Dr. Jocelyn Malamy 

My name is Jocelyn Malamy. I'm an associate professor at the University of Chicago. 

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Anya Sun 

OK. And then what made you choose your career path? 

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Dr. Jocelyn Malamy 

Let's see. I think I always had an interest in how things worked. I was particularly interested in plants from an early age. My father is a research scientist, which, as you probably know, is extremely common for women scientists to have a scientist parent. So, I was already sort of familiar with the idea of going into research. And you know, I think the idea was in my head and I just sort of followed it, you know, step by step, enjoying each of the steps as I went. So, I think that's true for a lot of scientists, you just kind of keep following interesting projects. 

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Anya Sun 

OK. So, was there any specific moment in your career that really inspired or motivated you? 

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Dr. Jocelyn Malamy 

These are good questions. Let's see. I don't know, you know. So, science, especially research, is sort of a long game. So, there doesn't tend to be that many of those big Eureka moments. It's like slow, steady progress and something that you're interested in. And once in a while, something works. Like maybe once every couple of years, there'll be some really exciting result that just makes you feel like you really understand something you didn't understand before. And I think I had those moments, you know, once or twice in Graduate School, once as a postdoc, and certainly a few times in my own lab, and those I think are the moments that you kind of keep going for. When something exciting happens, you keep like a very long, slow addiction where you keep pushing for that next aha moment. When all of a sudden, you kind of become obsessed with some very interesting piece of data, and think about it, and think about it, until all of a sudden, you realize how something works. And then that's very, very satisfying. 

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Anya Sun 

OK. So, were there any specific people or mentors that made a significant impact on you? 

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Dr. Jocelyn Malamy 

So many. I mean, my father, as I said, was a researcher. So, you know, he got me interested in science from the very beginning. And then I had a professor in college who got me particularly interested in plant biology, and I did research on plants for many years before I switched to the Nigerian systems. He was very exciting and he just, you know, sort of liked asking questions. And then in my graduate lab, I was assigned to work with a postdoctoral mentor. And he's really taught me how to do research and taught me how to ask questions in the right way. So, every stage, when you're in research, is a very long training process. So, you know, many people in college start doing a little bit of research, and then Graduate School is training, and then postdoctoral work is like sort of another level of training. So, at each of the stages, you have many mentors. You have the professors whose labs you're working in, and you have the more senior people who are teaching you things. And then even as a faculty member, you're learning all the time. So, there's people that really impress you, and you say, “Boy, I want to be like that.” 

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Anya Sun 

So, when you initially entered this field, were there any struggles that made you reconsider your career choice? And like if there were, how did you push through that? 

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Dr. Jocelyn Malamy 

Yeah, so I don't think I ever reconsidered it while I was a student or a postdoc, because those in a way are very charming years. You are pretty much left alone just to do research, and to learn, and be with a whole lot of other people who are also doing research and learning. And it's a very exciting time and then you just get to this point where you just want to have your own lab and have your own students.  

So, I don't know how relevant this is, but when you take a faculty job, all of a sudden you have a lot of responsibilities that are constantly pulling you away from your science, like your administrative duties and teaching duties. And then the biggest thing is that you're always applying for funding. So, I don't know if you know this, but academic research is one long slog of trying to keep your research funded. So, when you get an academic position in most places, most of your salary is covered, so you're not at risk of suddenly being out of the job. And you're provided with a lab space, but beyond that, very little is covered. So, if you want to have graduate students or postdocs or technicians to work in your lab or buy supplies to do research with or any of these things, that's money you have to raise yourself. Now most people raise that money from government grants, but government grants are very, very, very competitive and it is not unusual for people's projects, that they really hold dear, to just not be fundable, especially things that are new or different or risky.  

So, I certainly had a long period. It's actually why I switched fields. It became more and more difficult to get plant research funded, and I got very discouraged with trying to get the projects that I was excited to do in plant biology funded. And it just seemed a little on the hopeless side. You know, you get very excited when you write a grant and a proposal and plan some experiments, but then you just can't do them. So, I think that that takes out a lot of researchers these days. But instead, I just did a pivot to a whole different area, and I'm still in the middle of that pivot. That's the jellyfish work that I'm doing now.  

And then what I ended up doing, I guess also to address that problem, is I took on a position as Associate Dean here at the college. So, in addition to my research, I also managed the undergraduate curriculum and biology for the college students. And that in part supports my lab. 

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Anya Sun 

Yeah, getting your research funded sounds like a really challenging experience. And also, if any, what adversaries have you faced because of your gender or background? 

