UBRP Comes Full Circle

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Joyce Schroeder, PhD - Professor, Molecular & Cellular Biology

UBRP was a life-changing opportunity for me. Back in 1989, I was a first-gen student putting myself through college and I knew nothing about being a scientist. I knew I liked science, but knew nothing about research, and although I wanted to work in a lab I also had to work full time to pay the bills. I didn’t even know that ‘professor’ was a job that someone like me could aspire to. One day my roommate told me there was a sign in the window (yes, back in the old pre-internet days) in BSW about a new program that was designed to give undergrads lab opportunities - and it paid! I began my time as a scientist working in the lab of Vas Aposhian, in a collaboration with Danny Brower, where we were studying whether Drosophila would be a good model organism for the role of heavy metals on neurological development (it wasn’t!). Little did I know it, but I was being taught by intellectual giants; they taught me how to be a scientist. How to ask a question, how to form a hypothesis, the importance of controls and how to interpret data. 

This experience set me on the path I am still on today, taking me through grad school, post-doc and onto a faculty position, where I eventually became a tenured professor and department head. The gift that Aposhian and Brower (and other mentors later in my career) gave to me is something I carry with me always and try to emulate. Providing guidance, encouragement and time to young scientists is something I consider a key part of being an academic scientist, and I am proud to say it all began with UBRP. 

Michael Kuhns, PhD - Professor, Immunobiology

I applied for UBRP with no idea of what it meant to do research. I enjoyed my science classes, but I didn’t know how the information I learned in class was obtained. What I did know was that the idea of making discoveries and generating knowledge intrigued me, and that the freedom of staying in Tucson to work in a lab for the summer instead of returning to my parent’s house in Prescott to landscape in the heat of summer was very appealing! 

When I reflect on my time in UBRP, the most important lesson learned from the experience was that thinking and acting like a working scientist is fun, challenging, requires endurance, and is very different than being a student. This realization first hit me when reading the literature. I had to go to the library to photocopy papers at 10 cents a page. At first, I thought I would save money by only photocopying the introduction, results, and discussion sections. Who needs the methods or references? Turns out, I did – I needed to know how experiments were performed in order to design my own experiments, and I needed a better understanding of the basis for some of the claims in the papers, particularly when they contradicted things I thought I knew from class or textbooks. So, I invested in my future one dime at a time. 

Another lesson I learned was how important it is to talk science. I got to practice this with my mentor, Bill Grimes, and other people in his lab. I also count myself as lucky to have gotten to know and talk science with Danny Brower, who’s lab was next door to Bill’s. Danny would come in on the weekends, blast Credence Clearwater Revival, and challenge me with questions about my project when I was eating lunch. The whole experience was outstanding, and I remain grateful for the opportunity and experiences. Now, with the undergrads in my lab, I give them room to explore and learn from making mistakes. And I challenge them, along with everyone in the lab, to work towards thinking and acting like working scientists.