Natalie Kuldell Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hi Will! Nice to see you. Thank you for joining today.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Good morning, Natalie. Great to be here. Thanks for the opportunity to talk some with you guys.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
I’m really glad you could. You have such an interesting career path. I know a little bit about it, but certainly not all about it. And I welcome the chance to hear more. I know that you’re in a really interesting spot right now. Do you want to maybe start by saying what your job is now and we’ll back up from there?
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Yep, sure. That sounds good. So,right now I’m a scientist at Corteva AgriSciences, which is an agricultural biotechnology company that’s headquartered in the United States. And we provide all kinds of services and products in the agricultural space, you know, for a very large portion of food production in the country, in the world. And there’s all kinds of technologies that go into that with protecting crops, from insects, improving their yield through, breeding, genetic engineering technology, with transgenic traits. It’s a pretty broad area.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
It sounds great. Is that your lab behind you?
Speaker 2 (01:21):
No, that’s, this is just a picture from an early career inspiration for me. This is a movie, Jurassic Park, the first one came out when I was in elementary school, I think it was, it kind of got me thinking about working in industry when I was a kid.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
That’s so funny. So it wasn’t a cautionary tale for you. It was an attraction, so, but I’m guessing your work is actually a little bit different than, all that. Like, do you, work with a large group where you are currently working? Is it a bunch of people working together on a project?
Speaker 2 (01:55):
So we work in very early phase discovery research. Basically at the very beginning where we’re thinking about new ideas, new technologies that we can use to make the crops grow better, and provide better products for farmers. Because I’m so early in the process, you can’t know exactly what we’re doing. You know, it’s kind of you know, a proprietary thing. We normally want, we wait until we are, we ready and showed it works. And patent some of the inventions before we publicize a lot of it. But I work in a protection space. So trying to identify ways we can genetically modify the crops to protect them from insect feeding. And this is something that’s already, you know, there are versions of this that are already out and have been out for a very long time, and we’re trying to make the next generation of that technology that works better.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
It sounds really important, you know, protecting and enhancing our food supply is such an important effort now with the changing climate and population and all the other demands that are growing in our environment. So it sounds like an important job. Are you working leading a group or part of a group or do you move around from group to group?
Speaker 2 (03:27):
So you know, when you’re in, when you’re in industry, there’s multiple ways that you can be a contributor, you know, and there’s all different levels that you can contribute, you know, basically amounts of training that you can have before you can come in. And so I’m at a research scientist level, I do a lot of strategy, project leads, things like that, but I haven’t I’ve kind of chosen the path I’ve been down has been still staying. It’s more of like a, more like an individual contributor or a scientist, so I don’t have a whole team that I manage from like an HR standpoint, but I have, you know, teams that have large numbers of people that have to collaborate together on a project. So, you know, if it was Jurassic Park, you know, I would be in charge of, you know, maybe coming up with Stegosaurus or something like that. And, and then there’d be people from a variety of teams that would you know, have their boss or something would be from different places. But they would all collaborate together and work on the project, you know, under kind of my direction. And so that’s one way of doing it. There’s, there’s many different management styles, but we have things kind of broken up with project management and then sort of people management within Corteva.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
I think it’s so interesting because, you know, these, these are big questions, right? They’re beyond what any single person could really fully master and make a lot of progress. And I think science is much more collaborative than people sort of envision it to be. That seems to hold true for industry as well as for academia, which can be surprising to some people.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
Yeah, it’s really, I think, you know, I don’t ever want to discourage someone from thinking like if they’ve got an idea that they can’t drive it forward and make a lot of progress on their own, but you know, you’re in this competitive world that we’re in with companies and stuff, you very rarely see a company that only has one person and even a lot of people say in the venture capital world, they don’t even really like to have one founder anymore. You know, they like to see that there’s a few people that are there that can share the work or you have different complimentary skillsets. And so, you know, again, in the world that I’m in, I have a lot of background training in molecular science, bioinformatics, and chemistry, biochemistry, things like that, but I don’t have that training in agronomy or plant health or entomology. And so, you know, being able to have members on the team that have those skills really enables the ability to work on some of these complex problems.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
I think that sounds great. That actually brings up an important question, which is about your training. A lot of young people are thinking, what is the most important thing I should be doing or learning in order to get to be a practicing scientist or a practicing engineer? Sounds like you came at it from a molecular science side. Where did you go to school and what did you study?
