Good morning, everyone.
Good morning.
OK, so I'm going to introduce Doctor Carapina.
Dr.
Carapina is an associate professor of biology at Framingham State University,
which is a sister institution to Salem State University.
She completed her bachelor's degree at UMass in person in Biochemistry and
Molecular Biology in her doctoral degree at Brandeis University in Cellular and
Molecular Biology.
I have the privilege of meeting Cara during my first year at Advertising
University where she not only trained me as a microbiologist,
but she also shake me into the mentor that I am today.
She guided me from my mentoring policy scholars,
supporting students in the NSFREU Research experience for undergraduate
program, working with my first laboratory mentees,
and designing and teaching my very first class.
Her guidance, patience, and generosity with her time and
knowledge have had a lasting impact on me and I will always be grateful for her
mentorship.
Both Salem State and Framingham State serve and educate many students who are
people of color, first generation, from low income backgrounds,
and or are non traditional college age in Massachusetts.
Cara is heavily involved in work focused on ensuring that all students are able to
successfully pursue and complete a college degree,
regardless of the background to the use of equitable grading practices,
supporting faculty of color, and mentoring students through research.
She teaches a range of courses including introductory biology,
microbiology and seminar on infectious disease and society.
Her research covers a range of topics from how bacteria respond to
environmental stressors such as temperature, pH and osmolarity,
changes to bio remediation and alternative uses for microbes.
Please join me in welcoming my friend and incredible centre, Dr.
Power Peanut.
Thank you Laura.
Hello, how are you?
All good.
We're good.
All right, So I'm really excited to talk to you
about basically a whole list of things I really enjoy and a whole list of things I
do in my job that I also really enjoy.
So that's me up there.
So I grew up in Massachusetts.
How many of you grew up in the state of Massachusetts?
Nice, nice.
Where you all from?
Salem, Salem.
A lot of people from Salem, Boston, Boston, Lynn, Lynn Revere, Georgetown,
Georgetown, Lowell, Lowell, Attleboro, Attleboro, Taunton, Worcester.
So I grew up in Somerville.
So that's where I spent my time as a non college student.
So prior to going to college, I grew up in Somerville.
I then went to UMass Amherst for my undergraduate degree.
And from there, I tried to figure out what I wanted to do.
And the thing that sort of led me to figure out what I wanted to do was an
undergraduate research experience that I did over the summer.
So I did it at UMass Medical or UMass Chan as it's now called.
And I really, really liked doing research.
So I found out that I really liked doing research and I ended up getting a
position as a research technician.
This was still in Boston.
That particular faculty member does a lot of really prestigious Cancer Research,
and he received another offer.
So he moved his lab to New York, to New York City,
and I got another research position, also in Boston, as a research technician.
So I did some work in prostate cancer and then I did some work in Drosophila
genetics.
After that I applied to grad school and in grad school I did work in E coli.
From there I determined that I really liked teaching,
and prior to that I didn't think I liked teaching.
And I realised that I didn't think I liked teaching because I didn't think I
knew anything.
And so once I realised that I knew stuff, I actually liked teaching people the
things that I knew.
So I took a postdoctoral research position as a teaching postdoc.
So basically what that was is I worked at Providence College to learn how to do
research with solely undergrads.
So a lot of the bigger institutions like Brandeis or UMass Amherst,
they have graduate students.
So they have PhD students, they have masters students,
they have undergrads, they have technicians.
So they have a range of people with experience in a lab.
As you might know, primarily undergraduate institutions tend
to only have undergrads in the lab.
So I wanted to know how do you best create a lab where you do research with
just undergrads?
And so I learned some of that through my post doc position.
And from there I applied for a position at Framingham State and Doctor Lorando
and I started our positions at the same time.
And I have been really, really excited about the work that I get
to do at Framingham State.
As Doctor Lorando mentioned, the populations of students that the
Massachusetts State school systems serve tend to be a really exciting population
for me.
So I am a first generation college student and I at Framingham have lots of
first Gen.
college students to mentor.
I have lots of people who didn't necessarily think that they were going to
go to college.
Am I other than a faculty member at Framingham?
So I really, really like microscopy.
So microscopy is by far one of my favorite things to do in science.
I love looking at really small things or large things in really great detail.
I think that it's just really cool.
I also really like bio art, so I have had the awesome fortune this
semester of teaching a course with one of my colleagues who is an art history
faculty member.
