center, right? How does your time divide up, would you say?
02:02 [PS] Most of the time, I’m running my lab and I’m also teaching classes. The classes I teach are physiology, lung physiology, particularly, I teach people how the lungs work and what are the systems that interact with the lungs and how these develop when things don’t work out. Then the rest of the time, I lead the center. The center is basically a big lab where professors or researchers who want to measure biomarkers in blood, or in urine, or any other bio fluid, they don’t have to basically get a lab on their own. So what they do is they collect the samples in their study. For example, if they are comparing two populations that are undergoing something treatment or something intervention, then they bring the samples to my lab, and we measure that for them and then we’ll report the results. So that is why it’s called a Core facility, because I am by training a biochemist and molecular biologist. I know all the techniques and I can tell my technicians how to run everything so that everybody can just take advantage of that rather than having to learn everything from scratch.
03:22 [NK] Yeah. Yeah. I think there’s such an advantage to building in those efficiencies. And I don’t know that universities always celebrate enough of those core facilities and those collaborative spaces, but it’s great if you can bring your samples to a group and get the data that is measured and achieved by somebody who knows what they’re doing so you don’t have to learn all the ins and outs of every technique yourself. So, yeah, that’s really good.
03:55 [PS] Yeah. And another thing we do is we have equipment that we rent to investigators. Sometimes I work in a nursing school then nurses not only help doctors, they can also get PhDs and run labs and the investigators like medical doctors.
04:13 [NK] Yeah, yep!
04:14 [PS] Yeah, biomedical professional. And a majority of my core users are nursing researchers
04:22 [NK] So cool!
04:23 [PS] And the studies that they conduct usually have to do with an intervention that has to do with wellbeing, or increasing physical activity, or changing your diet. So it’s usually something to do with making your life better in a way, right. But very personalized. So sometimes they want to see if an intervention, for example, you sing dancing in a group or going to certain meetings makes people exercise more. So how do you track that? We have accelerators or we have here basically those watches that count your steps or they count your distance, and some of them even tell you how long you’re standing up or sitting down, or even how you’re sleeping, but if the lights or any other interference in the environment, and all of that can get quantified. So the same thing, these professors don’t have to purchase all of that. They can come through our core, they rent it from us, and then when they’re done with their study, they return it and then another investigator can use them.
05:27 [NK] It’s so great. It’s so wonderful to be building and being part of a community, right. Like being part of a cohort that lifts all things, right. It’s really very satisfying, I’m sure. To read about the research that you helped enable, right. It’s an enabling technology that you offer.
05:47 [PS] Right! Yeah. That’s the part that I liked the most is that I run my own lab and I read about lungs and asthma all the time and in my own world, right. But at the same time, I would never get so much detail and investigations that are going on on campus if I wasn’t the Director of the Core. So yeah, I get to learn about mindfulness and diets and even, you know, racial disparities. So there’s a lot of research going on that I will have – I could have gone and read them, but chances are that I would have not have, but it’s now a part of my job. And the other thing is that I get to contribute from a different perspective because I’m not a nurse. But I do have a very big background of techniques. So I can always provide a different point of view or tell them, maybe you can measure these in a different way, or even incite them to think the way BioBuilder teaches us to think.
06:55 [NK] That’s so nice. I was going to ask you about your lab. How many students you have, how you like running it, what you think about when you’re running your lab?
07:04 [PS] Yeah, right now, I only have two students; you know it’s not a big lab, but I have two technicians as well. So, we’re a small group of people. The way I run the lab, we have weekly meetings and then I have everybody running a different project. So I also have individual meetings with each of my team members. Sorry for the music outside of my house – I don’t know if you can hear it.
07:32 [NK] I can’t really hear it, but I love that it’s playing!
07:37 [PS] Yeah. So, but my job as the lead PI is mostly to make sure that everybody is on track, that everybody has everything they need so that we don’t run out of samples, and we don’t run out with things to run or samples on or to culture ourselves. So I am basically a person who coordinates everybody’s work, but also I’m the person who brings the money.