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Dr. Jocelyn Malamy 

Yeah. I mean, I think in biology, I don't think that I've ever come into a situation where I feel I was discriminated against as a woman. Certainly, in general meetings, there is always a little bit of a struggle with how women approach things to get their voices heard, versus the way men approach things to get their voices heard. So, in all careers that is always a little bit of a struggle, but I don't particularly blame anybody for, you know, intentionally ignoring me. You know, I don't feel like that ever happened. There's lots of women in biology, and faculty positions, and high-level positions, so it’s not all that underrepresented.  

That said, I think women face some tough choices. And so, in college, I think there's more women in biology than not. It's around the same during grad school and postdoc, but then it starts to go down and down and down. Women who have tenure in biology is considerably less than men. And I don't have the research at my fingertips to know exactly why that is. My guess is that a lot of it has to do with balancing, you know, work and family.  

So, I think the struggle all women face in all careers is, why can't I have it? All men can have it. All men can have their families, and their work, and their careers. And why can't women? And the answer is, you know, nobody's sort of stopping us except, when you have children and you have a family, it just takes a lot of not only of your time, but also of your mental time. You know, they’re something that you really want to focus on and think about. So, children are not just a time management problem, they’re very much a huge part of everything in your life. So, it's very, very difficult to have a family and also be at the top of your career. I think the women that I know who are much more successful than myself, you know, really sort of at the top of the field in biology, tend not to have children. And I think among my colleagues, that’s also the case, many of them do not have children. So, to some extent, I think it's just a little bit of a tradeoff.  

The women that I know who are the most successful and have children, have husbands who are in less driven and ambitious careers. They sort of take on more of that load, you know, of keeping the family going. So, that can work, but somebody has to be doing it. And then, I think at the end of the day, you know, do I want to feel guilty that I did a little less research or feel guilty that I didn't raise my children right? You know, nobody wants to feel like they didn't raise their children right. 

So, I think, for women, the work balance problem is still what we all struggle with. I think it still sets women back a lot, you know, no matter how wonderful a partner they have, the woman is still the mom. And especially when the kids are little, it's not a matter of fairness or what it should or shouldn't be. Nobody can really replace the mom in terms of time or effort, and that's important stuff. 

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Anya Sun 

Yeah. So, I know that you like kind of just went over balancing your family and your work, but what do you perceive to be the largest barrier or obstacle to female leadership? 

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Dr. Jocelyn Malamy 

In academia, I would say that there's a lot of there's a lot of female leaders. So, in biology, I don't think I see there to be a big barrier. Even at the at the administrative level, the level of Deans and provosts and even university presidents, there's a lot of women. For chairs of departments, there's probably less women. But still, there’s quite a lot of successful women scientists at the top of their field, who are all respected. I know a lot, so I don't feel that there are external forces, you know, that keeping women from achieving. 

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Anya Sun 

So, why do you think that diversity is important in a workplace? 

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Dr. Jocelyn Malamy 

Well, let's see. I mean, again, I can only speak from academia; that's where I've spent my career. As everybody knows, it's very important for students to see all types of people as their teachers and role models. There're also just subconscious messages that are sent with only seeing certain kinds of people being successful in the career. So, it's very important to have a diverse teaching body where all students can find people like themselves. 

And then in science itself, I think that the most important thing is that there be equal opportunities for everybody to find their place in all careers. I am not one of the people who think that we have to force exactly even ratios of everybody that we can think about. I don't think there is such an example but were there an example where more men than women were just interested in something, I don't really think that that's something we have to fight against. If women don't feel they have access to it, or if African Americans don't feel they have access to it, that's something that we have to fix.  

So, I think it's important to sort of look at the example and figure out, if there's not diversity, why is there not diversity? And sometimes it can be OK, and sometimes it's not. So, you know, I don't really believe in hiring practices that try to force a particular kind of diversity that's numerically equal. You know, I think that's not really the right approach. But you know, I do believe in figuring out if there are invisible barriers at any level and trying to make sure that they're not there. 

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Anya Sun 

Yeah, I totally agree. Like, I think equal opportunity is a lot better than equal outcome. And you kind of mentioned your plant research and how you pivoted over to, I think, jellyfish. But could you give me a quick overview of your research? 

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Dr. Jocelyn Malamy 

Oh, sure. So, about 10 years ago, I started the jellyfish work, and then I got so interested in it little by little, I phased out the plant work that I couldn't get funded anyway. So, you know, it was good. So, I've always been interested in the process of regeneration. It's one of the things that we were studying in plants. If you cut off a piece of a plant, it can grow the whole plant back. And even if you cut away a little tiny bit of a plant and you give it the right nutrients and culture, it can grow the whole plant back. And this is called total potency. It means that any piece of tissue has all of the information in it to regenerate the whole organism. 