And so we are teaching a joint bio and art class.
And so we get to talk about biological concepts and how they're used in art.
And it's one of the most amazing things and I really enjoy doing it.
So that's who I am and these are the some of the things that I've done that sort of
demonstrate that.
So this is the first paper that I ever published.
And there was microscopy involved, as you might be able to see.
So this was when I was working in a Drosophila lab and I created a mutant
that fluoresced in the larval state.
So for anybody who has some background with Drosophila genetics,
sometimes you want to separate different, different larvae with different
properties, different characteristics.
So you can link this particular fluorescence to the characteristic you're
looking for and be able to look at it when you have larva as opposed to an
adult fly.
So I got to take these really cool pictures.
I love how detailed you can get with microscopy and how interesting, I guess,
things things are when you look at them close up because we don't really get much
of a chance to look at things quite that close up.
So then in Graduate School I worked on E coli and most of my focus was DNA and the
associate associated proteins with the E coli DNA.
So this is a picture of an E coli cell that has been lysed and all of this is
the DNA.
I did not take this picture, but this is a pretty historic picture
that people may have seen before.
There's a lot of DNA in an E coli cell, and E coli cells are pretty small,
so they have to fit all of this DNA into the cell while still having room to do
all the other things that the cell needs to do.
So they compact their DNA.
And while I was in Graduate School, I spent a lot of time focusing on DNA
compaction because, again, I thought it was really cool.
It involved microscopy.
The DNA makes really cool shapes.
I mean, you can argue with me that they're not
cool, but I think they're cool and I got to
take pictures like this.
So you can sort of see, so in white is the DNA and you can sort
of see in this picture right here how there's this 3D sort of spiralling effect
of the DNA in where it takes up, takes up space inside the cell.
And then when you let the cells get older, they do this really cool thing where they
compact their DNA into what's called a toroid.
So a toroid is this doughnut shaped thing that's sort of bent like a saddle.
And so that's the shape that you get.
So more things that I just think are cool from the things that we've talked about,
a lot of stuff you may notice is not really high level breakthrough
information that's going to save humanity, at least I don't think so.
But it is information that we didn't necessarily know before.
It is information that helps other people to do their science,
and it's stuff that you can do with people who don't have much background to
help them learn the information that they need in order to be successful in their
future.
The other thing, because I said I like bioart,
that I do is agriart.
How many of you have heard of agriart?
All right, how many people know how you grow
bacteria in a lab?
All right, who wants to explain it?
Yeah.
OK.
So you get you get these Petri dishes that have auger in it.
You put the bacteria and you come in a warm place to the bacteria,
juice the auger, and then you put it in the fridge.
So multiply.
Yes.
So you use Petri dishes that have auger in it.
So auger is a similar substance to gelatin.
Gelatin is made from animals.
Auger is made from seaweed, but they're similar substances,
so they get sort of solid and then you grow your bacteria on them.
So Agri art is the use of bacteria that is colored in some way so they can make
their own pigments.
You can make them make pigments, they can fluoresce,
and you put them on your Petri dish in a particular way to make images.
So I ran an Agri art event at FSU and these are some of the products that my
colleagues created during the event.
And I think that this is another sort of cool,
fun way to get familiar with how bacteria grows,
get familiar with how one makes these microbes fluoresce and what you can do
that sort of brings our science into the realm of people that might not be doing
science, right.
So a lot of colleges tend to separate by topic, right?
So at Framingham, we have the College of STEM,
and they're all sort of together.
We have the College of Humanities and they're all sort of together and they're
listed as separate colleges.
But we do a lot of things that overlap, and the more that we can find stuff that
overlaps, that we can do, I think makes a lot of our education far
more interesting.
So those are the things I like to do.
As I mentioned multiple times, I work at Framingham State.
So like Salem, we are a state level university.
We are not part of the UMass system, but we are also not part of the Community
College system.
We are the state level other system.
And this is a job that I've that I really wanted.
This was immediately after interviewing.
I knew that this was what I wanted to do, and I'm really excited about all of the
stuff I get to do.
And I know that your faculty are also really excited about the stuff that they
get to do.
I spend a lot of time actually talking to faculty at the other state institutions.
And all of us really, really love our jobs.
So when we are trying to figure out what we're going to be doing to help our
students, to benefit our students, we're doing these things intentionally
because we deeply care about our jobs.