Speaker 2 (06:48):
I’ll take it all the way back early, early on to the beginning. So, you know in high school, I took courses with dual enrollment at a community college, and then I also took some AP courses. I was involved in some clubs, student clubs, things like that. And, you know, I had in my head say when I was in high school and I grew up in Southwest Florida. I saw you had Irene [[Reizman]] on, she was talking about growing from a farming environment or something. I wasn’t in a farming environment, but I was in a place where there was no major university. There was no, you know, professors around or startup companies or any anywhere where I could get any exposure to genetic engineering, except for maybe going to the library and checking out a book like a physical book for anyone out there who knows that those still exist, but they, you know, that you have to go there and it might be checked out and you couldn’t get it.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
And so I learned a lot through taking some of the fundamental science courses. I was very interested in physics, math, chemistry, calculus, computers. Computers were really starting to take off the personal computer when I was younger. And so I originally, I wanted to be a computer engineer. I was very much like, Oh, well, I want to do computer engineering. I looked it up and I was in Florida, Southwest Florida. So I looked up online what the curriculum was and I said, well, how many of those courses can I take at my local community college? And I started taking calculus, two chemistry, one chemistry, two physics, all these different things. And you know, it was helpful. But then I got into the university and it’s time, they’re very much, you know, I don’t know how much they still do this now, but you know, it’s very much, you show up on day one and they say, well, what’s your major going to be, you know, what’s your career going to be?
Speaker 2 (08:48):
What do you want to be when you get done with this? What are you going to do after you graduate here? You know, at least to me, maybe to others, you’re saying, well, I just got here. You know, I just got here. But so I got in there and I said, well, I’ll be a chemistry major. And you know, I thought for a while, for a very short period of time, that maybe I wanted to be a doctor or medical thing which of course is very strange, because I had just been doing all these courses to be a computer engineer, but you get the social pressures and things like everyone, you know, a lot of others you see, a lot of your other friends or people or parents are saying, well, Oh, this is a good career for you to go into, you know, you can make a lot of money or, you know, it’s difficult or you can still do science and things like that.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
And so for a short period of time, I was pre-med kind of just by you know, sort of being pushed in that direction. And I quickly found, I was pre-med chemistry and I kind of found that that was unsatisfying because to meet the requirements, to be premed didn’t require taking the full throated scientific courses like physics with calculus, or, you know, the more advanced chemistry courses, there was just a set of prerequisites that allowed you to take an exam. And then you did well on this exam, and then you could go forward. And so I went from chemistry to being a chemical engineer, and then I got to a point where it was the midway through. I think it was my sophomore. I started my sophomore year and I had a choice to make that I could either take this course called Energy and Mass Balance, which is a, for anyone out there, who’s a chemical engineer.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Thiskind of locks you into the path a little bit, the kind of course about thermodynamics and engineering and chemical engineering. It was a five-hour course per week. Or I could do bio-organic chemistry with this one professor that I really liked. And I was like, well, you know, I really liked this. I really got interested. I was very interested in this topic because I I’d taken organic chemistry with the professor. And, it was like, yeah, you know what, I’m just going to go with what I like. And so I went with down that path. The professor I formed a good relationship with, and he asked me to do undergraduate research with him. So it got after my sophomore year doing undergraduate mechanistic enzymology, which I really thought was interesting and fascinating.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
