David Bellows'95, UBRP alum from Dr. John Law and Dr. Rolf Zeigler's laboratory in Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics will be visiting the UA in October.  Brianna Kolody, UBRPer in Dr. Roger Miesfeld's lab, Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics had an opportunity to ask him some questions:

1) What exactly do you do now?

I am a lecturer (the equivalent of an assistant professor in North America) in Cellular and Molecular Biology at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. I am responsible for a research laboratory that is focused on chemical genetics. We use the awesome power of yeast genomics to interrogate the activity of novel marine natural products derived from New Zealand waters.

2) Do you enjoy doing it?

When I lived in New York City in the 1980's, I used to say that I loved Manhattan and hated Manhattan, sometimes on consecutive blocks. Academia is like that. It is a complicated job. Actually, it is about six separate jobs, but you are only trained for one of them (research) when they hand you the keys to an empty office. You are required to learn personnel management, public relations, accounting, pedagogy and politics on-the-fly.

3) Describe a typical day in your career.

Wake up, fall out of bed, and drag a comb across my head. Find my way downstairs and drink a cup and looking up, I notice that it's late. Find my coat and grab my hat, make the bus in seconds flat. Oh, sorry, that's "a day in the life" by the Beatles (still a great song). Interestingly, Paul and John have nearly perfectly captured my morning ritual. HMMM. Actually, the most alluring aspect of an academic science career is that there is no "typical" day. However, I normally catch the 9:07 bus (ever since I lived in New York, I have always avoided commuting during rush hour) and am in my office sometime <10. After checking email and looking at my calendar to see if I have completely forgotten about a meeting with the dean that started 10 minutes ago, I wander down to the tearoom to pick up my mail. New Zealand still hews to the British system, so it is just about coffee break time and I spend a few minutes catching up on School gossip over a scone. Then I check in on the lab. Hopefully, one of my students will come running up with a plate of yeast and a look of anticipation (I love that). Other times I have to say something like "am I the only one who smells burning plastic?" If there are peals of laughter coming from the robotics room, I know that the latest Youtube find is being dissected (Eppendorf's EPMotion video is currently on high rotation, though "Michael Palin for President" is catching up fast). If I am teaching, I usually sequester myself before the lecture and make sure I know where the embedded videos are in the slides and that the links still work since last year. At 3pm, we have teatime and I play an occasional game of foosball with the lab (they play every day). Afternoons are usually dominated with administrative whatnot. Then there are a couple hours when it gets quiet and I can work on a grant or edit a thesis. When I get home around 7ish, my wife says, "what did you do today?" and I usually answer, "I don't know...but I was really busy."

4) What is your favorite aspect of your career? Conversely, what is the most frustrating aspect of your career?

Students are the best part of my job. Nothing beats the look on someone's face when they have the "aha moment", either in the classroom or in the lab. The most frustrating aspect is that the system is set up so that I am essentially an independent contractor. The constant struggle to secure funding is enervating.

5) If you could start all over again, would you choose the same career? Why?

I am not sure I "chose" the career I have. Do you mean, would I take the same ant-on-a-map route to get where I am? Absolutely. It has been an incredibly fun, interesting journey. My crazy quilt career approach has allowed me to interact with a remarkable spectrum of personalities, from famous faces to Nobel laureates, while living in great places in three different countries. Leaving out any part of it would make me an entirely different person, I suspect.

6) Did you always know that this is what you wanted to do? How and when did you decide?

No, I had an entirely different career in New York City and Sun Valley, Idaho before I heard the siren song of science. I parlayed a BA in journalism into gigs as a sommelier (wine guru) at a restaurant in midtown Manhattan and as a beverage director at hotel in a ski resort. Then, I found myself unemployable in Tucson (thank you, Janos and Anthony) while my wife was beginning her PhD in Political Science at UA. In my despondency, I had this crazy idea I wanted to be a wine MAKER instead of a wine BUYER, but it required a working knowledge of chemistry and I didn't even know where the chemistry BUILDING was at my previous alma mater, much less what a covalent bond was. Thus, I returned to school to get a biochemistry degree so I could go off to UC Davis and enter their Oenology (winemaking) program. Fortune smiled on me in the form of my advisor, Bill Grimes, who humoured my plan, but apparently saw something more and encouraged me to apply to UBRP. Long story short (I know, too late, right?), seduced by the shiny toys in the lab, I began a torrid love affair with basic research and never did apply to UC Davis.