And there are very few things in the animal kingdom that can do this in the way that the plant kingdom can. If you look at the animal kingdom, there are lots and lots of animals that, to some extent, have some ability of regeneration. Even we can regenerate like the tips of our fingers in some cases. You know, if you cut off a little bit of the finger, it can grow back, but then there are animals that can regenerate whole organs or can regenerate big chunks of their hearts. And then there are certain animals where their tail will grow back. In frogs and salamanders, if you cut off the limbs, the limbs will grow back. So, one of the big questions in science is why can some animals do this, and other animals can't? And one way of understanding that is to figure out how the animals that can do it, do it. And then you can look and see what's missing in higher animals. That’s kind of a big career long question.  

Some of the animals that are the most regenerative are the simple animals. You know, so regeneration has actually been lost rather. And the Cnidarians, which are the sea anemones, the corals, the jellyfish, and things like that, are some of the most regenerative organisms, sort of akin to plants. So, I got interested in that idea. I was looking for a highly regenerative animal to kind of be a parallel to the kind of questions I was asking about regeneration in plants. And at that time, an article had just come out in a journal called Transient Genetics that had this picture of the hemispheric on the cover. This group in France, was developing it as a new model system, and it had a lot of traits that just made it very, very cool.  

So, I asked them to send me some and they did. We started looking at it under the microscope and kind of cutting it apart to see what would happen. But if you cut a jellyfish in half, you get 2 jellyfish. If you cut pieces off of it, it regenerates those pieces with no trouble at all, incredibly fast. And then as we started watching and studying this process, we also noticed that the site or the skin of the jellyfish, if you wound it, you could see, in exquisite detail, the cells moving along the surface to reclose that wound in the skin. It's almost impossible to see that in adult animals and almost anything else.  

Just microscopically, you can sort of watch this in real time, and I saw it. I still feel that there's a real potential in studying a very primitive animal that's kind of at the beginning of multicellularity. But already, the way it heals things looks an awful lot like the way we heal things. So, we spent a couple of years developing tools and learning how to work with the animals, learning how to keep them alive in Chicago, and characterizing what wound healing looked like. And then we started looking for signaling pathways that play roles in vertebrates and asked if some of those signaling pathways were there and in jellyfish. Finding that they are, you know, and using those tools to sort of see if we could figure out how they work a little bit, is the main focus of my lab.  

We also tried to figure out how stinging cells work in jellyfish, which is a super cool project because they have cells that trigger stinging that are very similar to the cells that we have in our inner ear that trigger hearing. So, that's the second project that we do. I'm here at the main biological laboratory for the summer studying how microbial signals trigger life cycle development, and that’s in a different direction. 

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Anya Sun 

That's really cool. Like I've heard of the immortal jellyfish, I guess. Like the one that keeps like regenerating, and I think that that's just crazy. 

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Dr. Jocelyn Malamy 

Yeah, that one doesn't only regenerate, but if you sort of poke it and mess it up enough, it actually goes backwards in the life cycle. So, normally you start with a polyp, and then that polyp releases Medusa, which are the jellyfish you picture. But I think the way that goes is that if you mess with the Medusa, it sort of makes this little lump and goes back to being a polyp. So, there's nothing that should go backwards like that, and what’s really amazing is that these organisms can reorganize. They have a really amazing power to just sort of reorganize themselves. Like with a hydra, you can completely dissociate them so that you have a whole pile of single cells, and then you can watch them come back together and organize themselves to make a hydra out of those cells again. 

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Anya Sun 

Yeah, that's so cool. Like what type of traits do you think define a great researcher and also like what type of traits would you look for if you're trying to select someone for your lab? 

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Dr. Jocelyn Malamy 

Yeah, I mean, I don't know that I'm a great researcher. I think I'm a good researcher, but I know a lot of people who are a lot better. And if I knew their secret, I'd maybe be better myself. You certainly have to have persistence and clarity and the ability to find the right questions and to find the right approaches to those questions. Sometimes it’s not obvious how to do that.  

These days you also have to sort of be the kind of person who would run a successful small business, which in a way, a lab kind of is. So, you have to have an ability to be a great leader and motivate the people in your group. So, you know there's a lot of things that great researchers have that's really able to make things happen. They also often are highly charismatic people and are able to bring in funds by just getting everybody excited about their work. So, I think I'm good at all those things, but not great. Great people can do all those things really, really well.  

So, we take people at all levels in my lab. So, I always have undergraduate students in the lab. I had a time when high school students were in the lab, through one of the programs we run at U Chicago. And I find it very difficult to predict who's going to be good or not good. So, I pretty much take people on almost a first come first serve basis, as long as they express enthusiasm. But if they don't work out, they don't work out.  