So Framingham's core values that it lists on the website are as follows.
Some of these things are really easy to see how we're going to do that in our
classes, right?
Academic excellence, that's pretty easy.
Personal and professional growth.
If you are planning to be in this field, then your personal and professional
growth within this field sort of makes sense with classes.
But other things like public purpose, global stewardship, ethical citizenship,
inclusive and collaborative community, they may not seem like they fit quite as
well in a class space or in the classes that you're taking,
but I would argue that they do right.
I would argue that inclusive and collaborative community is important in
the workplace to be inclusive and collaborative for projects.
I would argue that public purpose and commitment,
it's sort of one of those things that matters when you are thinking about what
you want to do.
Global stewardship.
Well, if you're working in STEM, much of your global stewardship probably
has to do with people and the environment, right?
So we tend to do a lot of things that benefit people.
We tend, or at least try, we tend to try to do a lot of things that
benefit the environment an ethical citizenship.
While you may not think that, you know, ethics is necessarily a biological
concept, there are definitely things that you have
to think about when you're doing science about the ethics of what you're doing.
So I would argue that for me, all of these things sort of fall into
similar categories of things that I'm trying to address in my classroom.
All right, So ultimately, you all want a degree to go do something
with that degree, right?
Yes.
Yes, you're getting a degree because you want
to go do something with that degree.
OK.
So a lot of you said that you grew up in Massachusetts.
How many of you have family in Massachusetts?
A lot of people have family in Massachusetts.
How many people think that after they graduate,
they're probably still going to be in Massachusetts?
A lot of people.
So the Massachusetts workforce matters.
It matters to me.
It matters to your faculty, because a lot of the students that we are
teaching are going to go on to be part of the Massachusetts workforce.
So when we think about STEM, what does the Massachusetts workforce
need?
So I'm going to focus right now on biotech because that's what I have the
data for.
But this sort of is a broad statement about the Massachusetts workforce.
So if you were to use some software to search for biotech jobs in New England,
so I did this for 2022 and 2023, what you get is 78.
4% of those jobs in New England are in Massachusetts,
and 54% of those results are asking for you to have a bachelor's degree.
So a good chunk of my job is to ensure that my students are prepared for what
they want to do after.
And a lot of what they want to do after is this.
So when you do this search, these are the types of companies you come
up with.
So we've got Moderna, we've got Pfizer, we've got Johnson and Johnson.
How many of you have heard of at least one of the companies up there?
So these are all of the companies or many of the companies that you're seeing
posting jobs for the search that I was just talking about.
So again, these are the types of jobs that many of
my students want, and it's my job to prepare them to go
into whatever it is they want to do.
And like I said, many of them are interested in things
like this.
OK, so why does any of this matter?
So I'm going to read something from Wikipedia.
It is the Wikipedia page for the demographics of Massachusetts.
Massachusetts has the most Moroccan, Brazilian and Ugandans of any state in
the country in percentage of total population.
Massachusetts also has large communities of people of Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian,
Danish and Icelandic descent, Armenian, Lebanese, Turkish, Syrian, Palestinian,
Jordanian and Egyptian descent, and Italian and Spanish descent.
Massachusetts has one of the largest lucifone populations in North America,
so those are people who speak some form of Portuguese.
It has the largest Cape Verdean population and the second largest
Portuguese population after California of any state.
So this is just total population.
And as a percentage of the population, it's second only to Rhode Island for both
of those groups.
Fall River and New Bedford on the South.
Well, Ricky says South Coast, South Shore have large populations of
Portuguese, Brazilian and Cape Verdean heritage,
all of which are also prevalent in Taunton and Brockton areas.
And there's a growing Brazilian population in the Boston area and
especially in Framingham.
As of 2010, residents the age of 5 or older spoke the
following languages at home.
So 79% of them spoke English at home, 8% spoke Spanish, 3% spoke Portuguese,
2% spoke Chinese, 1% French, 1% French Creole, another 1% for Italian,
and another 1% for Russian.
So the state of Massachusetts has a really diverse population.
Regardless of what anybody wants to say, This is this is what our state looks like,
because this is what our state looks like.
These are the students that are coming to state institutions, right?
These are the students like you, all that are coming to state institutions
to get a degree.
So these are the populations of students that I'm teaching.
Oh, I'm sorry, I missed Vietnamese.
Oh, my formatting was very terrible there.
I apologise.
