Natalie Kuldell (00:01):
Hi, Kris. (Hi, Natalie.) How are you? (I’m good.) I’m so happy to see you. It is always fun to have a chance to talk with my friends and your career is one I admire so much, so I’m glad that we can share a little bit about it, but I will also say at the outset that some of what I really admire about you well, there’s a lot, but one is your teaching. And your ability to tell great stories are things that I think are exceptional and extraordinary. And I don’t want to lose this chance to pull a little bit of that out in our conversation.
Kristala Prather (00:44):
It sounds like a lot of pressure, by the way.
Natalie Kuldell (00:53):
I don’t think you ever wilt under pressure, Kris. I mean, in fact I think that you know, it I think you and I both, and you more than me, but both of us actually are people that when pressure ramps up, we do better. Like, I think that in emergency situations, but when decisions have to get made quickly, something’s on the line, we’re both people that can go, okay, you do this and you do that.
Kristala Prather (01:31):
Yes, not to sit around and just worrying about it, then nothing happens. At least then you take some control and maybe you, you get to have a little bit of agency in what comes next. Yeah. So I agree with that
Natalie Kuldell (01:42):
Agency is both, is what we both sort of go to naturally. Yes, actually in thinking about that it made me remember a story, but only part of a story in which you were asked to rescue a piece of jewelry from a drain. So maybe as a story, you can start with that one.
Kristala Prather (02:04):
Yes. So, so I, I know where this story came from there. Oftentimes we get asked the question, all of us, how we became interested in doing what we do. And I’m an engineer. I work with biological systems. So functionally, I feel like many times what’s happening in my group was much more about biology, but, but I became an engineer kind of on purpose, right? Like I’m, I was always very much interested in applications and in translation. And in tinkering and, and I have to remind my students these days that I grew up in a world before there was an internet or, or a cell phone, right? Like imagine the world with no cell phones without instant communication. And I also grew up in a house with, with all women. So it was my mother and my sister, myself. My dad passed when I was very young.
Kristala Prather (02:51):
And so it was always just, just the girls. And so I was the “boy” of the girls. So this is, this is, you know, the eighties. So very gender stereotypical. And I fixed stuff that was just my job was to fix stuff. If things were broken, I would fix it. I remember once using a safety pin to repair a leaking toilet. That was fun. The chain a link had fallen off of the chain. So the chain wasn’t quite long enough to reach the lever. And so I remembered staring at it and thinking, what could I use that would connect these two pieces and actually hold an and a safety pin was the answer there. And so the story that you remember was one where I don’t remember from, to my mother or my sister, but one of them. They rush out of the bathroom was like, “I dropped a necklace in the sink.”
Kristala Prather (03:43):
I’m like, STOP, don’t turn on the water. And I open it up and sort of pull everything out. And we did have a toolbox of some sort. I don’t know but it probably had one screwdriver and one wrench in it, but it happened to have a wrench that would actually fit. And I immediately, I mean, looked at it and just thought, well, it’s in the, U-drain, right. It has to have stopped there because I didn’t know anything about fluid dynamics at the time, mind you, but if the water is off and there’s no flow, there’s nothing that’s going to move it out of that drain. And so I just immediately went, I get it and grabbed a wrench and undid the U-plug in the drain. Right. But then pour the water that was in the, in the pipe and the drain and the necklace pops out. And I, it must have been my sister, but it was like, you got it. And I’m like, yeah, I got it. Why wouldn’t I get it? Right. And so I was, I was that kid. When something is broken. let me immediately try to set my mind to think about how to fix it with whatever tool. MacGyver. That was our version of like, you know,
Natalie Kuldell (04:51):
Yes. That U-tube removal, all that, MacGyver’ed.s
Kristala Prather (04:55):
Yeah. Yeah. And that’s so, so I tell that story as an indication of my interest in engineering. And being able to make things and build things and if necessary fix things, cause a lot of engineering is about fixing the stuff that was wrong with your bad design. Yes. Yes.