08:04 [NK] Exactly!
08:07 [PS] That means that I have to write proposals and I have to identify where this money is. They are the NIH and the NSF, which are federal organizations that provide funding, but then there’s also foundations. And so to write a grant, you need information, you need to make a case, explain why your research is important, and what is the hypothesis that you are trying to test, in addition to why it has this significance. Why is this a problem that we need to solve? And how the field is going to advance if you conduct your research. And so, although that takes a lot of time to put together Writing grants takes, you know, several months, sometimes most of my time I am sitting there on the computer writing and checking out what’s going on in my field and seeing, you know, “okay, this is the new stuff that we know, and we’re going to take this information and use it to build upon or we’re going to consider it in our investigations.”
So the other part of my job, when there’s not a pandemic around, is to travel throughout the country to go to conferences and to visit other people that are working in my field. So if you’ve ever been in a research lab and you talk to the people, they will tell you that the PI, which is the principal investigator – the boss – is never around!
09:34 [NK] Right, right!
09:35 [PS] That is usually because we are traveling, doing that. Because they are important to write the grants that we get so that everybody in our lab can run the research.
09:47 [NK] Right, right. I think it’s wonderful. And then on top of that, I’m just going to mention again, you’re also teaching, right? So it is – I mean, each one of these could be a full time, more than a full-time effort, right.
10:04 [PS] Yes, yeah. Over time, and I can talk about my career trajectory, but over time, as you grow in this ladder, it’s like you’re climbing a ladder. You will learn skills, and then things that 10 years ago took me three days, now they take me 15 minutes because I’ve done them so many times and I have acknowledged so much information and habits and knowledge that everything becomes faster. I don’t know if it becomes easier, but it becomes faster.
10:39 [NK] That’s so true!
10:41 [PS] Absolutely. I sometimes say I sit down doing something and I say, “Oh my God. I remember when it started, this would just take me weeks and I’m doing it fast, and in English!” Because English is my second language, so it was also another learning curve.
11:03 [NK] It absolutely is. I can’t even imagine trying to do everything you’re doing in a language that’s not your first language, but maybe that’s a good sort of segue or point of entry into a little bit about your personal background. So you said English is not your first language. Although your English is beautiful. It’s beautiful.
11:27 [PS] So I was born and raised in Argentina. For those of you who don’t know, Argentina is in South America, like if you really look down the map, it’s the last country in the very bottom, it looks like a triangle is a very big country. It’s the same size of India, if you think about how large India is. In surface, Argentina is basically the same size. However, India has millions and millions and millions of people. And Argentina only has 40 million people, which is very, very small compared to the size of the country. So they’re placed in a country where there’s very, very few people. And then there are places like the city where I was born, where there’s ten million altogether, it’s not equally distributed. So I grew up in Buenos Aires surrounded by a lot of people. And here I attended college. College in this country is a little different than in the U.S. we get something called a licenciatura, which is basically a bachelor’s and a master’s. So it was seven years, and at the end of the seven years, you have to defend a thesis. So imagine that you do your bachelor’s degree, and then you do a three-year master’s degree, that’s the same way.
12:46 [NK] All the way through, yep.
12:49 [PS] And then yeah, if you look at what I learned here and what everybody learns in the U.S., doing those two things is exactly the same, except that I learned in Spanish. English, I had to learn to get some books and to read the papers, because the papers with the research, like you guys read to do your investigation, and they’re all reading English, majority of them, there are some that are not, but they’re all in English. So when I finished my basically bachelor’s and master’s, I signed up for a PhD program also in this country. At that point in my life, I didn’t know that you could go and do a PhD in another country. If I had known and I’m the first person in my family to go to college. So I didn’t know, I didn’t have anybody around me that could tell me. But yeah, if I had known, I would have tried to go to the U.S. and do a PhD there. But yeah, I get to do PhDs with my own students now. Cause you know, they get that. But the PhD here is similar in the fact that you have to complete a thesis, you have to publish papers, you have to run an investigation. But it’s different in the fact that you don’t have formal coursework or classes that you have to take, you have to take classes, but they’re – you select which classes you want and then somebody approves them. So it’s just a pick to get points. So you don’t have a cohort of students that join with you and then graduate with you, like in the U.S., so it’s a little bit more isolating. And then the other thing you need to do is get your own funding.
