Natalie Kuldell (00:03):
Hey, Patrick, thank you for joining today. It’s great to see you.
Patrick Holec (00:07):
Hey Natalie, how’s it going?
Natalie Kuldell (00:09):
It’s going. OK. It’s going OK. I am so grateful that BioBuilder has brought us into contact and gave us a way to work together. I admire you and your work so very much. But maybe we can start by sharing what that is. You can say maybe what your name is and where you’re studying and what you’re doing.
Patrick Holec (00:34):
Yeah, yeah, of course. So, hi everybody who’s watching this. Um, so my name is Patrick. I am currently a six year graduate student at Massachusetts Institute Technology or MIT. Um, I am currently studying bioengineering, but I’m originally from, my hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota. I think unlike a lot of people who, well, maybe not, but, I definitely did not start in biology. I started actually in mathematics and then switched over to bioengineering when I came to graduate school. So I definitely come from a lot of different mixed backgrounds, and not necessarily the canonical way that people get into science. <laugh>
Natalie Kuldell (01:16):
One thing I’ve learned from these conversations is there is a traditional path, but there are also an awful lot of people who don’t take a very traditional path into this kind of work. So, do you wanna say whose laboratory you’re in and the kinds of things that you’re studying there at, uh, BE?
Patrick Holec (01:33):
Yeah, so I am currently in the lab of Michael Birnbaum and so Michael Birnbaum is an immunologist by training. And we’re in my sixth year, which is also his sixth year. So I joined his lab as one of the first wave of students. And so what I really got to see throughout my PhD was how do you start science? How do you kind of get involved with academia? How do you think about beyond your first couple years as professor, but, it’s really been a cool way to get the full range of experience there, from beginning to what is going to be his tenure year, which is right now.
Natalie Kuldell (02:15):
It’s funny. I guess I hadn’t realized it, but I was also the first graduate student of my PhD advisor and one vivid memory I have as like unwrapping laboratory chairs and taking the plastic off of them. It was that early, early on when I joined. So it is the experience for sure. I’m sorry. I interrupted you. What were you gonna say?
Patrick Holec (02:36):
Luckily I didn’t, er, too bad I didn’t get to unwrap the lab chairs. I think that was right before I joined, but, I was gonna say, I forgot to say what I worked on. So he’s an immunologist, but I kind of think of myself as somebody who thinks about mathematics and how it relates to the immune system. And so what I do in his lab is build technologies that you can use to study an immune system. So it’s not like we’re looking at a specific cell and we’re saying, what does this thing do? What I think about is how do we make a process where we take a patient and then say something useful about their immune system. And so what I want to be doing, I don’t want to be the person who’s giving the diagnosis. I want to be able to make the tools that can allow people that make those diagnoses. And so, it’s a lot of really creative thinking projects take right turns all the time. It’s really not the same thing every single day you come into lab, it changes direction nonstop.
Natalie Kuldell (03:33):
Yeah, that is so cool. I mean, technologies are, so useful. These tool as a tool builder, you know, you have an idea for where that tool will be used and then it’s used there and then parts of it get useful in other places. Like it grows in ways that are really unpredictable and it’s applied in ways that are so unpredictable, which I think must be so satisfying to be a tool builder. What does it take to build a tool like that? Is it research like at the wet bench? Is it reading? Is it modeling?
Patrick Holec (04:08):
Yeah, well, I think there’s a lot of different types of tool builders out there. And I think it can be really rewarding cuz when you get a chance to hand something to another lab or to another scientist or even a clinician, um, it’s a really exciting moment to see something that you put all this time into become a really useful tool in the repertoire of somebody else who’s trying to ask a totally different set of questions. But I think for me, when I think about tool buildings actually a little bit more, uh, it can be a high risk adventure because it’s very possible that you go down this long labyrinth of different experiments and trying different methods and it turns out the thing that you have at the very end, doesn’t actually end up being that useful to anybody.