Natalie Kuldell (05:18):
I mean, that’s the other piece that I get from that story is a willingness to just like try and hope it worked. If it doesn’t,
Kristala Prather (05:28):
Although I will say I am not… I have selective fearlessness. There’s certain things where I think what’s the worst that can happen. You have to just try. But, but there are others, right. Where I do find a bit of risk aversion and myself, some of it is it’s probably healthy, cause I’m not gonna, you know, blow all my money on a bad investment. Right. Cause I’m suspicious of everybody. But it can make it difficult to try something to, to push far beyond the boundaries. So yeah, I have to remind myself of that aspect of my personality quite often.
Natalie Kuldell (06:12):
Yeah. Well, it’s funny cause I know where you are now, I don’t imagine there were a lot of people in Northeast Texas who were, you know, doing the kind of work and the kind of career that you are doing right now. So there has to be an ability to imagine something. So either you can imagine something that you can’t see, or you just go
Kristala Prather (06:36):
Yeah. So, so, so in my story, there’s a little bit of both of that right there. There’s imagining what you can see, what you can’t see and, and there’s the going part of it. So, I will say they’re both intertwined. I was gonna see if I could figure out how to split them up. But I’ve told this story a lot where I picked engineering as a major cause my history teacher told me be an engineer. Because she said, you know, we had this conversation, I told her, I like math and science. So that’s what engineering is. Now. I had done a book report or a career report rather than on engineering as a discipline and chemical engineering actually, when I was in middle school, totally forgot about it for like the next decade.
Kristala Prather (07:19):
So that wasn’t in the forefront of my mind at all. And the same teacher said, if you’re going to study engineering, you should go to MIT. So there, that was both imagining something that you hadn’t seen. Cause my response was, well, what’s MIT? No internet, no cell phone, right? No Ironman yet. Right. So, so now kids know MIT because of Ironman or the Big Bang Theory, like none of those things kind of existed. People knew what Harvard was and what Yale was because there were movies from the fifties that talked about those places that would come on TV late at night, but MIT wasn’t really known. And so, so part of it was just imagining the unknown in the sense of, well, okay, if this is what the favorite teacher of mine, whom I trusted, this is what she suggested I do.
Kristala Prather (08:10):
If I was interested in engineering. It resonated with me when I thought, well, yeah, engineering, that sounds kind of like the stuff I’ve been doing underneath the bathroom sink all these years. So, so, so that aspect of it was a little bit of pushing beyond the limits of what I knew. And then it was like, okay, well let’s just go for it. Right. Like Ms. Ramirez said, I should do it. Let me just do it. I, you know, I would argue that in some ways my decision to pursue a PhD was more reckless than informed. It had it had no basis and, and anything that was thoughtful or, or was well-informed. It was “wait a minute, you can have people call you doctor and not have to go to med school in order to do that.” Well, that’s interesting.
Kristala Prather (09:10):
I kind of set this goal that I was going to, and I ended up at, MIT as an undergrad, and then I always knew I was going to go to grad school because that’s how I was going to be called doctor. And I didn’t want to go to med school. I’d cross it off the list years earlier. And it wasn’t until much further along that I was able to put the pieces together to figure out what that meant. And you know, I have to say though, I think that I think where we’re to, especially for, for young people of color, we are in a culture for good reason where we do want to push young people to go towards graduate school. And when people ask me to speak on panels about grad school, I always say, “that’s fine, as long as you’re okay with me being honest and saying, not everybody should do it.” Like you should, you should actually know what it’s about. unlike I did, you should
Natalie Kuldell (10:02):
Know what it’s about before
Kristala Prather (10:05):
You declared this as a career aspiration. So that you’d go into it with much more of an open mind. So I would say, you know, I have, I have consistently, and I know more now I have access to more information. So none of my decisions are, most of my decisions are not as ill-informed as those first ones were, but I have always been the type of person to commit. So even if I don’t exactly know what’s ahead of me, I’m committed to the process, I’m committed to the journey and I’m committed to the fact that I know I’m going to learn something new that I wasn’t expecting. And I’m either going to go, “Well, boy, I wish I hadn’t done that. Right?”
Natalie Kuldell (10:54):
Big oops, right?
Kristala Prather (10:56):
Or I’m going to go ”It’s not so bad, right? Like, you know, maybe, maybe we’ll ride this train a little bit further and see where the next stop is.”