14:31 [NK] Really? Wow! That’s different than here.
14:37 [PS] Yeah. So based on your GPA from the prior training, your bachelor’s and a master’s you get selected in different labs that are in institutions around the city where I started; they all belong to the university. So I joined a research institution that was founded by the prior Nobel Prize winner from this country. This country has three Nobel Prize winners in science, and they all founded a research institution. So I joined that one and yeah, you get selected by your GPA, but then you, together with your Principal Investigator, submit a grant. Until that point, you just work for free in the lab and you try to get preliminary data. And both of us still have jobs outside of doing that or a lot of times still live with our parents. And it’s not like in the U.S. where you, when you go to college, just leave your house. College is like high school in that you still live with your parents, if you want, and then you go to college, like you were going to get high school in the same city in place. So yeah, it’s a different experience.
15:46 [NK] Very different! Yeah, so I think my PhD in this institution is called EB Med, which stands for it will be the Biomedical Institution, Biomedical and Experimental Institution. Yeah. Something like that,
16:02 [NK] It’s in Argentina?
16:04 [PS] In Argentina. And when I was about to finish my PhD, I was writing my thesis, I got an email from a friend that said somebody was looking for a postdoc, in the U.S. and I said “no, that will never pick me.” It was just a typical thought, because I didn’t know anybody who had gone to do anything like that. But I contacted that person, and then they said, “yeah, well, if you want to come here or you have to bring your own funding.”
16:40 [NK] Oh my God.
16:41 [PS] So I started applying for scholarships. And a lot of scholarships I didn’t get, but then I got one scholarship that allowed me to come to the U.S. And that was through the Rotary Club. So part of the fellowship was that I had to go work in the lab, but then the other parts of the scholarship meant that I had to go through the Rotary Club and speak about Argentina! So I gave about 24 presentations in the first year which was good because I learned a lot of English and I learned public speaking. So it’s actually a great experience to do that, but it was challenging to manage that with the work in the lab.
17:24 [NK] Cause it’s a lot of extra time and a lot of extra efforts. Sure.
17:27 [PS] Right, but when you are a postdoc, which is a training that you do after you get your PhD if you want to stay in academia or in industry, that you acquire a lot of skills and then you publish a lot, because those are the things that you’re going to need later for what comes after.
17:43 [NK] Right.
17:44 [PS] So as a postdoc, you are basically in the lab all day.
17:48 [NK] All day, exactly.
17:48 [PS] It’s a lot of tedious jobs. So yeah, it was challenging to manage that with my duties, which usually was a lunch meeting. I had to go like an hour away and give a talk to people at the club, and then come back and talk to scientists.
18:11 [NK] So you learned a lot of time management skills too.
18:15 [PS] I did, yeah. But, you know, the other thing was, my family was still in Argentina and I was there. So it was also different not only the culture of the U.S., but also I was in the middle of Pennsylvania in the middle of nowhere. And it was very different from the 10 million people city I had grown up in. So for me, there was a cultural shock in addition, like I got there and I was like, where’s the Metro, where’s the people!
18:43 [NK] Where are all the people!
18:45 [PS] There were no people. So yeah, it was very, very different. But then you adapt and I really liked working in the lab and what I was doing, the people I was meeting. So I got to learn a lot. So then when I was about to finish the postdoc, I had to make a decision because I was either going to return to my home country or try to stay in the U.S. and to stay in the U.S., that means you have to apply for the green card, which allows you to apply for grants. So I took a lot of decisions just to make the story short. But one of the most important things I did was to start submitting applications for funding to open my own lab. And there were things that I wouldn’t have been brave enough if I didn’t have a support system and if I didn’t have mentors that told me “yes, you can do this,” “yeah, let me look at your application,” “okay, this is something that you can improve.” And then after a few rejections, I got a grant to open my lab. And after I got the first grant, I started getting more and more and more to the point that then I just had my own space with my own students, and I started helping them.