Patrick Holec (04:50):
And so I think one of the ways that I’ve got about my PhD, um, is I wanna position myself right next to the people who want to be asking those biological problems. And so that background in mathematics, I was talking about, it was a very intentional decision to set up camp in an immunology lab because they have all these different, crazy questions that nobody’s been able to answer. And so as far as making sure that there’s that use case that somebody cares about the stuff I’m building, I can be sure because I can just knock on my advisor’s door and be like, if we had something that we could use to study the immune system in this way, would it be interesting? And that can be a direct yes or no. And so then it becomes all right, we have a perfect problem where we can build a tool that solves it.
Patrick Holec (05:35):
And that question of utility never really has to be worried about in the same way that if you’re in a pure tool development lab, it can sometimes be lost in the details. So that’s the way I mitigate my risk, but it is a very exciting time and I think it can be very challenging. Like I said, um, there’s just so many different ways that science can look and you know, the things that you’re absolutely certain about could be very wrong for assumptions that you don’t even understand. And I could go on for hours about the ways, I could have my PhD and that would be much longer than the time that I’d be talking about the ways that I’m right. <laugh>,
Natalie Kuldell (06:15):
Well, it does take a resiliency. I think, you know, if people are considering this as a path, you know, the notion that you are wrong, at least as much as you are right in your pursuit is an important bit of awareness coming in.
Patrick Holec (06:37):
Yeah. I totally agree. When I first came in, actually I, I sat down with some graduate students that were just graduating program. I went to their defenses and I was like, this is amazing. This work is wonderful. It was about immunotherapies. And I remember asking ’em like, what is the thing that you tell yourself as a first year graduate student or somebody who’s just starting to run these experiments? And the first thing they said was never run an experiment that proves that you’re right. Cuz you’re gonna fool yourself into thinking that you’re right way too easily. And so whenever you’re designing experiment, thinking about science, you should always be asking, what are the ways that I could be wrong here? And you should always be looking with skepticism for all these mistakes. And it takes a lot of reservation because we would all like to be working on the things that make us feel very smart. But, um, as you learn in science, there’s just so much, so many different ways that we can fool ourselves into interpreting our results incorrectly.
Natalie Kuldell (07:40):
Couldn’t agree more. That’s humbling. Right. You know, but what great wisdom that is exactly right. And you know, science is set up in a way that if you run the experiments properly, whether you want the result that you get or don’t it actually that doesn’t come into play. Right. <laugh>
Patrick Holec (08:00):
Yeah <laugh>. And it definitely, you know, I’m a sixth year student, so typically a PhD, depending on where you go could be anywhere between four and eight years, most of them are around five, five and a half. And so I’m a sixth year, so I’m, you know, towards the end with graduation, and I am no stranger to having the feeling of man, I just really wish this could work right now. It’s a question of discipline and living up to the type of science you want to do.
Natalie Kuldell (08:32):
Yep. And resiliency and, you know, stick to it because things do work out and your work is fabulous and it’s gonna make a huge difference. So you have come to it from math, you said now, does that mean that you did math as an undergraduate or that you just have always pursued math starting in high school?
Patrick Holec (08:54):
Yeah. I mean, I guess going back to my young days in middle school and high school, I always knew that I was an okay math person. I took a couple of math classes. I did pretty well but at least in high school, I was not a great student by any means. I was a, B or C student. I was actually thinking about this this morning. Um, I think biology was actually my least favorite science class that I took in high school. And, uh, it wasn’t anything on the teaching side or anything. I just really didn’t have a direction at all. So when I applied to a bunch of schools for undergrad and I only got the University of Minnesota, which I dearly love, but very thankful that I had a spot somewhere.
Patrick Holec (09:41):
And so I got in, and then didn’t really know where I wanted to go with this unrefined interest. I just knew I was relatively good at using numbers or math. But I wasn’t great at anything, especially when you go to the university, you’ll be surrounded by a ton of smart people. And I think a lot of people go through this imposter syndrome phase where you feel like everybody else is smarter than you. And so, after going through a couple of different family-related matters involving medicine, um, I started thinking about what are the things that I really wanna see a difference in, in my time, in my life. And for me, that was medicine. And so I was like, all right, let’s know thy self here. So I’m good at numbers. I’m not the best at any of the science fields, but I really like the blending of everything.
