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Question: What inspired you to pursue a career in research, and when did you realize it was the right path for you? 

For the first 15 years of my life I was convinced I was going to be an actress. However, somewhere between middle school and my first pipette I realized my stage was going to be attached to a microscope or in front of a whiteboard. I think what drew me to theater in the first place is actually the same thing that keeps me at the bench: communicating with people and doing something that might improve their lives. Science does both, and I was lucky to see it in practice before I understood it in theory 

My interest in science did not come from a Bill Nye or Neil deGrasse Tyson, but rather my mom. My mom is a microbiologist and environmental engineer, and in the 1990s in Arizona not many of my friends had moms who worked, let alone moms with PhDs. She came home talking about her day the way most people talk about a great movie, and every so often, she brought me into it. For example, when it rained in Phoenix, she would load me into the car and drive out at night to collect stormwater samples. In the car she would explain what she was measuring and why the first hour of rain mattered more than the rest, with the streets pushing months of accumulated contaminants toward the drains all at once, and the city needing to know what was in there. I was young enough that it did not occur to me to think this was unusual work for a mother to be doing in the middle of the night. It seemed obvious that if the city needed these questions answered, my mom was the person to ask. 

Realizing research was the right path for me was less of a lightning strike and more like building a house. The “foundation” was poured during high school where I had the opportunity to perform research at ASU’s Biodesign Institute’s research program. There, in Dr. Rosa Krajmalnik-Brown’s lab, I learned how to run a GC-MS and fumbled my way through group meetings and journal clubs I did not fully understand. I loved them, though, because everyone in the room was pulling in the same direction. It was the first time I felt what a shared research question feels like. The “framing” went up during my undergraduate degree at the University of California Berkeley. Coming from a small Arizona high school, it was a shock to be with so many smart students on such a big campus that was a world away culturally from Arizona. I went from being the kid who thought she was good at math, biology, and chemistry to feeling like I was truly scraping by. It wasn’t until I joined Dr. Lisa Alvarez-Cohen’s environmental engineering lab that something shifted. For the first time I felt like I belonged on this campus of very talented people. I could talk about our research problem, hypotheses, methods, and results with more confidence than I had about any of my coursework. It was then that I switched my major to include a thesis component and stopped wondering whether graduate school would be the right next step. 

The “roof” was built during graduate school at UCLA. It was then that I realized I truly loved academia and where benign urology was first put on my radar. During my PhD in Dr. Shaily Mahendra’s lab, we collaborated with Dr. Richard Kaner in the Chemistry Department to develop an antibiofouling coating for environmental tubing that was then applied to medical tubing such as catheters. Once I started reading about catheter-associated infections and the patients who live with long-term catheters, benign urology became something I thought about while staring at stormwater drainpipe screens. However, while UCLA does have a medical school, my contact with urologists or urology researchers was slim as I sat in the basement of the engineering building. After my PhD I cold-emailed Dr. Jim Brooks about an open postdoctoral position. He wrote back within minutes asking for an interview. Two interviews later, once I had convinced him that yes, an environmental engineer/applied microbiologist really did want to work in benign urology, he took me on and I traded Southern California for Northern California. 

What I love about the work I do is what I loved in all my mentors’ labs. Research is not a grade. It is a room full of people arguing about the best way to answer a question that matters to our community, and getting to be one of the voices in that room is a privilege I do not take for granted. My work on benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) uses both in vivo and in vitro models as well as omics analyses to produce small answers to the big question of why there is a debilitating health condition most men will live with given the chance to live long enough. My research is preclinical, it is translational, and on my best days it feels like the kind of work my mom would have signed on for. The throughline from Arizona storm drains to indwelling catheters is more direct than it looks from the outside. Bacteria do not care whether the pipe is under a street or inside the body. 

Another small part of why I would like to stay in academic research (besides the work itself and amazing people) is that my parents were not able to. They both grew up without a safety net, and academia looked risky in a way industry did not. My mom loves teaching in front of a lecture hall; my dad, an electrical engineer, loves teaching one person at a time at a whiteboard. I would like to think I inherited both instincts. 

If I ever get restless about the road not taken, I remind myself that a lab is a stage too. The audience is smaller and the reviews can be more painful, but the script gets rewritten by the data, and I think that is a much better deal than I would have gotten in Los Angeles. 

If you are reading this from an odd background and wondering whether it disqualifies you from the field you actually want to work in, the answer is no. Mine did not. Go for it.