20:04 [NK] That’s amazing. There is so much about your story that is really, just so notable and so inspirational, right? Like I think one thing that might come as a surprise to people is that you had not planned out every step of your career from the get-go. You sort of continued with things that made sense, and that were opportunities for you, and then you through networks and through keeping your eyes open and your possibilities open, you landed and moved. Then the other thing that I think you said, which is so important – well there are so many things, but one is that just, you just start, right? Like you’re not gonna be perfect right out of the gate. The first grant you wrote, you probably did not get funded. And as you said earlier, it takes a lot of energy to write a grant, right. It’s a big investment and the yields’ usually low, but you learn from it and then it gets better.
21:03 [PS] Yes, there’s a lot of perseverance.
21:06 [NK] Perseverance and being okay with looking at everything as a growth opportunity, right, as what can I learn from this? And then the last thing, so important, I think is that you turn to people who you trusted as mentors, and they could give you feedback. They could help you along the way. I think nobody does this by themselves. Everybody has people they rely on.
21:30 [PS] Anybody can call you, I mean, sometimes you think that you need a super mentor or this super famous person to help you, but there’s a lot of people that are not famous.
21:42 [NK] Who are great!
21:48 [PS] They don’t know as much about what you study, but then they have a different perspective because they have their own background.
21:55 [NK] Right.
21:56 [PS] And I always tell the story of when I submitted my application for this scholarship that I ended up getting, it was actually my grandmother who didn’t even finish elementary school, who helped me and said “okay, look, I’ll go with you. Let’s go to these people.” And then she took me to the Rotary Club and she didn’t even know them, but she just said “okay, yeah, you’re going to go there.” Cause I didn’t want to go talk to this club with all these old people. And I didn’t know what to expect if I went in by myself and my grandma was nice enough to come with me and I owe her that. So yeah, it doesn’t have to be a super mentor, super famous professor. Reach out to the people that you trust that have your best interest at heart and then anybody can help, or guide you, or connect you with someone.
22:43 [NK] Yeah. So, so wonderful and so important. And it’s funny, cause I as you were mentioning this, I’m trying to remember how you and I got connected through BioBuilder. I know that we’ve had a lot of, I mean, you’ve done amazing work and led teacher professional development for BioBuilder, and you’ve mentored so many of our students in the past and continue to mentor the students, so I’m so grateful for all that. But I can’t remember how we got it. Wasn’t your grandmother that introduced us; that I know.
23:17 [PS] No. So part of what I do, I think I already mentioned this, that one of the things that fuels me to do science is the opportunity to teach others and to train others to join science. And science – there’s this misconception that is not so evident right now that it used to be a few years ago, but there’s this misconception that science is only done by certain groups of people. You know, you used to ask kids to draw a scientist and they used to just draw this very old man, white and just that right. There was a stereotype. So I always try to help in causes or in organizations that try to bring more people into sciences, especially people like me who didn’t think that they were going to make it or that things were not for them. Right. So one organization I was volunteering with was the American Physiological Society. I already mentioned a physiologist. I do love physiology. I teach physiology. So a lot of things I do with them and they have something called the physiology understanding week or FUN week.
24:32 [NK] Clever!
24:32 [PS] What you get to do is to visit the school and talk about physiology. So I define an activity to do with students. And I contacted a teacher at the Milton Hershey School, which was a boarding school. So I brought people to my lab and I went there, and with the teacher, I met her there. Her name is Lauren. And we did this activity to measure lung function using water bottles and hoses and it was great. The students learned a lot about their lungs. And so after that, Lauren and I kept talking, cause she kept telling me “you know, these students they really like to meet a scientist and to meet the people in your lab. Why don’t you come back doing this BioBuilder club?”