So in total, we have 21. 07% of Massachusetts population age 5 or
older speaking a mother language other than English.
So the Massachusetts State Universities, so these are all the sister institutions
to you all and Framingham, these schools, while they have differing focuses for
topics, some of them, right.
So we have some specialty schools like Mass Art that does art and art and design
and we have Mass Maritime Academy.
So those are sort of specialty schools comparatively,
but all of these institutions are structured to support the students in the
state of Massachusetts, which is the population I just described.
So we all knew what we were getting into when we agreed to our jobs.
I mean, the population, of course, changes over time.
But I've been at Framingham for how long, Laura?
Six years?
Six years.
I've been at Framingham for six years, and I knew what I was getting into.
I knew what populations I was going to be serving as a faculty member at a
Massachusetts State institution.
So what do we as faculty member folk, faculty members, focus on?
Well, how do we prepare students for the
workforce?
How do we close educational achievement gaps?
How do we increase graduation rates?
How do we give all of our students the opportunity to be successful,
regardless of their background?
So that's what we want as faculty.
We want all of our students to be successful.
If you do the research on this, there's lots of things that they suggest
faculty should do to help students be successful.
But one of the really big things they suggest is mentoring through research.
So these there are lots of papers.
These two papers I'm picking because their titles were sort of catchy.
So early engagement in course based research increases graduation rate and
completion of science, engineering and math degrees.
So they found that when students did research in their courses,
they were more likely than their peers who didn't to be successful and to
graduate.
Mentoring for inclusion.
The impacts of mentoring on undergraduate research, researchers and the sciences.
So this paper found that when students did research and had a research mentor,
they were more successful than their peers.
So what does that have to do with anything that I was just saying?
Well, I told you that I picked my job
intentionally.
I told you that I want my students to be successful.
So I spend a lot of time mentoring students through research.
I actually do a lot of it with Doctor Lorenzo.
This is a picture taken in her lab.
So for undergraduate research experiences, the things that I want my students to get
out of them, I want them to find something that
they're interested in that they can do research on.
I want them to have an opportunity to see how different information they've learned
can be connected.
And I want them to demonstrate a professional understanding to get skills
that they can bring with them to whatever it is they're going to be doing after
they're finishing their degree.
So find something that students are interested in.
There is lots of ways to do this.
One of the ways that I do this is to let my students pick their own products.
So there's sort of there's, there's guidelines and boundaries, right?
There's, there's only a, a subset of things that I have skill in.
And so they know what I have skill in and sometimes they mention things and I'm
like, there is absolutely no way I can do that.
Or they mention things and I say there's absolutely no way we can pay for that.
But I like to give them a lot of freedom in what they are going to be researching.
So I have a couple of students.
So I have one student right now and I've had a couple of students in the past work
on this hydrocarbon project.
So basically, there's some microbes that we know can
eat hydrocarbons like oils.
They tend to be marine microbes that we see in the water when there's oil spills,
which is unfortunate, but they're interested in this,
and they're interested in trying to figure out how to make these microbes
more efficient at eating oil.
So that's one of the projects that's actually running in my lab this semester.
So this student was interested in antibiotic resistance.
So I have another student in my lab right now who's focused on antibiotic
resistance, but this particular student wanted to
know if antibiotic resistant microbes existed on corn.
So if we think about corn, right, we grow a lot of corn in the US We don't
necessarily eat a significant amount of what we grow, but we grow a lot of corn.
And her question was, well, when we're growing corn,
are we ending up with the treatments we're using on farms?
Are we ending up with antibiotic resistant microbes?
So she swabbed the outside of the corn, the husk.
She peeled down the husk and swabbed the inside of the corn.
And she did some general soil samples to see, you know,
what kinds of microbes grow, how many of them grow?
Do different samples show different microbes?
I had another student who was interested in gut bacteria.
Gut bacteria is not my thing, but she was very excited about it.
So we looked into gut bacteria.
So we know that there's some microbes that are in your gut,
and some of them move from one place to another.
Sometimes it's OK, sometimes it's not great.
But we also know that different parts of your digestive system have different PHS,
right?
Your stomach pH is not the same as the rest of your body's pH,
because that would be really bad.
And your intestines have a different pH.
So she wanted to know how these microbes adapted to the different PHS.
So these are different types of projects that my students have found really
interesting and they've been able to pursue in my lab.