It became a kind of a good merger of the different skills that I had kind of picked up with, you know, the interest in computers. And there’s a lot of modeling. This was, you know, for people who are maybe a little further along, you know you can represent molecules, proteins, as 3D structures that you can kind of interact with almost like the video game and get insights into. So I was able to do that was able to do some kinetic modeling, the genetic engineering component, but doing site directed mutagenesis was really, it was really kind of you know, in some ways it was very surreal for me personally, I remember when I first was explaining to me the research project, and I said that I would say that it can’t possibly work that way.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
You know, it was like, you know, we have this, like you’re saying, there’s a tunnel through this enzyme that substrate, you know, channels through from one active site to another. And I said, how can that possibly work? You know? And he said, well, we’re going to, your project is going to be to try to block the tunnel by doing mutagenesis on some amino acid that lines, you know, so there I am looking at a 3D model on a computer trying to decide what I want to do to try to block this tunnel up to that and do a kinetics experiment. And it was so, I mean, it was, I thought it was great. And you know, I got to be working with him, you know, I got the chance to go to conferences. I went to an ACS conference in Atlanta and I presented a poster.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
I even got the chance to go to a conference. I got to go to Como, Italy, Lake Como in Italy. And I it’s like something in there was enzymology international conference and I got to go there and present. And that was my first time to be outside the United States, you know, and this is like I think like Oceans 11 or something. It was like partially filmed there. And so, I mean, this is like, like a pretty, exotic place and, it was pretty neat. And so then I went, so after that, I was like, well, you know, I really liked research. I was fortunate to have some of the work I did in a peer reviewed publication, which was exciting. Cause that’s another thing that, you know, I think has changed.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
It’s starting to change a lot now, too, for anyone that’s a young person that’s out there, you know, the currency of being in academia has always been, and maybe it still is, you know, the paper, but I do sense there’s starting to be this transition to more self-publishing or sharing things in social forums or on YouTube or on Twitter or these things where, I’m me as a scientist. Oftentimes if I’m trying to find what’s the most cutting edge interpretation of something, I’m actually looking to certain individuals on social platforms discussing it kind of in the open, which never happened before. It used to have to be, at like a social hour at a conference to get any insight into some of that stuff. So it was kind of another time. So then I went to graduate school, I got into Berkeley out in California and I thought one thing I’d point out, but I would say too, from a career standpoint, you know, when I was in high school, I never really cared too much about, you know, much of anything really.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
I was just kind of careening along through life. And I was like, well, I liked this. I liked that. And you know, I actually wasn’t able to even be in the dorm my freshman year because I forgot to send in any forms related to staying in the dorm. And I only applied to one university for undergraduate which is terrible advice, by the way. I suggest that you don’t do that. That you at least could consider multiple options because I only applied to one place. Luckily, I got in, I forgot to fill in the dorm form. And then it was like the total inverse for graduate school. I was like, you know, here’s all these good schools. I’m going to assess all the different faculty members there and what are they ranked? What are the, you know, who do I want to work with?