Natalie Kuldell (11:02):
Oh, it’s so interesting. And it’s funny, I have a history of, of more reckless than informed decisions as well. I went to Cornell and studied chemistry because somebody said that would be a good thing to do. I was like, “OK.” For you it was go to MIT to study engineering, “OK.” So then MIT to Berkeley, and that was with Jay Keasling. And was that where you went from Chem to Bio?
Kristala Prather (11:36):
Yes. That it was although I had these interests early on. So one story I like to tell a very still dear family friends and is mid-eighties now from my hometown along the Texas first introduced me to biotech and to, to really, to chemistry as a platform for many different options. In terms of career, he was a chemist by training. A PhD chemist and had been an academic chemist, was a professor at the University of South Carolina. And then ended up moving back to Texas to take over the family business as his father had gotten older. And he, he kept this interest in education in small town, East, Texas, and really try to look for who he thought were people who could get out, I’ve come to believe that’s what he had in mind, which are the people who can leave and actually get the ticket out.
Kristala Prather (12:35):
And so I met him when I was a senior. I had already applied to MIT, actually he was an MIT PhD alum in chemistry. And he handed me a couple of American Chemical Society publications on different areas of chemistry. One was on polymers and polymer science. The other was on biotech. And this would have been in late 1989. Early 1990 AIDS crisis is full-blown now and biotech, is it right? Like there, this was the first time where in a relatively short period of time, a new disease had been definitively tied to this causative biological agent. We had a sequence that was a big deal when you had like the sequence of the HIV virus. And I remember reading this book about DNA and all this stuff you could do with DNA. And this is when we still thought cancer was going to be cured in five years. There’s a rolling five-year window for cure in cancer at that point, because antibodies were going to be the thing. And we had recombinant DNA technology. So we could make any antibody we wanted to make, and it was going to cure all the cancers. You just needed the right one. And I was really fascinated by it. And then I read the polymer science one, and that sounded really cool and fascinating too Again, right?
Kristala Prather (13:48):
Like just whatever came to mind was very interesting. But I took the time at MIT as an undergraduate to explore both of those areas. I took a class that was a polymer science class. I took a biochemistry offered by the chemistry department the first year it was ever taught. It was a big deal cause it was before nine o’clock in the morning. Kids at MIT liked to sleep late.
Kristala Prather (14:14):
It was a new class and it ran from 8:30 to 10:00 AM. And I was like, “well, can I get up at eight 8:30 to go to class?” I don’t know. Right. Like how bad do I want to learn this stuff? So that was biochemistry. And then I took biology, just sort of general biology before it was required of all MIT undergraduates. And I did a UROP as well in a lab there’s still chemical engineering, more fermentation process development. So not a lot of DNA, but moving towards the bio side. So when I went to Berkeley, I went there specifically interested in the bio stuff. So it was definitely the first time that I had a chance to do the biology at the molecular level. But that was purposeful. I chose it and I chose it for two reasons. One was, it was in California and I was cold.
Kristala Prather (14:58):
So I’d been in, I’d been in Boston for four years. My senior year was a really cold winter, not a lot of snow, but crazy cold winter. And, and I had enough, right? Like, I’m like, you know, I, I just, I gotta, I gotta be done with this for a while, put away the heavy boots. California seemed like a great place to be able to do that. And then I had again, no internet. So when I was trying to figure out what schools to look at, I talked to my UROP supervisor who was a professor named Charlie Cooney and the biospace and said, where should I go for you to have choices? Really? I knew even then I kind of knew it wasn’t a good idea to be singularly focused on any one particular advisor. And so Berkeley was on the list. There were places like Minnesota, but that was too cold
Natalie Kuldell (15:47):
You’re not going to put your boots away there.
Kristala Prather (15:50):
No. but Berkeley was on the list and they had it by, I should say bio within chemical engineering was still relatively new at this point. And so the fact that Berkeley had three faculty and Jay, my advisor, was the youngest of those three, but three faculty who were really well versed in the biochemical side of chemical engineering. That was a huge driver of motivation for me to, to go to Berkeley for grad school.