Patrick Holec (10:32):
So, in undergrad I actually did, mathematics as my major, but I did a double major at the same time, which was biomedical engineering. So I do have, I would say a little bit of a biology background, but I think there’s a little devil in the details here, which is biomedical engineering, at least at the University of Minnesota and many universities, is a lot more about medical devices. And so I pretty much only took mechanical engineering and electrical engineering and a little bit of chemical engineering classes. I had still almost no training in actual biology itself. And the whole thought process here was like, if, to make a difference, I want to be at that cutting edge of inventing new things. And I knew I wanted to go to grad school. And so I was like, let’s just want my brain with as many different perspectives as I can, a little bit of every single column.
Patrick Holec (11:23):
And let’s just sit at the intersection of all this. And I’m good at having conversations with people and figuring out how to blend a certain type of thinking with another. And so, that transition to grad school was all about just having clever solutions of just being able to sit at that intersection with math and computation and biology and chemical engineering, um, and do something useful. And, that’s really how I got there. So really it’s me being indecisive and not knowing how to pick a lane. <Laugh>
Natalie Kuldell (11:59):
That’s not what I was thinking. <laugh>
Patrick Holec (12:03):
Yeah. I mean, jack of all trades master of none, I suppose is another way to say indecisive.
Natalie Kuldell (12:10):
I think you have to be comfort being a new person in a field. And one way to do that is to just be broadly curious about a lot of things. And in that way, you are asking the questions that people who are so deeply involved in the field might not remember, are questions that get asked. I was just asked in this workshop, I’m teaching about why there is no position zero on the DNA. We have plus one and we have minus one, but there’s no zero. And these people are computer scientists and they need to build a raise that started zero. So, you know, it’s just one of those things you don’t think about until somebody, who brings that new perspective, asks something.
Patrick Holec (12:57):
That’s gonna bug me. So, well, <laugh> mind blowing <laugh>
Natalie Kuldell (13:04):
You don’t need one more thing to bug you. I’m sorry.
Patrick Holec (13:09):
Yeah. I definitely agree that there’s, uh, it wasn’t just doing classes that really made me into a bioengineer. I think the biggest thing was that I worked with a professor on campus, Ben Hackel, and, I got to work in his lab as a researcher for four years. And I think it really was just that it was just like questioning all these things that, um, you know, I loved the environment that I was in because I would walk in every single day or every single day that I could much to the chagrin of the productivity for the people there, but I would walk in and I would just, you know, bug them about simple things. I would be like, why are we analyzing data this way? Why is there not more systemic way to do this?
Patrick Holec (13:55):
Why can’t I use, actually one of our silly projects that actually we ended up publishing was like, how do you connect an Xbox 360 controller to PyMOL, which is like a protein engineering tool. It was just like something ridiculous, but it was just all these goofy little things, but it came from the perspective of somebody who was really naive and you just gotta be really humble coming into it, which is like, I know I wasn’t going to be the protein expert in the room. And I was really comfortable with the idea that somebody would be like, this is a bad idea. And so, the advice that I have for young scientists or people in undergrad is yeah, just be humble and appreciate the fact that you’re in a position to learn a lot. Um, and there’s no expectation that you’re going to be the best, but, just use this as an opportunity really.
Natalie Kuldell (14:48):
Yep. I think that’s a theme that I’ve heard in a lot of conversations with people is that, um, there is just a lot to learn. And as soon as you can get comfortable with the idea that your job is not to be the smartest person in the room, but to listen and learn and ask a good question or ask a question, which may be a good question. It may not be a great question, but, you know, ask those questions because that inquiry is the value that you have that bringing a new, just a freshness to the thinking about things and that’s exactly right. So, I am so glad you landed at MIT and in the department of BE where you are doing tremendous work. You have done great, great work with BioBuilder as well.
Natalie Kuldell (15:42):
I have had the great joy of teaching with you. And, it has been a pleasure. You are a wonderful teacher. I hope that you have not only great success in tool building, but also great success in continued mentorship and teaching of others, because you definitely draw on your experiences to understand where people are asking their questions from, which is, I think part of the core of being a really great teacher. So I hope you’ll continue with that too. Yeah. Thank you so much, Patrick.