I turn a lot of people down because I have very a small lab and only a small amount of space, but very rarely do I meet someone where I will say that this person can't do it. That almost never happens. But what happens is people, especially at the young level, get into the lab and then it becomes obvious, really quickly if they're going to be researchers or not. You teach them some techniques for an experiment you want them to do, and you set them up to do it. And they will either get completely addicted to it. And when it fails, they’ll do it again and try it again and think about things. They just become lab rats. And the college kids just end up doing their homework here and being here in between classes so that they can keep an eye on their experiments. So, people either just become part of the lab or they're just trying to do it like a class. You can't really do that. People just kind of get into it and sort of start living it. Those people are always going to be good, and we all look at each other and say, “OK. This is one of us. This person is going to be fine.”  

Then there's a process that becomes sort of a mentoring task. And everybody comes in different, you know, some people come in full of ideas and they need a little bit of help reining in those ideas to make something happen. It's a lot of fun to just dabble in stuff, but at the end of the day, you want to have rigorously done some experiments multiple times so that you could say, “OK, this I really proved,” as opposed to, “Look at all this cool stuff.” So, some people just have to be taught exactly what is required before you can say, “Something is caused by this,” or, “This happens when I do this to my system.” So, it's a lot of talking about controls and statistics.  

Other people have to be kind of encouraged in the opposite direction. Other people need to be sort of told exactly what to do. And you have to encourage them to be to be brave, be a little exploratory, and just try stuff. So, some people look too much one way, and some people look too much the other way.  

The other piece of it is like I'm at NBC and they run research courses where they do exactly that. They get students out of classrooms and at the bench and say, “I don't know if this is going to work. Go ahead and try it.” That's such a different thing for young people to hear than what they hear in school. At first, it's scary, but for many of them, it's really transformative. They just see what science is all about; it's just trying stuff. 

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Anya Sun 

So, what type of skills do you think that high schoolers can develop, even if they don't have access to a wet lab? 

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Dr. Jocelyn Malamy 

I think they can read. You know, I think that's probably the best thing to do. Read widely about, you know, any aspect of biology that excites them. It doesn't have to be Science and Nature. It can be, you know, National Geographic and things that are written more for newer scientists. And watch documentaries, you know, just try and get your handle on the kind of questions that people can ask in science to picture what it means to do science. See if it excites you. I think that's the best thing.  

I don't know what your school science is like, but there's a lot of high school curriculum that kind of beats the excitement out of it. Like my daughter had biology, my daughter is going to be in 11th grade, and it was really hard to watch her do biology. You know, she had a very nice teacher, but a lot of it's very crude and lots of memorizing. And science is just not that. So, you know, anything that students can do to see the fun. You know, science is really supposed to be fun. It's looking at stuff in the water, it's cutting things up and seeing what's inside, it's adding things and seeing what those things do. 

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Anya Sun 

Yeah. So really just exploring your own interest. 

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Dr. Jocelyn Malamy 

Exploring your own interests and trying to see the reality of those interests. Like what people in those areas are doing. These days you can see websites of every famous scientist that there is. So, you know, if you look around for scientists that are doing research in an area of interest, they'll have a one-page description of their research on their front page. There’s also something called iBio, which are YouTube videos with scientists introducing their own work and the stuff that's in their field. I bio it's called. And when I switched fields, I learned a lot from watching iBio videos. You know, they're the people that you would want to learn from, explaining the basics of their field. So, I mean that's another resource. High school students have access to all these great seminars by scientists. 

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Anya Sun 

OK. And then for our final question, what advice would you give to other people who want to enter your career field? 

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Dr. Jocelyn Malamy 

I would say that you know, in high school, it's out of your control really how much access you have to opportunities, but once you get to college, there's opportunities to do some sort of research with your science professors. If there is that opportunity, those are opportunities that you want to try and get. For people who go to schools that don't have any sort of research opportunities, there's summer internships and all sorts of programs that they can join and be paid for. So, there's lots of ways in which people can get a little bit of research experience in college. And that's tremendously important. There's very little you can learn in class that prepares you for what research is really like. So, just kind of getting in the lab even just as a helper, is probably the most important thing. It's also the thing that will allow you to get into Graduate School if that's the direction one is going.  

You know, I was just talking to someone who had just graduated from Northwestern and wanted to get research positions, but she hadn't done any research in college. And you know, it can be tough to get that first job when you're out of college, but having any background at all gives you some credentials coming out of college to kind of make that next step.  

Try to do some research in college. If you still like it, try and get a research technician position and work in a lab after college. If you still like it, go for Graduate School. If you still like it, keep on going. But I think that I would say on the other hand, research is long, slow, and not particularly lucrative. It's too hard if you don't love it. So, that's what I emphasize for people. It's too hard and too time consuming and it’s a long trajectory before you get a position. It’s not worth it if you don't like it. So, just try it and be honest with yourself. See if it really seems like something that you would want. 

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Anya Sun 

Yeah. So, that's all the questions that we that I have for today and thank you so much for meeting with me. 

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Dr. Jocelyn Malamy 

Sure, sure. I hope it was helpful. It's really nice that you have this organization.

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