25:20 [NK] Right! We have Lauren to thank!
25:23 [PS] So I first went and I had lunch with the students that were doing their projects and they all told me about their projects. And then the second time it went, the students were presenting their projects and I served as a judge. And then Lauren invited me to do the training, to do the teacher training. So that’s when I met you Natalie.
25:44 [NK] It was in New York we met in! It was great.
25:47 [PS] In New York, yeah. And soon after that, I was teaching with Lauren for two years. I taught with her, and then I moved to North Carolina and I stopped here.
25:58 [NK] Yes. And we were slated to do that again, but things changed for last summer, but we will teach again for sure. It just seems so lucky, right? Like how lucky we are to have you in the BioBuilder group and the community and, all the expertise you bring and all the examples of persistence, and curiosity, and drive, and generosity. I mean, that’s the thing, when I think about you is just your generosity of spirit when you want to teach and share. And it comes from not only great understanding, but also just a desire to make sure other people have access and interest in this information if they’re interested.
26:46 [PS] Yeah, it’s also just fun.
26:48 [NK] It’s fun too! Yeah. That is true. That is true. So what are you doing for fun these days? Anything good to help keep mind, body, spirit together other than – I mean, you have essentially no time, but.
27:02 [PS] Well, I wake up in the morning and I go for a short run. I just keep a habit. It’s not fun when it starts, but then he gets fun after you warm up. I don’t know for the younger people, but as you get older, I know it’s hard to start. I do it while I’m still a little bit asleep, so I don’t notice.
27:29 [NK] So you don’t notice how hard it is!
27:32 [PS] Yeah. The other thing I do, I do yoga because it calms me, it helps me breathe better, calm down, the mind is so busy all day, especially with the screen we’re on all the time on the computer now. The bad thing about the computer is that we have multiple windows open. So it’s not what our brain was designed to do. So it can get really, really tiring, and inefficient.
28:04 [NK] Yeah. It is. We are all fatigued from,
28:07 [PS] I’m from the older generation. We used to just have one thing that we were writing. You can’t write two things at once!
28:14 [NK] Unless you’re writing with two hands!
28:16 [PS] Exactly. So, yeah. So I recognize that that is something that you need a break. And one of the breaks I take is that, through yoga, concentrating on my breathing and then talking to the nurses that work in my Core.
28:34 [NK] It makes a difference! There’s science there!
28:38 [PS] There’s a lot of biomarkers in your blood like cytokines and inflammatory molecules that, you know, normally they are being expressed when your body is under stress or undergoing inflammation as a result of maybe an infection or something. But in this case, it’s just stress. And if you do yoga, mindfulness, or breathing exercises, the studies that compare people who do those and who don’t, they show that all these bad biomarkers, or, you know, I would call them alarm signs in your body telling you something’s going on that is not right. All of those decrease you can waste.
29:21 [NK] Yup. Yup. It’s such an ancient practice. You have to believe that even before it was studied, it was known to work, right. It works and now it’s studied and we had evidence that it works in particular ways.
29:34 [PS] And it’s also hard and it’s not easy. It’s like running!
29:42 [NK] It’s good to do hard things. I think it is very satisfying for sure. Well you are just a rock star. You are one of those folks that just does so much good and surprising you just make it look easy. And I know there is a ton going on in the world that has even more challenges associated with trying to fit what is happening into all these other things that have to happen. So thank you for doing all you do and for adding so much goodness to the world.
30:18 [PS] Thank you.
30:19 [NK] Yeah. It’s great to see you. And thanks for taking the time to do this. I don’t see any students online to answer their questions. So we will just pause this and we’ll post this so that they can reach out if they have questions or things. Awesome. All right.
30:35 [PS] Thank you so much
30:35 [NK] Thank you so much, Patricia. So good to see you.
30:37 [PS] Alright, bye.