CivicSciTimes - Stories in Science
Building Self-Confidence Through Science
Lauren Tereshko: “I realized I had stopped putting positive energy into myself, and grew angry and restless. Ashamed of my stagnation, in a moment of catharsis, I made the decision to apply for grad school.”
Lauren Tereshko
[su_boxbox title=”About”]Lauren is a Neuroscience PhD candidate at Brandeis University working on a collaborative project between the Sengupta and Turrigiano Labs. She is interested in molecular neuroscience and studies how signaling through neuronal primary cilia may affect synapses. She is an advocate for equity in STEM and is currently co-chair of Brandeisโ Women in Science Initiative.[/su_boxbox]
[su_boxnote note_color=”#c8c8c8″]Key points:
- Donโt give up on yourself.
- Find support in your community and find ways to give back to it.
- The academic system has problems, but you can be a part of positive change.[/su_boxnote]
[dropcap]I[/dropcap] started to feel separate from my peers when I got to college. Up till then, I had been confidently and comfortably nerdy. Science was the only subject I cared about in school, and was something I actively sought out in my free time. I read text books for the sheer joy of learning, a behavior that prompted my siblings to call me a โsuper nerd.โย I felt really lucky to be starting college; I got into a school that offered Neuroscience as a major, and I even secured some financial aid and grants to help with tuition costs.ย
Despite my excitement, by the first week of college I felt like a fish out of water in many ways. Growing up a tomboy, I found it unnerving to be living in an all-girls dorm. Many of the girls came from wealthy families and didnโt have to work to cover tuition costs. I went to a large institution where classes felt less about learning than they did about surviving the workload. To make things worse, I had a number of negative interactions with my older, white, male faculty advisor which left me jaded and dejected. I felt split between being grateful for the opportunity to attend college, and being disappointed by a system devoid of relatable role models. The more I learned about the inner workings of academia, the more disenchanted I became.
As I work toward finishing my doctoral thesis, I can proudly say that Iโve reclaimed the title of Super Nerd.ย
After graduating โ left with a paradoxical interest in neuroscience and distaste for academia โ I lost my sense of purpose. No longer sure I wanted to go to grad school, I took a job at the same university I received my degree from, and sunk into a comfort zone in the familiarity of the institution. As time passed, I found myself drifting. My job wasnโt challenging me and I wasn’t earning enough money. I became involved in a romantic relationship that became abusive, and alienated myself from my family and friends, hiding how bad things were getting in my personal life.ย
I realized I had stopped putting positive energy into myself, and grew angry and restless. Ashamed of my stagnation, in a moment of catharsis, I made the decision to apply for grad school. I moved out of my home, extracted myself from the unhealthy relationship, and started planning for my future. Even though I wasnโt sure if grad school would be right for me; it felt good to be taking action. I was still interested in neuroscience and felt willing to brave the academic system once again.
Today, as I work toward finishing my doctoral thesis, I can proudly say that Iโve reclaimed the title of Super Nerd.ย
In stark contrast to my undergraduate experience that was riddled with negativity, my graduate experience has rebuilt my confidence and self-worth. I feel valued as an individual, and have formed strong relationships with my peers and advisors. Iโve found empowerment through connecting with other women in science โ a far cry from a tomboy feeling out of place in an all-girls dorm! I am fortunate to be at an institution with strong female representation, and can boast that my thesis committee is composed of entirely women.
My thesis is now centered around exploring the potential importance of primary cilia signaling in postnatal neurons.ย
A turning point was when my advisor proposed starting a new project. Entering Brandeis as Masters student, I joined Piali Senguptaโs lab and initially researched how the elaborate ciliated endings of sensory neurons in C. elegans attain their morphologies. I immediately fell in love with the work, and was able to gain molecular biology skills through the project. I knew that I wanted to stay in research so I reapplied to the PhD program, and was luckily accepted.ย
Shortly after, Piali asked if I would be interested in starting a collaboration with the Turrigiano Lab. The idea stemmed from the realization that most neuroscientists aren’t aware that neurons in the central nervous system are ciliated cells! I jumped at the chance to bridge my interests in neuroscience and cilia biology. My thesis is now centered around exploring the potential importance of primary cilia signaling in postnatal neurons.ย
Starting the collaborative project really helped me take ownership of my research. Such little is known about the function of primary cilia in the developed brain that I was starting from scratch. Itโs been so exciting to explore such a novel area of research, the possibilities feel endless, and there is a lot of room for creativity. Iโve run many experiments to find negative results, but I am not disheartened. Iโm still fascinated by the science and continue inching my way towards answers.
