 Good morning. Sorry that my glasses have not turned the color yet. It's going to turn pretty soon. So I'm the only cool guy with sunglasses in the room the whole day. Welcome. We're here to celebrate our newly promoted associate professors, Mohit Verma, Maria Onkinowski, David Johnson's not here yet. Luis Salores is here. Congratulations to your success. Now you don't need to listen to deans anymore. So this event, we're listening to each of our newly tenured associate professors' success stories, how they enjoy their research, and their reflections on the path to their successes. Each success story is unique. So I'm really looking forward to listening to those. To start with, I want to introduce Professor Nate Moser, head of ABE department, to introduce our first speaker. Thank you, Wayne. So yes, I'm Nate Moser. I'm the department head in agricultural and biological engineering. And it's my great pleasure this morning to introduce Dr. Mohit Verma, a newly promoted associate professor. As Dean Chen mentioned, all of the speaker's day are asked to reflect a little bit on their path to get here. So I'm going to give a biographical details for Mohit. But I want to brag on him just a little bit. Some things that, in my reflection on his time here at Purdue University, that's led to some of his successes. And I'll sort of point to two sort of key things. Number one, Mohit is very entrepreneurial. So he thinks about where there are opportunities and how to go after opportunities and do so aggressively, whether that is in research, whether that is in teaching, whether that is in developing teams, whether that is going after grant funding. He has this entrepreneurial mindset, and he may even talk a little bit about his startup company that he's founded as well. Part two that I would say, in my reflection of Mohit, that he does extraordinarily well is that he is a team builder and a collaborator. So you may hear a little bit in his reflections about how he's formed very diverse teams in approaching research, diverse in terms of backgrounds, in terms of expertise, in terms of organizations that are involved in the research that he does. So these are public-private partnerships. He has developed teams that involve foundations, companies, faculty from multiple colleges, all as part of bringing together teams that do this effectively, and he may speak a little bit about the Purdue Applied Microbiome Science Center as well, which he is a member of in addition. So these are some qualities, I think, that are part of his road to success, and it's my great pleasure to welcome him here to tell his story, and please join me in welcoming him. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for that kind introduction, Nate. As you all know it by now, my name is Mohit Burma. I'm now an associate professor in Ag and Biological Engineering, also have a courtesy in Biomedical Engineering. And a reflection of first, how did I get here, right? And I've written about this in a blog called lifeofhoprofessor.com, so that's my blog. And one of the most viewed articles is this one right here, What Is Tenure? Because people are curious, I think, just from the public, and even students maybe don't really understand what professors do and so on. That's really what's got me to start this blog. So there's some foreign articles there. What I'll highlight is this graphic over here, which kind of shows you a typical path, and that's pretty much my path as well, for becoming a faculty member, starting with an undergrad, and you'll see the stick figure gaining more and more credentials. So you'll see it starts with a degree. My degree was in nanotechnology engineering from the University of Waterloo in Canada. And the red kind of bars are the milestones. On the y-axis it's relatively how hard it is to get across those milestones, from my perspective at least. And after an undergrad you go on and specialize to a PhD. I continued on at the University of Waterloo, focusing on nanotechnology. I have a PhD in chemical engineering, and it's become very typical to go and try to get a postdoc position, which I did at Harvard with George Whitesides for a couple of years. And during that time you get to learn a wide variety of things, not just your technical skills, advancing the science, but in my case also how to communicate better, and the importance of communication really, both oral and written. And I think the biggest hurdle really is from that point, trying to get a tenure track position, because typically the number of jobs available versus the number of candidates, the ratio is pretty challenging. At least that's what I found. So when I landed a position here at Purdue, that was one of the biggest achievements and that's why I put that as a very high milestone. And after you get here, Purdue is actually a very supportive environment because they want you to succeed. That's what I found. And most universities are like that. So they have all kinds of resources to help you get there, get tenure basically. And that's where one of the key things is now you become a mentor, right? So you train other students and that ranges all the way from undergrads, grad students, postdocs. We have some visiting scholars as well. And once you get that, you get tenure hopefully. So that's really, that's been my journey so far. And the future typically goes on to expand your network, build some international collaborations, and hopefully become a professor maybe for life, who knows, we'll see. So that's been the journey so far. More details are on the blog if people are interested. One of the key things, and Nate kind of mentioned this, is once I got here, how did I succeed, right? And it builds on really finding out what's going on at Purdue. Like for example, I wasn't really familiar with agriculture and biological engineering until I got here. So I got to learn a lot about the problems in agriculture, the advances we can make from biological engineering and apply it there. Got to connect with a lot of colleagues on campus, across colleges for sure, within the college as well. And my approach had really been first just to learn what's going on. And one of the kind of key moments happened very early once I got to Purdue. It was at a networking event actually between the College of Agriculture and College of Engineering. And they're trying to kind of initiate new programs. I was sitting next to Aaron Ault, who is a feedlot operator. So he operates cattle feedlot. And he was kind of just complaining about this problem that he has about his cattle getting sick. He doesn't know which antibiotics to use. And I was like, there must be a solution. There wasn't. So we're like, okay, why don't we do it? As an assistant professor, you have some leeway into what you want to stop working on and we had that freedom. So that was like a key moment to get started on my lab. Start working on an important problem because you know that there really is a problem if you come up with a solution, someone will actually use it and it'll make a difference. You're of course validated that it was a big enough problem and it was. And that led to very initially some Purdue internal support. And those are, on the plot over here, what you see is the x-axis is just the time since I got here, those are really just submission dates. The y-axis, these are just successful awards. The y-axis is cumulative award. And that red line over there is basically what a typical startup package is for the faculty members