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Question: How did your career path evolve?

I had about a year of working in a lab at the University of Virginia during undergrad in 2000, where hardly anything worked. However, a volunteering experience at a local hospital made me realize that was not the environment for me. I decided to apply to graduate schools, not because I truly understood what being a scientist was about, but because I knew I did not want to be a physician. I don’t recommend career planning by negative association, but that’s how it worked out for me.

My first year of graduate school in 2001 at Baylor College of Medicine was rough. I was underprepared, but I chose a good mentor (David Rowley) and made it through my classes and quals. Urology became my field because Dr. Rowley made the questions interesting, not because I had any particular interest in it. My mentor was very hands-off and I was not organized so it took me 5.5 years to graduate (it should have taken 4.5). I always loved to read and think about science and realized then that I had a knack for writing when I finished my thesis in 2 weeks. I married in my 4th year of graduate school and didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do with my career. I had interviewed at a few startup companies in Houston and even tried substitute teaching a bit before I decided to move to Vanderbilt to start a postdoc with Simon Hayward in 2007.

Dr. Hayward had a way of making his trainees take ownership of their science and provided opportunities for leadership development. Within the first month, I was giving lectures and writing grants. Within 2 years I received a DOD fellowship to study stromal-epithelial interactions in prostate cancer. This was a period of tremendous growth for me personally and professionally. My wife had two boys. I read nearly every book in Dr. Hayward’s personal library, and we discussed politics, religion, philosophy and culture. He also taught me the importance of understanding the history of your field so you can be prepared when opportunities to answer important questions arise. Vanderbilt was strong in metabolism research, so I focused on questions related to the intersection between metabolism and prostate disease. Given my weak organizational skills, I took too long to publish and almost missed my window for a K award. Luckily, I had been introduced to Chad Vezina who gave me a masterclass in grant writing after my first attempt barely even got scored because of my lack of productivity and research focus. Within 6 months I published 2 more first author papers and revised my K01 for success.

Once I received my K01 score and knew it would be funded, I knew I needed to move quickly to secure a faculty position so I started sending emails to urology department chairs who might have an interest in benign urology research. After a few interviews over the next year, I landed at UT Southwestern in 2014, drawn by the incredible opportunity to do translational work with the best clinicians on a campus known for its high impact research. The single most important thing I did for my career is to be brave enough to surround myself with people smarter than me. I was intimidated walking past the laboratories of Nobel Prize winners every day. My peers were publishing in high impact journals, and I was scared I wouldn’t measure up enough to get tenure. My breakthrough was when I ran into one of the clinical fellows asking how he could contribute. I knew from graduate school that one of the most important questions in prostate research was ‘what does normal look like?’. Over the course of the next year, we built a relationship with a local organ transplant alliance to collect prostates from young organ donors. At the same time, an NIDDK program officer (Deborah Hoshizaki) asked me if I thought I could try this new technique called single cell RNA sequencing. At the time, I was trying to optimize flow cytometry for isolation and characterization of individual cell types in normal prostate. The thought of having to become an expert in bioinformatics was daunting, but I found a local expert in bioinformatics down the hall from me who was also trying single cell RNA sequencing (Gary Hon) and we bought the first commercially available machine from 10X Genomics together. Of note, my department chair had to come up with $40K for this and showed his faith in me by purchasing it. After publishing a few smaller papers from 2014-2017, our big breakthrough was the publication of a normal human prostate atlas in 2018, which was the referenced we needed to study disease. I had obtained an R03 in 2016 as a small addendum to my K01, but was able to secure my first R01 to study BPH in 2018.

All of the work done in my first 5 years as faculty was done by myself and 2 technicians, which was both miserable and exciting. Between family and work I was overextended. I could not compete for graduate students in our programs who were not interested in benign disease research. I was finally able to recruit a postdoc (Diya Binoy Joseph) in 2019 and this took my career to the next level. She was the engine and the engineer. I got out of the way. She finished her postdoc in 3 years with 4 first author publications and gave me the space to think bigger about urologic research questions. I received tenure in 2021 by focusing on productivity rather than always pushing for the highest impact journals. After 11 years, the laboratory has now expanded into many aspects of urology by supporting others with human tissue research. This helps broaden my portfolio and pay for my salary. It took a while, but I now have multiple graduate students across different programs. My best advice is to be brave and humble enough to ask for help to answer the big questions. A successful scientist is not necessarily a genius, just stubbornly curious.