Meet the PI
Kara Cerveny, PhD
Associate Professor
Reed College
Portland, Oregon, USA
Questions:
What is the research focus of your lab?
The research goal of my lab is to understand the cellular mechanisms that guide progenitor cells from proliferation to differentiation in the developing vertebrate eye. Over the past few years, we have also become very interested in investigating how the visual system, once assembled, remodels in response to continued growth or changes in sensory input.
How long have you been working with zebrafish? How long have you had your own lab?
I’ve worked with zebrafish since 2005 when I started my post-doc at University College London (UCL) with Steve Wilson and I took the zebrafish course at Woods Hole MBL that August. All of my work up until that point had been in single-celled organisms (bacteria, yeast) and so there was a lot newness (and slowness) with moving into a multicellular organism. Fortunately, there were supportive faculty, post-docs, and grad students in the London zebrafish group, from UCL and Kings College, who welcomed me, taught me the basics, and were always happy to talk about science and life.
How do you use zebrafish in your undergraduate teaching?
I teach developmental biology and zebrafish feature prominently in the lab sessions, helping students gain an understanding of cellular level events of development with cell transplantation and time-resolved 3-D imaging (now including our new light sheet microscope) and probe cell and molecular level events with morpholino, mRNA, and CRISPR/Cas9 injections followed by in situ hybridization, immunohistochemistry, and qRT-PCR. In addition, students perform independent projects for the second half of this Developmental Biology course and most of them choose to work with zebrafish embryos and larvae, often on projects within my lab. Due to the pandemic, I’ve also developed some lab exercises that use bioinformatic approaches including one in which my students explore and validate potential new eye development genes using scRNA-Seq datasets from Adam Miller’s lab at the University of Oregon.
At a small liberal arts college like Reed, the lines between teaching and research are blurry. I have a number of senior thesis students working with me each year, and they master everything from basic fish husbandry and molecular biology to more advanced live imaging acquisition and analysis.
In addition to using zebrafish in the lab, I teach an upper-level seminar focused on developmental neurobiology of sensory systems. This spring we focused on the visual system and read many zebrafish papers. Each student wrote a summary of their favorite paper in the style of Science Spotlight and then, toward the end of the semester, we spent one class giving and receiving peer feedback. For our final meeting, students were responsible for reading all of the summaries and then they voted for the one they thought should be part of this edition of News Splash. These types of authentic reading and writing projects can be transformative and fun for my students and me.
Getting to know you better
Where were you born/where did you grow up?
I was born in South Dakota and moved every ~5 years, calling Texas, Ohio, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Massachusetts, and the UK home before moving to Portland, Oregon. We’ve been here for 10 years and as much as I love my position, I’m starting to feel like it’s time to find our next adventure.
Science
Which of the current projects in your lab you are most excited about?
It’s difficult for me to choose just one project that I’m most excited about. There are a number of projects that are partially completed that are the foundation for two grants that I’m working on. One is an outgrowth of a project that started when I was a post-doc and is leading us toward new live-imaging experiments to probe the interaction between immune cells and neurogenesis in the optic tectum. The other is based on a combination of RNA-Seq (bulk data gathered before sc-RNA Seq was so ubiquitous) and imaging data that has helped us gather information about new immediate targets of the retinoic acid signaling pathway in the developing eye while probing how the RA, BMP, and FGF pathways interact during eye formation.
How does your current institution compare with the one where you did your PhD or postdoctoral research?
Before coming to Reed College, I had always worked at large research institutions in narrowly focused cell and development departments. At a small liberal arts college, I have colleagues across a wide range of biological disciplines including neurophysiology and neuroethology, ecology and evolution, cell and molecular biology. The diversity of fields represented in our department, my colleagues, and the myriad opportunities for learning and teaching that I have keep me getting out of bed each morning. To “talk shop” with other researchers in my specific field, I rely on friends and colleagues at other institutions including the Portland area zebrafish club and the Northwest regional Society for Developmental Biology meetings. Zoom isn’t the most effective way to teach, but it’s not bad when it helps you keep in touch across wide distances and multiple time zones with colleagues and friends.
Which part of the PI job you enjoy the most? Why?
Being a PI at a small liberal arts college is intellectually invigorating and working with enthusiastic and bright students is the most rewarding thing I do. I love learning and teaching and helping students find their passion and recently, I’ve started to feel like I’ve figured out how to match the right people to the right projects and how to build teams that can work together. This is an important skill when running any lab, and it becomes mission critical when students join and leave the lab every semester with limited continuity.
Outside of work
What do you enjoy doing outside of work/lab?