So here are some of my students in my lab space with their multi channel pipettes
doing Doctor Lorenzo's favorite thing, which is pipetting bacteria onto Petri
dishes.
I don't know.
I'm assuming it's your favorite thing because it's not my favorite thing.
So I'm giving it to you.
It's her favorite thing.
So I also mentioned creating opportunities to see how different
information is connected.
How many of you are interested in the environment?
How many of you are interested in organismal biology?
So multicellular things, how many of you are interested in what
happens inside a cell?
How many of you think that what happens inside a cell and how the environment is
functioning are deeply interconnected and easy to make the connection between the
two fewer of you, but some of you.
So last fall I had the opportunity to work with one of my colleagues who
technically her background is Ornithology, so she works with birds,
but she teaches a lot of our environmental biology and wildlife
management classes, which wildlife is generally multicellular,
bacteria are not.
We are not in the same field, but we did this really cool project where
students went out to her field sites and they collected salamanders and frogs and
then we swabbed those salamanders and frogs to look for particular microbes
that may be causing infection.
So we had the ability to have students do sort of their wildlife related tasks as
well as some cellular and molecular tasks to see how knowing both of those pieces
of information or collaborating with people so that you have that full set of
information can allow you to answer some questions.
So there happens to be fungi that sticks to salamanders and frogs skin,
so it prevents them from breathing basically.
And one of those fungi has not been found in the US but has been found in other
places.
And so there's lots of people who are out doing these swabs on salamanders just to
check to see has it arrived here yet, which sounds depressing,
but the fact that we have people looking that we can know about this early means
that we can figure out what we're going to do about it.
So that was another project that I did last fall.
It's a continual project, but I started it last fall.
And then there's professional demonstrating, professional understanding.
So often times my students will present their work, sometimes departmentally,
sometimes outside the department, so they all learn to make professional
posters.
And sometimes my students will participate in writing up their work.
So this is a review of oxidative stress.
So this is stress that cells experience because of oxygen.
And this review was written by several of my students and several of Doctor
Lorenzo's students.
We weren't really working in our lab spaces because this was over COVID.
So while we were looking at everybody through Zoom,
we were working on this paper and our students have published this paper and
our students also have different set of students also have another paper from
research that they've done that they have recently got gotten accepted.
So I really want my students to have this range of skills from understanding what
they're talking about to being able to professionally portray their
understanding and to do things that people are going to do in professional
settings.
Right.
In professional settings, we present posters, we give talks.
In professional settings, we write papers, whether we enjoy it or not,
that's a different question, but it's what we do, right?
It's it's part of what we do.
And so students having the opportunity to practice doing this I think is really
important.
All right, So what are my current projects?
So this is a continuation of the project that I had just mentioned had been
published.
So this is a joint project with Doctor Lorenzo.
So we are looking at different drugs or different medications.
So we're looking at anti inflammatories, anti cancers and steroids to see how they
affect a particular type of mutation.
So lots of different mutations can happen in a cell.
Doctor Lorenzo and I both actually came out of ADNA damage lab.
So in grad school, our lab focused on DNA damage and how
it's repaired.
So we have significant background in this and this is one of the projects that
we're working on.
So our students are looking at different things.
So one of my students is really interested in the steroids and a lot of
her students are looking at anti cancer drugs,
but they're working on similar projects.
And another set of professional skills, right,
is they have created their methods with professional software so that they can
create these images so they can do a visual method section.
Another current project I'm working on is trying to determine if we can create
textile dyes from bacteria easily in our lab space and jointly then create sort of
fashion pieces with the fashion design and retailing department.
So that was wild and broad, but basically when we dye fabric
commercially, we tend to use a lot of petroleum,
we tend to use a lot of water, and we often, and when I say we,
I mean humans, we often then dump a lot of things into
waterways and contaminate them.
So people have been looking for better ways to try to dye fabrics that are
better for the environment.
And one of those ways is using plant dyes, and another way is to use pigments from
bacteria.
So one of my students, really, so I talk about this in my microbiology
class, and one of my students in my microbiology
class was really excited about this project and she wanted to move it forward.
So this semester she is working on this project.
She's trying to figure out exactly which microbes make which kinds of pigments,
which pigments would be best for dyeing fabric,
and if she can figure out how to ensure that the fabric is, I'm sorry,
that the dye is colour safe, right?
So that it doesn't fade, it dies well, it doesn't wash out.