Speaker 2 (15:41):
How am I going to connect with them? It was like a total 180 and, you know, as a student you go out, and you visit all these different places. And you know, I ultimately, I had a very embarrassing moment in hindsight. I was kind of down between a few places and there was one place. I won’t say exactly where it was, but it was in the Northeast, and I had gone there during a blizzard. I had no idea what it was like to be cold because I had grown up in Florida. And so there was like feet of snow. And while I was there, me and some other person, we had gone to the mall and bought jackets. And I was just, I told the person, I finally said, look, you know, I really like your program, but it’s just too cold there.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
I just can’t handle. I don’t think I could handle being in such a cold place. And, you know, to the credit of the professor or the person, they told me, this is good advice: they said, that’s a terrible reason. Well, that’s a horrible reason to decide where you’re going to go to graduate school. And I was like, all right, fine. I just liked the people at Berkeley better and I just liked their program better. Then the person said, well, that’s okay. You know, and, what was funny is they told that story to people who came in subsequent years, that there was some person that came that my friends are, you know, the butt of a joke or something, but it was funny. Yeah. It was funny. Hearing from my friend, one of my friends, who’d been an undergrad at Berkeley that when I was first starting there, that went to that same place and was told about it.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
There’s some person who didn’t know what it was like to be cold. And so anyways, I was at Berkeley, I got to work in a very, I got very passionate about the energy sector and things like today I think it’s become, you know, there are so many young people that are very passionate, the environment, especially with, concerned with climate change and the plastic in the ocean, or, you know, any sort of an environmental type of thing. There’s a lot, there’s way more awareness and concern. Now that I think when I was, when I was a little bit younger, at least there wasn’t much where I grew up. It wasn’t a very big topic, but I was into it for some reason. I made some, some decisions.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
I was like, well, look, I don’t want to do biomedical because I don’t really me personally. I just didn’t like the idea of being in that medical environment or doing research on, you know, humans, or living, you know, animals or things like that. It, for me, I didn’t personally like that as much. And, it was to work in this new sector, which they were calling it bioenergy at the time or the bio-economy. And this is kind of around the time where some of the ideas of the synthetic biology kind of really blew up and took off. There was a lot of funding for some areas of research that had not really been funded much before. Most funding with two medical applications from the government agencies. And so we had a big investment into renewable energy and bio energy, and a lot of people started to think about and work on it and work in some of these areas.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
And so I got involved with that. Then I was very interested in fuel production as well as conversion of one thing into another. So my project was really focused on: how you could take the fiber portion or fiber portions of plant matter, which is currently unused, and convert it into the equivalent of sugar or sucrose or glucose. And so this, this was, a ton of people were working on it. Cause it was one of the principle problems. So, for anyone viewing here who doesn’t have a car yet, or hasn’t looked into this that much, you know gasoline has additives put into it and one of them is ethanol and there’s a limit of up to 15% or so 10 or 15%, depending on where you live of ethanol, that’s added to your gasoline. So that’s actually a huge portion of production in absolute terms. And if you live in the Midwest, and drive around and you’ll see these giant facilities, which are fermentation facilities, where they are producing alcohol ethanol, and this goes into many products, it was not only into….. I’m back at a technical difficulty with my internet connection. So, I was saying that it was in graduate school, we’re working on the spiral energy problem at the time, the gasoline price was very high, like $5.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
It was going up to $5 a gallon. You had the environmental concern, you had the national security concern that we’re running out of it. You had the price getting so high. It was really kind of a wild time. And so, you know, you felt like you’re working on the Manhattan project or saving the world. And so working on this really hard thinking about it, my PhD was on what I thought was the most important, difficult part of that problem, which was this depolymerization problem. And so it was just, it was a very exciting. I really liked it. I got, I was fortunate enough to work with some other really good people, good advisors, a lot of opportunities. I got a fellowship also from National Science Foundation, which made it, you know, even it was even more supported from a financial standpoint and independence.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
It gave me some independence from not needing to be kind of on a specific grant per se. And so I was, it was great, and I was able to learn a lot about filamentous fungi, which are, you know, you can learn about things about them on YouTube, but they’re very important in the industrial biotechnology sector. Not just not yeast, but the filamentous fungi like mold and people are making proteins out of them, enzymes of all kinds of even, you know, food, turning them into food in some cases. So it was very exciting and we found some fundamental mechanistic entomology things that were really great about oxidative enzymes that are involved in depolymerizing, kind of cracking the nut of the plant cell material, plant cell walls.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
The chemistry and the chemical engineering all sort of continues to fit into this biological framework. And now you’ve taken it from, you know, enzyme site directed mutagenesis to plant biomass conversion, right?