With restored strength and self-confidence, Iโve also been able to put positive energy into my community by helping to create several outreach initiatives on campus. My volunteer work focuses on offering guidance and support to undergrads struggling with academic issues. I hope to advise the next generation of scientists by sharing my own experiences with the academic system (good and bad), and cheer on students grappling with decisions about their futures.ย
Returning to academia has made me optimistic for change. I am hopeful that the system will continue to become more inclusive and accessible to all people, so that any aspiring student can proudly become a Super Nerd.
Cover image by DavidRockDesignย fromย Pixabay.ย
[su_boxnote note_color=”#c8c8c8″]It’s a little awkward to ask, but if you can, please consider supporting our efforts to keep the journal alive โ it only takes a minute to donate. Thank you![/su_boxnote]
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CivicSciTimes - Stories in Science
Unexpected Stories and Spindle Mistakes: Discovering that Wild-type Cells are Full of Surprises
Natalie Nannas
Natalie Nannas is an Associate Professor of Biology at Hamilton College in Clinton, NY. She teaches courses in genetics, molecular biology, and bioethics. Dr. Nannas graduated from Grinnell College with bachelor’s degrees in biological chemistry and French. She received her Masterโs and PhD from Harvard University in molecular biology and genetics. Dr. Nannas conducted her postdoctoral research at the University of Georgia where she won a National Science Foundation Plant Genome Postdoctoral Fellowship. At Hamilton College, Dr. Nannas enjoys teaching and sharing her passion for microscopy with her undergraduate research students. When not glued to a microscope, she loves spending time with her husband and two daughters. The narrative below by Natalie Nannas captures the human stories behind the science from a 2022 paper titled โFrequent spindle errors require structural rearrangement to complete meiosis in Zea maysโ which was published by her group in 2022 in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences.
Science never works out the way we plan. As scientists, we ask questions, hypothesize and outline our goals โฆ then reality of science occurs. The reality of science is often full of failed controls, endless troubleshooting, and sometimes strange findings that lead us in new and unpredictable directions. Our publications give the impression that we planned these scientific journeys from the beginning and do not tell the human side of the process with all of its twists and turns, dead-ends and U-turns. I want to tell you the real story behind my first publication as a faculty member with my own lab. It did not go as planned due to the COVID-19 pandemic. My lab was shut down in the middle of our investigation, and my students and I were unable to generate new data. In the beginning, it seemed like we were stranded with only control data and no story to tell, but the time away from the lab allowed us to spend more time looking carefully at wild-type cells. What seemed like a dead-end suddenly became its own story when we found something unexpected hiding within microscopy movies. Our wild-type cells were making mistakes, attempting fixes and changing directions, just like we do as scientists.
My scientific journey began with flickering green lights and a microscope (you can read more about it here). As an undergraduate, I was mesmerized by the beauty of watching living cells shuffle fluorescently labeled proteins throughout their cytoplasm. I followed this passion for microscopy into my doctoral dissertation research at Harvard University where I investigated how yeast cells build the machinery needed to pull their chromosomes apart. This machinery is a dynamic collection of long protein tubes called microtubules and other organizing proteins that help move and shuffle microtubules. I loved watching the delicate dance of chromosomes interacting with microtubules of the spindle, and I wanted to continue studying this process in my postdoctoral studies.
During postdoctoral studies at the University of Georgia, I won a fellowship from the National Science Foundation to develop a new technique in microscopy. No one had ever watched plants building their spindles in meiosis, the specialized cell division that produces egg and sperm. Other scientists had performed beautiful microscopy studies observing how mitotic spindles function inside of plant cells, but due to the technical challenges, no one had ever observed live plant cells building spindles in meiosis. I was thrilled to take on this challenge by using version of maize that had fluorescently labeled tubulin, the protein that makes up microtubules of the spindle. With this line of maize, spindles would glow fluorescent green, allowing me to image if only I could extract the meiotic cells.