Natalie Kuldell (16:16):
That sounds amazing. You, you have such a, such a diversity of experiences and backgrounds and you definitely allowed the train to take you place to play. I also know you have ridden that train, not only through academia, but also into industry and back, right. So do you have a story about either going towards industry or leaving industry or your experience with an industry that I can, yeah, I can. I think
Kristala Prather (16:50):
The story for why I went to industry and the story for why I left or are both I think, instructive and good ones. So in terms of why I went towards industry, I had always intended to do it. I’d forgotten. I do a lot of writing stuff and then forgetting about it. Like I wrote a book report about the chemical engineer in sixth grade, I think it was, and forgot about it. When I wrote my statement of purpose for graduate school, which I did not find…. so I went to, I graduated in 1994, so I would have written this in the fall of 1993. I found it 10 years later. And 2004, when I was actually moving back to MIT, and then that statement of purpose I’d written, I wanted to get my PhD. I wanted to go spend some time in industry and then I want it to be a professor.
Kristala Prather (17:31):
And then apparently, like, I probably forgot about that after I wrote it because grad school was hard enough that it just washed all that stuff to the back of my brain. But while I was in grad school, I had a fellowship from DuPont and as part of the fellowship was required to go to what was called the experimental station, this really research center they had in Delaware, where they had over the years, invented all sorts of stuff, including nylon and Teflon and, and you know, these really, really creative scientists there. And I went to give this talk, my first full length presentation. I’d done these conference things, there were 15 or 20 minutes here or there, but this was, you have the hour you’re supposed to spend 40, 45 minutes talking. And then the rest of the time for Q and A. No laptops then. So I had a binder with my overhead projector slide.
Natalie Kuldell (18:19):
That’s right. Then you had to have like the printed paper.
Kristala Prather (18:24):
I can actually read them. Cause the slides and you couldn’t really read those on paper. I’d studied everything. I go to this talk that I, as I like to say, that I thought was brilliant. I’m like, I nailed it I’m like, yeah, I’m telling you a couple of jokes and people are like really engaged and they’re laughing and nodding along. We have this great Q and A afterwards and I’m like, okay, my job here is done. And then, and then, I don’t know, don’t remember if it was the, I don’t think it was immediately after meeting, or one a little bit later. But Charlie Nakamura, God bless him was a scientist at DuPont. And, and in a way that only Charlie could do, Charlie, when I met with him, I sat down and he said, I really enjoyed your talk but your motivation for doing it. It’s totally wrong.
Natalie Kuldell (19:14):
But I enjoyed it. I thought I was great.
Kristala Prather (19:20):
And, and I think he must’ve seen the look on my face and he said, don’t misunderstand me. I think what you’re doing is very interesting. I think you’re going to learn some things that are going to be really important for the field. And I think, you know, you’re going to write a paper about your major thesis project and people within the metabolic engineering community are really gonna appreciate it. But you’ve motivated your work by industrial concerns and you’re just wrong. Okay I say, Well enlighten me
Kristala Prather (19:50):
And I don’t, I don’t remember the details anymore, but as most people teach you to do, I had three points, right? My three points for why this was important. And one of them, he was like, well, that used to be important, but we kind of figured out how to get around that. And because in industry we don’t publish everything we do, the academics just haven’t quite caught up yet. That problem has been solved. The second one, it was, this was never as big a problem as, as people thought it was in the first place. So yeah, you can, you know, you can do something, but it’s not really going to be game changing. And the third, and I don’t remember exactly what these were anymore, but you know, the themes were the same, the third one, he said, no, no question legitimately, that’s a real problem, but you’ve got to solve these other five or six problems first before solving that one actually matters. Right. So now feeling sort of humbled,
Natalie Kuldell (20:45):
Right?
Kristala Prather (20:48):
No longer feeling like I nailed it. Right. It caused me to stop and think about the difference between industry and academia, because the goals are different, the processes of doing research are different. The motivations are very different, right. And I was still interested in being an academic, but I want it, yeah. My research as much as possible to be relevant for industry, right. It didn’t mean that everything we did was going to be patentable or translatable, but I want it to be able, to have it be relevant. And in part that was to be able to educate students, knowing that most of our students don’t become professors. It’s just not, there’s not enough of us leaving for everyone that we educate to replace us. Right? Like the math just doesn’t work out there. So most of our students by a pretty healthy margin are not going into academia.