Speaker 2 (22:57):
Yes. It was, it was such a, for anyone aspiring chemical engineers out there, it was such an interesting area because traditional enzymology, you basically are always kind of assuming you’re under some sort of diffusion limited environment that, you know, substrates in aqueous solution or kind of bouncing around in a diffusion limited fashion. And then they come into contact with your catalyst, which is the enzyme, whereas in the world of I guess heterogeneous catalysis, which this is, it hadn’t been studied very much, from an enzymological standpoint, because quite frankly, two of the experiments are very difficult to do. And so, you know, our substrate was always insoluble. It was poorly, how much of it was available. We couldn’t synthesize standards of it because despite the fact that things like cellulose or hemicellulose or oligosaccharides are all over the place, you know, boatloads of it are in your oatmeal or, you know, in corn flakes or whatever, to get them in a defined purified form that you can do careful experimentation on like chemist and a biochemist do in the medical space.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
It was basically impossible. It was practically impossible. It was, you know, you would have to spend thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars for milligrams of these oligo saccharides. And then they may not even work because the enzyme actually recognizes a crystaline surface or something. And so the science of it was really interesting. And then the reaction, it turned out that it was a new type of inorganic biocatalyst. So it was like, I think my advisor, one of my advisors Michael Marletta, a pretty well-known mechanistic enzymologist made big contributions throughout his career into like, you know, very serious enzymology things. I think he was truly startled the day that I told him. I said, I think the thing that’s really important for this process is a novel, mono-oxygenase, it has copper in it.
Speaker 2 (25:07):
And, you know, it was working mechanistically in a way that we’ve never seen anything work before. And I think he was in kind of, you know, a state of disbelief maybe initially, and then was like, wow, this is a pretty good, yeah, this is pretty cool. You know, my friends at the bio-inorganic Gordon Conferences will find this interesting. You know, they’re not going to just say, Oh, you’re doing it. Cause there’s a lot of poo-pooing, I think rightfully so, that you’re just working on a hydrolysis mechanism. Which is the thing that, you know, undergraduates will learn general acid catalysis or something. And it’s very, you know, as opposed to some serious electron pushing and, you know, different oxidation states and all of this. And so it was neat. I also got a lot, I brought back, my knowledge of computer or sort of my love of computers and using computer programs in graduate school because it was right in this time, I was in graduate school from 2006 to beginning of 2012, fall of 2006 to beginning of 2012.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
And, this was around the time that the sequencing revolution, the next generation sequencing revolution was taking place. And so we had, we were going from a position where we had essentially no genomic resources for any fungi outside of like yeast and maybe one or two other ones, to where it became feasible that we could do it ourselves in the lab. And so that, you know, this required some computer programming. These DNA assembly algorithms that were applicable to these technologies were just being written. And it was just, it was very exciting. Cause I mean, I remember I was working with some stuff that was very cutting edge, doing de novo transcriptome on some of these fungi that I was working on. And , I was, it was a great environment, you know,I remember I talked to our IT person.