Outside of the lab, I love spending time with my family, reading (either historical fiction to myself or Poppleton and Mercy Watson with my 7-year-old daughter), walking in the woods, running, and taking care of our chickens and dog.
What career would you have liked if you were not a scientist?
I find joy when I can learn and share with others, so teaching and mentoring are things that I would do no matter what other job I would have. Before I was a faculty member at Reed, I was a scientific editor at Cell and I could possibly see myself returning to a scientific editing/writing type of job. I would also love to do more creative writing and maybe, possibly start a plumbing business, plying the skills I’ve learned to keep my fish facility in working order.
Present situation
How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected your lab and work?
I started to answer this question with a list of how much I’ve lost because of the pandemic, but I wanted to end on a positive note and so instead will focus on what I’ve gained as a result of the pandemic. I’ve gained a deeper sense of what is important and my limits for what I can do with limited sleep. I’ve also learned a lot about pedagogy, and although I like to think I was an effective teacher pre-pandemic, I know that my teaching has improved since having to retool and refine my classes for hybrid/zoom learning (so glad we are back to fully in-person instruction for this coming fall). My classes are now much more focused on data analysis and critical thinking and students seem to prefer learning about morphogenesis by doing dances and building clay models of embryos. In addition, I’ve become more open to taking on other roles outside of the classroom and have been sharing the discipline of inclusive pedagogy with my colleagues across campus by facilitating workshops in collaboration with Reed’s Center for Teaching and Learning.
William Jackman, PhD
Associate Professor
Department of Biology
Bowdoin College
Brunswick, ME, USA
Questions:
What is the research focus of your lab?
We study zebrafish tooth development, mostly focusing on investigating the function of genes involved in cell-cell signaling.
How long have you been working with zebrafish? How long have you had your own lab?
28 years, or maybe 21 years, depending on who you ask. When I was a graduate student in the Chuck Kimmel group at the University of Oregon (UO) in the 1990s, I mostly focused on evodevo work with amphioxus. Fortunately, I also participated in the zebrafish mutant screens and picked up some skills that helped me later when I realized that everybody wanted to work with zebrafish!
How do you use zebrafish in your undergraduate teaching?
The primary way is in the lab of my developmental biology course. We do a month-long unit at the end of the semester where groups of students pick a developmental gene to focus on and we use CRISPR-Cas9 to insert a promoter-GFP segment into the gene to see if it recapitulates the expression pattern of the gene and/or generates a mutant phenotype. It very often does both. I do the injections and the students do the rest of the analysis. They end by making a figure in the style of a journal article and also present their findings to the lab class. Doing this with zebrafish allows the students to see the GFP expression and phenotypes in living embryos in a way that seems to make it 'real' for many of them.
Getting to know you better
Where were you born/where did you grow up? I was born and grew up in Seattle, Washington, USA, where I also went to the University of Washington (UW). I hadn't been away from home much before going to UO, and that was only a mere 5 hour drive down Interstate-5.
Science
Which of the current projects in your lab you are most excited about?
I think the most exciting projects are some of the tooth-related GFP knock-ins that stemmed from work in the dev bio course, as well as a cis-regulatory analysis of the retinoic acid cell signaling pathway gene cyp26b1. The latter is part of a collaboration with Yann Gibert of the University of Mississippi Medical Center, where we're trying to learn more about the changes to gene regulation that have led to the evolution of tooth shape.
How does your current institution compare with the one where you did your PhD or postdoctoral research?
All of my training was at large research universities: UW, UO, and the University of Colorado for my postdoc. As a small liberal-arts college, Bowdoin College is very different. There are no graduate students and I don't currently have a postdoc or technician, so all of the research ends up being done with undergraduates. Bowdoin attracts some bright and energetic students, which helps things tremendously, but there is a never-ending cycle of training that took awhile for me to get used to. I sometimes joke that I train a student for a year and get a month of productive work out of it, and it is only funny because it is pretty much true.
Which part of the PI job you enjoy the most? Why?
Definitely working with students in my research lab, especially when we can do some small thing that nobody has ever done before and share the wonder of that experience.
Outside of work
What do you enjoy doing outside of work/lab?
Rowing, fishing, running, walking my dog, photography, and family adventures--especially being a fan of my boys' various sports teams.
What career would you have liked if you were not a scientist?
A photographer of some kind. However, I probably would have ended up as an IT person.
Present situation
How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected your lab and work?
As with every lab, I imagine, it was difficult for students to finish up their work remotely in 2020 and not much happened until the vaccinations and testing got going later. Lately things have been masked but otherwise pretty much back to normal. I wish I could blame the pandemic for a dip in productivity but I think the reasons for that lie mostly in the answers to question #8 above.