Kristala Prather (21:39):
They’re doing something else. And so I want it to have a perspective that allows me to be a better mentor and a, in a research lab. So for my graduate students, for my post-doc and even in the classroom. There are certain things. I remember my first couple of years, I was teaching one class. So I said, look, you’re never going to use this. Actually, you’re going to do this when you’re in industry, you don’t have that kind of time. Right. You don’t time to sit and optimize and build a detailed model, but you still need to learn this because number one, it’s just good for your soul to be smart so this is going to make you smart so go ahead and learn it there. But you need to understand enough to learn from what other people have done and then apply those lessons to what’s going to be useful for you.
Kristala Prather (22:23):
And I didn’t know that before I actually went to industry, I was trained as a very traditional chemical engineer. You study systems, you build these mathematical models and use the models to design, whatever. That’s great. But I worked in pharma, and pharma is like, “this is the date we’re going to launch. So this is a day where the process has to be set. So this is the date where you have to have your preliminary stuff done. And you do as much as you can, within that timeframe to meet whatever you’re performing. Is it optimal? Probably not. Right. Do you care? Right. Like it’s got to meet the objectives, right. It doesn’t have to solve all problems and that’s not how we’re actually trained. I think it’s, and that’s fine. I think that’s appropriate for being trained in academia, but that’s not really how people do things in industry.
Kristala Prather (23:09):
So I decided then like that, and I ended up that visit interviewing for summer position. So I spent the summer at DuPont and after the summer definitely came away going. I want to spend real time in industry learning all the ins and outs, understanding even what drives companies to adopt new tech. Right. And then we’d go into academia. And so I went to Merck, Merck research labs in New Jersey was really happy, right. I like liked my job. I liked the people I worked with. I probably would have stayed forever. And then my husband one day said, “it’s okay if you change your mind. But when you took this job, you said you only wanted to do it for a couple of years. And then you were interested in being an academic.” And it’s been, I think it had been maybe two and a half years at that point.
Kristala Prather (23:59):
And he said, if you’ve changed your mind and you like it and you want to stay, that’s fine. But I don’t — remember the whole risk aversion thing. He said, I don’t want you to not try because this is comfortable. And because it’s, it’s easy. Cause it’s sort of the devil you know versus the devil you don’t. And so that’s the second part of the story, which was that forced me to ask, what was it about my job that I liked at Merck most right. What was the, what was the best part of it? And the best part of it hands down was that I had two young people who came to work for me, one fresh out of undergrad, one who had worked at Merck after undergrad for a couple of years, then gotten a master’s degree. And I worked at sort of QC.
Kristala Prather (24:48):
So not in a research area who were, were bequeath to me, right, as young researchers. And I got to train them to be independent scientists. And I tell one last story here. But to me, I’m like, this is, this is why I’m here. We had every year. Imagine if you did this in academia every year, we had these performance evaluation periods where for everyone within a certain grade or a certain band, we had numbers. Like I came in as a grade six and then I got promoted to a grade five as a new PhD. If you came in with a new bachelor’s, I’m just saying the president of MRL was grade one. So it went down. And so individually we would sort of rate our individuals. And then we had to sit in the meeting with all the managers and everyone within a certain grade had to be ranked one, two, three, four, five, right?
Kristala Prather (25:45):
So, so on and so forth. And once for having this meeting and within my group, we had, we had sort of taken this project that had been around for a long time and had figured out something really critical. We didn’t quite solve the whole thing because whole genome sequencing wasn’t cheap enough at that point, but we, but we had a major, major insight. And so there are these two people and the question is who’s number one and who’s number two. And there’s my person and there was the other person. And the head of our department says you know, you sort of figure out who’s one, who’s two. And the people are giving their arguments such as the direct supervisors, but people who have worked with them have to weigh in on this as well. And my department manager finally says, there’s no question.
Kristala Prather (26:28):
Both of these people have done a great job, but the question is, “what were the expectations?” Right? and he said for, for this person who, wasn’t the person working for me they deliver it. There’s no question that they delivered. It was, it was pretty straightforward. And you know, this was something we’ve done before we knew what the expectations were. And he said for this person, the person working for me he says, I actually thought that was never going to work. And I looked up, I’m like, “wait a minute. What do you mean? You thought it was never going to work.” He said, “you came to me with this idea that you would nuts,” “but you didn’t tell me,” he says, “I figured it was worth a shot. Right?” Like maybe you had seen something that other people had missed and it worked out well. And I said, so what would have happened if I was totally wrong? And he goes, “Oh, that would have reflected in your performance evaluation.”