Speaker 2 (26:58):
I said, Hey, you know, I need a powerful computer so that I can you know, so that I can try to do some of this stuff, do this assembly. And he was like, all right, well, let’s go build it. You know, let’s build it or find it or buy it. You know, we built it, we installed Linux, I got these programs running on it and then it was very eye-opening. It was more like for me, it wasn’t just that it was like a video game where I was looking at, you know, some model in 3D, but it was more like I can use this data in a way that I never thought possible to make predictions about the experiments that we’re going to do. And so I had a paper related to systems biology integrating a lot of different types of data to help make better decisions and predictions about how these things work.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
And it was, you know, it was pretty, it was very neat and it’s very applicable today. You know, it’s a very, you know, if again, from a career advice standpoint or a training standpoint for anybody interested, I think it’s really important early on get some foundations, you know, know some foundation in math and physics and chemistry. And then, once you feel like you’ve got that intuitive understanding of the basics of those, then just kind of, make sure you know something about the computer, some of how can you use the computer to take in data that’s more than you can handle, you know, to read yourself. And if you can do that, then just kind of follow your interest, I think. And so that helped me out a lot. And I use it all the time in my current work now, you know. I don’t do a lot of electron pushing in my current work right now, but I do a lot of data integration and experiment interpretation.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
Yup. As I’m listening to your path, it really does seem to fall into that pattern. Right. Of using foundational science and courses and learnings to set up your intuition about things and your basic framework for thinking about the projects and then using computational tools when you have to go beyond intuition and then following things that make you, that you find genuinely interesting. It seems like you have been driven by curiosity and it has taken you into places that would not have necessarily been front of mind when you started. But that short seem to pan out very, very well.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
Yeah. I mean, I’m happy. I’m happy with overall how things have turned out. It’s been, I tell people all the time too, you’re going to run into bumps in the road. You’re gonna have moments where you’re like, what am I doing? You know, I need to pick, I’ve got to pick like: Oh, I’m going to do this, or I’m going to do that. Or, you know, I’ve got to get an A on this test or whatever. Right. And I know, maybe in the moment that’s really the case, but your whole project or your whole career is the integrate. Just like I’m saying, Oh, I’m integrating a little knowledge of physics and computers and biology. It’s the same way with your career or, you know, how you develop your skills
Speaker 2 (30:12):
And so, and I guess, because there was definitely some time like, I’ll tell you my project, I’m talking about with graduate school where I said, Oh, it was so successful, like discovered some really great things. There was a moment where I went into my advisor and I said to him, I said, look, it’s time that we publish to tell the whole world that this doesn’t work. This doesn’t work. And, he said to me, he said, well, people don’t publish papers like that. Very often I said, we’ve done so much and it just doesn’t work. And that was, you know, and that was right before the key breakthrough, where it finally came together. But yeah, it was, it was fun. I do always want to point that cause, you know, whenever we tell stories, you know, we normally tell them like we create a story that says like, Oh, I did this fun thing. And then that fun thing, and then, you know, this great thing and I linked it all together and while it was happening, it certainly didn’t seem so direct.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
I think that is so true. We have these narratives. Once we reached the end, we look back and we think, Oh, that’s where all those pieces fell in. But in the moment in the process, it feels like the direction and the end point, aren’t always as clear as they as the stories we tell and make them seem to be. Right.
Speaker 2 (31:30):
Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. And, and you can always, I tell people too, you can always update your story. If you come up with a better one, you know, down the road, you know? Yeah. You can always update it and be like, you know, I realized that another thing that I left out that was really important, you know, or, emphasize, so it’s you know, but for me right now, I say it’s really important. You know, if you’re I think again, if you’re a young person right now, you know, use your computer, and, you know, follow people that are doing work that you’re interested in. Try to get a good core set of skills, find people in your local community that where you can interact with and talk about ideas that you have, or practice your skills. You know, join clubs at your school, participate in BioBuilder, fill your day up with things that you like that, you know, that you want to get better at.
Speaker 2 (32:27):
And, I think that normally that can work out pretty well. You know, that could work out pretty well. Cause things are changing. I can’t be prescriptive and say that what I did, specifically is the right thing to do today, but because the world is so different now, but I think it’s generally pretty good to say, you know, pursue what you like, what you’re good at and find some other people that you think are even better than you are right now. And see if they’ll help teach you, teach you what they know.
Speaker 1 (32:59):
I think that is great advice. Great advice. And I am so grateful that you contribute to the BioBuilder community and share your wisdom and advice to help exactly those individuals that you mentioned, the folks that are interested in computers and biology and math and engineering and making the world a better place, environmental issues, all those things. I’m trying to find a way to bring it together within BioBuilder, we try to do that. And we very much rely on the wisdom of people who have traveled that path already like you to turn around and help the next ones along. So thank you for all that. And thank you for taking the time today to share your story. It’s such an interesting one.