And then hopefully we're going to be able to talk to some people in our fashion
design and retail department.
So we have a department that focuses on fashion design, retail and retail,
fashion design, merchandising.
That was the other one.
And we have lots of students in those majors that create their own fashion and
have this really big, really cool fashion show at the end of
the semester.
So one of the things that we're interested in doing is trying to see if
we can sort of make this tie across different fields of having some students
work in the lab to create these dyes and to dye fabric.
Other students checking to see how the fabric is dyed and if that dyeing process
works.
And then other students determining how they can use those fabrics in order to
create really interesting and creative microbial driven.
Fashions.
So your faculty at all these state institutions are really excited about
what they do.
They're really excited about their research,
They're really excited about your research,
and they want you to be successful.
So I've talked a lot about things I like to do.
I talked a lot about how I try to mentor my students and things that are
beneficial for students, like research, right?
And you can get research in lots of different ways.
You can research with your faculty members here.
You can do research at other institutions, right?
There are summer research programs.
There are faculty who at other institutions who are looking for part
time technicians.
There are internships.
All of these things are going to give you research experience.
And as I mentioned before, research experience and having a research
mentor is shown to help students be successful.
And with that, I'm done.
Thank you all.
I just want to say like your, your mission to connecting with, you know,
your privileged students to mentorship, like particularly undergrads.
I just want to say I have so much respect for that because the difference you're
making, like just because a lot of these kids,
they come in and they feel like they don't belong and for you to like give
them that feeling that they belong.
I just have like so much respect for that.
Thank you.
Like I'm a veteran.
So I sort of we're kind of an overlooked group as well.
And a lot of times I felt like I didn't want here.
I felt like I didn't have a mentor here.
And so I just, I just wondered if you have like any
advice to me because I would love to kind of maybe do some mentorship for veteran
students, mentorship broadly for for students or
specifically here, I guess under undergrads in general.
So I haven't had tons of veterans through my courses.
I have had several and a couple of them were my advisees.
I will say that the Framingham, at least I can definitely speak to,
works really hard to have sort of a place that our veteran students can go,
a place that sort of can connect with them and has somebody who can sort of
advise them outside of their academic advisor.
So I think places like that are probably a really good place to start because they
usually have contact information.
And I will say Framingham also does a really good job of having groups set up
for students to be able to connect over varying topics, that being one of them.
But I, I completely agree that that there are
lots of populations that could benefit from mentoring.
That is a population that I can definitely mentor,
but not necessarily have similar backgrounds as them.
So I think that organizations and programs like the Veterans Centre that we
have at Framingham and other things like that might be the best option to sort of
connect with other other people who are looking to both mentor undergrads and
other undergrads at the particular institution.
This room is so long.
It's just like run back and forth with many students who are here listening.
What about two characteristics that you would say are ideal that students possess
that makes you enjoy?
So I think that a lot of the students that are coming through the Massachusetts
State institutions are really passionate about achieving their goals.
They may not necessarily know exactly what they need to do in order to achieve
their goals, but they're really passionate and they
have reason for why they want to finish their degree.
And being able to help students find a path to that particular outcome is one of
the things that I really enjoy.
My students in particular are also just very, very real.
They, they are never going to tell me things
just 'cause I want to hear them.
And when things go wrong, they're like, yeah, so that happened or Yep,
homework was due.
Didn't do it.
I was busy, sorry.
So I, I also really enjoy that.
So I think those are the two top things that I thoroughly enjoy about the
students I teach.
Nothing, nothing else.
Oh, you have a you have a question way on the
other side of the room.
Way on the other side of the room.
Sorry for holding over.
Thank you for such a wonderful talk and hanging on talking.
Sarah, I just wanted to ask, what do you think is an important step
especially just for any academic career and society to make sure these kind of
connections of diversity, every inclusion can be continued in the
workforce?
You may have to give me a hard question.
So I think a significant portion of the science community realises that problem
solving is pretty high up on what we do and that problem solving requires diverse
opinions and diverse perspectives in order to do it well.
So usually that's the angle that I come at it from,
is that when you have an and it's been shown people have done research on this,
right?
When you have a diverse group trying to solve a problem,
you are better than when everybody in the group has similar opinions and thoughts
and backgrounds.
So I think that making sure that you spend time with people who don't have
similar backgrounds as you, who look at things differently to ensure
that we are developing a broad science population of broad science field so that
we can in fact solve problems effectively.