7) What project did you work on as a graduate student at Johns Hopkins?

Apoptosis was a white-hot field in 1995, so I became an apoptologist. I chose Marie Hardwick as my supervisor and got a crash course in virology and molecular biology. We used a recombinant alpha virus that constitutively activated apoptosis as part of its life cycle as a model to dissect the death pathway. My project centered on identifying the strategies that herpesviruses employed to evade regulation of Bcl-2 genes they had assimilated into their genomes (from us).

8) What are the most enjoyable, challenging, and frustrating aspects of being a grad student?

Hmmm, where to start? A PhD is an intense, heady experience. I guess the most enjoyable aspect is the excitement of working right at the leading edge of biology as you are making the transition to becoming an independent researcher. The feeling, when you get a result and you know for a few moments you are the only person in the world with the information, is electrifying. The rush is even more intense if the experiment you performed was based on your own idea. Every aspect of grad school is challenging. The sheer volume of information and the insane rate that they expect you to assimilate it is a shock. Treading water in the deep end of the brain pool is also exhausting. By far the most frustrating aspect of the process is the fact that it is effectively run like a medieval apprenticeship in a guild. You are indentured at low pay for a significant fraction of your lifespan and your entire future relies on your relationship with a single, all-powerful supervisor. Maintaining motivation for the entire length of a North American PhD (plan on six years) is the hardest part.

9) When you were a UBRP student, who was your mentor and what project did you work on?

Again, fortune smiled on me in the form of John Law, Regent's Professor of Biochemistry. Dr. Law (funny, I still can't call him John even today) has this infectious, omnivorous inquisitiveness. He can only be described as a renaissance man. He would travel to New York in the winter to take in an opera at the Met (I am a fan as well) and would travel to Ecuador in the summer to find new orchids for his hothouse. In between, he ran an insect biochemistry lab where we did classical, grind-and-find biochemistry. My project, under Rolf Ziegler, was to isolate and characterize a lipoprotein from the hemolymph of a locally collected scale insect called cochineal (Dactylopius confusus). You would know it better as the stuff that looks like old toilet paper on the prickly pear cactuses on campus and throughout the city.

10) Did UBRP help you achieve your career goals? If yes, how?

UBRP gave me my career goals. Were it not for UBRP, I would probably be standing in the middle of a vineyard in the Sonoma Valley right now. Wait, what was I thinking? I COULD BE STANDING IN THE MIDDLE OF A VINEYARD RIGHT NOW! I am apparently none-too-bright and should not be relied on for advice of any kind.

11) What do you remember most about being in UBRP?

The camaraderie. Time card reminders. Carol Bender's smile.

12) What advice do you have for juniors and seniors who are still deciding what they want to do after graduation?

It's too late for me, but you can still save yourselves. Run Away! Seriously though, if you have the science fever and feel compelled to go on to grad school, aim as high as you can and find a program that will really challenge you. Look for a program that has the broadest possible spectrum of supervisors to choose from (Washington University in St Louis is famous for sending a book with 400 lab descriptions when you mail off the interest card) and whose curriculum will give you expertise with all avenues of biological research (that was one of the things that made the BCMB program at Hopkins special) so that you will have a complete toolbelt when you graduate, instead of just a screwdriver (or a pipetman). Finally, don't be fixated on individual names. You are going to be there for a LONG time. Make sure the school is in a place where you want to live. There is great science being conducted in really cool places all over the world. Dream Big.

13) What advice do you have for incoming UBRP students?

Have fun. You will look back and realize that UBRP was paradise.

If you enjoyed reading this interview, plan on attending one or both of Dr. Bellows' presentations.  The first is October 23 at 5:00 PM in LSS 340 entitled, "The Accidental Academic:  How UBRP Set Me on a Path to New Zealand (and How It Can Send you There Too)."  The scientific seminar is scheduled for October 24 at 12:30 pm in LSS 240 entitled, "Sea Cucumber Makes a Deadly Finger Sandwich: A Chemi-Genomic Approach to Identify Marine Natural Product Bioactivity and Mechanism of Action Using the Brewer's Yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae."

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