We were so busy collecting data and prepping for our mutant studies that we never really took time to analyze the wild-type cells.
After almost a year spent dissecting maize plants, I finally managed to develop a method to isolate these tiny cells and keep them alive in a growth media long enough to image them. This new method of live imaging was going to serve as the foundation of my new lab at Hamilton College, a primarily undergraduate institution. With my students, I planned to investigate the pathways governed spindle assembly. Most animal mitotic cells have a structure called a centrosome that dictates how spindles are formed; however, female animal meiotic cells lack these structures and must use other pathways to direct spindle assembly. Plants also lack centrosomes, and I wanted to inhibit these known animal pathways in our plant live imaging system.
As I set up my lab, my students and I collected live movies of wild-type maize cells building their spindles. I told my students and myself that these movies were not the main event, they were just the control cells so we would have a baseline comparison for our experimental conditions. We were so busy collecting data and prepping for our mutant studies that we never really took the time to analyze the wild-type cells. At the surface level, they built spindles and segregated chromosomes in a generally expected amount of time, so we focused on preparing for our upcoming experimentsโฆ. then March 2020 occurred.
The pandemic forced us to slow down and look more carefully at our wild-type data, and I am grateful for the detour.
My students headed home for spring break with a warning that there may be a delay in coming back to campus due to the spread of COVID-19. None of us were prepared for the shutdown that followed. Like many colleges and universities, our campus was closed for the remainder of the spring 2020 semester and the summer of 2020. My students and I began meeting on Zoom, trying to make a new plan for our research. The only data we had to work with were the microscopy of wild-type maize cells, so we decided to spend time digging more deeply into these movies. Originally, we had only measured the total time it took to build a spindle as it would be a baseline for comparison to our mutants. We had not looked carefully at any of the intermediate time points in the assembly process. When my students looked more closely at our movies, they discovered that wild-type cells built an incorrectly shaped spindle over 60% of the time!
We found that maize meiotic cells often built spindles with three poles instead of two, and they had to actively rearrange their spindle structure to correct this mistake. We also found that in these cells, there was a delay in meiosis as cells refused to progress until this correction had been made. This is an exciting discovery as it showed that plants are error-prone in their spindle assembly, much like human female meiotic cells. Our findings also suggested that meiotic cells were monitoring their spindle shape when determining if they should move forward in meiosis. Previous work has shown that cells monitor the attachment of chromosomes to the spindle to make this decision, but our work adds a new dimension, showing that they also monitor spindle shape. As we continued to analyze our videos, we also learned that cells corrected their spindle morphology in a predictable way. They always collapsed the two poles that were closest together, creating a single pole and resulting in a correct bipolar spindle.
My students and I had begun our scientific journey planning to breeze over wild-type cells, moving on to what we envisioned would be a more exciting story of spindle mutants. The pandemic forced us to slow down and look more carefully at our wild-type data, and I am grateful for the detour. I rediscovered my love of closely watching flickering green fluorescent lights, the dance of microtubules sliding into place or making missteps and shuffling into new arrangements. Watching life attempt a complicated process, make mistakes, and try again, is a lesson that never grows old. It reminds me that our scientific journeys are just the same, they start in one direction but are fluid and constantly changing, and hopefully, they end with a functional spindle!
Read the Published Paper
Weiss, J.D., McVey, S.L., Stinebaugh, S.E., Sullivan, C.F., Dawe, R.K., and N.J. Nannas. 2022. Frequent spindle errors require structural rearrangement to complete meiosis in Zea mays. International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 23 (8):4293โ4312.
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ABOUT: Stories in Science is a special series on the Civic Science Times. The main aim is to document the first-hand accounts of the human stories behind the science being published by scientists around the world. Such stories are an important element behind the civic nature of science.
SUBMISSION: Click here to access the story guidelines and submission portal. Please note that not all stories are accepted for publication. After submission, we will let you know whether we have selected the story for the review process.
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