Kristala Prather (27:28):
Good to know. But that was the moment when I realized that, you know, my person was being given credit for really having this novel contribution. Right. And when I stopped and thought about what success would look like if I stayed at Merck, it would mean moving up the management ladder. Right. You’re trying to get your grade numbers to drop. So I go from being just my little group to being a group leader where I have other PhDs under me, to being a department head and so on and so forth. And that would have meant moving further and further away from that experience. Right. Right. Whereas the one thing that’s the same and academia, everything else around you, changes but the students, they’re always there. Is there a new crop that comes in every year, there’s a crop that’s graduated out. And so every year you have this opportunity to go through that process of taking someone who’s really enthusiastic, not necessarily very skilled, but really enthusiastic and really smart. And your job is to not screw it up. Don’t take their smart and undo it. Right. But to actually give them the appropriate space, as well as the right guard rails to have them realize their full potential. And so I always say every time, the day a student mind defends their thesis is both the happiest and the saddest day of my life. It is very happy because you see them really come into their own. But it’s very sad because you’re like, this is when you’re like you’ve got your greatest productivity.
Natalie Kuldell (29:10):
Okay,
Kristala Prather (29:11):
Well, you can’t really don’t sell stuff out. And you let them go and you get your next crop of little baby birds and you teach them about it.
Natalie Kuldell (29:18):
So it’s so funny. Cause I started by saying that I love how you can tell stories and how you teach. And that one really, like, I think that you know, if I were in your classroom, I would feel both that sense of space and that sense of guardrail that you bring to the students to let them grow their wings and excel.
Kristala Prather (29:52):
It is certainly the goal. I mean, I think for me, one of the things I think a lot about, as a difference between being an academia and being an industry, and then when I worked at Merck, there was no question why I was doing what I was doing. Right. And I’m not going to pick on other industries, but other industries you can kind of be like, really, if you disappeared, would it matter if you’re in
Kristala Prather (30:16):
Pharma. If you’re there every project you were working on, you know, is tied to a disease, right. There’s, there’s never any question about it that, that what you’re doing is very much focused and very driven. And so the big picture was always really clear to see, but when you are in a large company, it’s hard to understand the significance of your individual contribution, right? So, so you get, you get this really clear sense that you’re part of the machine and the machine is moving towards making life better for, for people. But you know, your, your, your own place in that is really, really hard to see. What I have really enjoyed about my academic career is I see who’s being impacted, right? I, I have relationships with the people who are growing and who are thriving and who are figuring out how they’re going to make their marks on the world.
Kristala Prather (31:19):
And it gives me the opportunity to amplify, whatever my message is. And the hope that other people will, will leave my research group, or leave my classroom, thinking about things in a way that’s about “what can I do to play my part and making the world better when I leave it then it was when I got here.” So I find them that my impact, I think, is much more personal. I have no idea what people are going to do. They’re going to do some great things, right. And I’m going to get zero credit for it, but that’s fine. Right? Like it’s enough for me to know that what I am doing is playing my part to make sure that when the young graduates leave MIT, they’re doing that ready, as ready as they can be, to actually make the world a better place.
Natalie Kuldell (32:15):
I can and give you credit for some of the wonderful students that you have launched into the world, because they have joined the BioBuilder community and they are mentoring our students, innovators and engineers themselves. So it is really a very virtuous circle and they do give you credit, how important your teaching of them was and how they still think of all that you’ve taught them.
Kristala Prather (32:54):
You never know, it’s like, you know, we have kids, right? You raised the kids, you just don’t know if the kids are going to give you credit for anything.
Natalie Kuldell (33:04):
Blame yes, credit we hope.
Kristala Prather (33:07):
So that’s very good to hear.
Natalie Kuldell (33:10):
So Kris, thank you so much. You’re an amazing, amazing, wonderful friend. And so thankful to be able to work together. It’s wonderful.
Kristala Prather (33:21):
Good to see you. Thanks so much for the invitation.