to get here. So the initial dots you see, those are internal funds or small external funds. Just to prove your concept, show that this is actually an interesting project, interesting idea. A lot of these are internally supported. And then you'll see some big jumps. That are happening, the laser pointer isn't great, but you'll see some big jumps that happen on the y-axis. For example, one of the biggest ones was when we got this USDA grant through NIFA IV, that same problem, the cattle problem, the trying to solve the boba and respiratory disease problem. And that was a million dollars. And that really kind of set me up to be like, okay, we can actually get external funding. We can build a sustainable lab. And once we got that, we had a platform technology, a technology that could do diagnostics out in the field. It could be applied to a variety of different applications. So we took it from cattle held during the pandemic. We looked at looking at COVID-19, so detecting SARS-CoV-2, for example. And those were some big kind of external sources. We expanded that to a new innovative award looking at viruses in cattle as well, just kind of expanding the breadth, also looking at antibiotic resistance genes. And then kept building it towards other animal diseases. For example, in this case, the other big one is African swine fever, which is in pigs, and it can be a big problem if it ever gets here. It is a problem internationally. And this is kind of where my tenure package would have gone in, so that's what it was evaluated on. When I initially joined Purdue, there weren't really, and I think this is still true, every case is evaluated on a case-by-case basis. There's no real numbered or at least firm numbers, but at least unofficially, what I heard was, you should at least try to match what Purdue is starting you off off. So at least get to the startup level. If better, that's even better. I'm not sure the deans in them can comment on that news, but at least that's what I was told. So my milestone was at least meet that red mark and go a little bit beyond, and we were successful in doing that. And most recently, what we've done is expanded this towards looking at taking a more one-held approach, expanding beyond just livestock, looking at other animals, wildlife, and so on, and see if we can do surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 using similar technologies. All of this would not be possible if I was just doing this by myself, and that's what Nate commented on. So almost half of our work is things that we are expert at and we do kind of ourselves. The other half is basically things that I'm working with collaborators, working with co-PIs, because they actually have the expertise of animal sciences, for example, of wildlife sciences, working with industrial partners. So all of that, it's been really fun because that's when you know that you're working with a relevant problem. Otherwise, as engineers, this is very common. We come up with really fancy tools which maybe don't really have a use. We try to find a use. So we try to work the other way around and that's been working out well for us. And some of the examples I've already mentioned, so for example, the BRD project is listed on the left over there, where we're actually going. And one of the things we also do is take it from all the way from the lab. So we're developing new technologies and go out and test it in the field. So we're doing the whole scale and that's only really possible if you have the right partners in place. And you can see we've worked with industrial partners as well for COVID-19. That was quite an experience because it was a very rapid development that helped us get work done that would have taken several years in maybe nine months, six to nine months. So that really helped develop the technology itself and that expanded on to applications in animal health but at the bottom you also see for food safety. So we're actually helping the food safety industry as well to help detect what kind of risks might be present. What we're kind of, and all of this, of course, I'm not the one doing all the work. It's all the grad students and the trainees and undergrads and postdocs. I have a limited list really of the people that have gone through the lab over here. This photo is also outdated because we haven't had the time to update it but really it's been fun to work with all the grad students, all the postdocs, undergrads, visiting scholars and so on and they're really the ones who do the work, right? They're the ones who actually go out in the field, develop new technologies and really the credit goes to them to execute everything. Especially as we're moving more and more towards testing things out in the field, a lot of people are really unfamiliar. Like I'm also unfamiliar. So we're learning together. They're learning the skills to test these technologies, get feedback, work with stakeholders. So it's been a learning process but it's been very valuable to be able to do this. So really the credit goes to all of these people and the collaborators which it's a long list so I won't mention detail but it does cut across multiple different colleges. Where do we go from here? So as I mentioned, my starting story was really because there was a problem that needed to be solved and that's how we started doing this research. We've kind of built upon that and I have a startup company that has taken the technology to develop in my lab and trying to commercialize that. So really turning into a faculty entrepreneur, Chrissy Diagnostics is the startup. We're trying to build that up. Our initial market will probably be towards companion animals and we're building on that. We've raised some money in investment. We're raising more money and trying to hopefully get a product out next year. Is there a goal? So you'll probably see a little bit more of that. And on the research side of things, what we've done is we've done applications on for example animal health, plant or environmental health from a food safety perspective, a bit of human health and now we're also looking at some wildlife health. In the long term, what I would like to do is kind of try to start integrating these things, take a one health approach, see how factors from one system affect the other and how we can control them to try to, for example, limit the spread of antibiotic resistance, detect new emerging infectious diseases earlier and try to build systems that are smarter than what we have available. Now try to do it out in the field rather than depending everything on a lab-based method. And to do this, we're expanding our tool set so the things that we've already developed that we're good at, we're building that further but also looking into new tools such as the AI-based tools. I mean, this image, for example, was generated using Adobe Lester AI tools, right? So that is taking off and we're just kind of starting to get into understanding how we can leverage that for our applications. And that is it. So thank you everyone for joining. Appreciate your time. Thank you for having me. Back on. I think we've got time for a question or two if I'm right. So are there anybody from the audience with a question? Could you go back to your chart that your years versus research awards? Yes. So the Dean's office would like to see the end has the aspirational trend. But of course, you don't have to listen to the Dean's office anymore. When I see this flattening off, hey, what are you doing? It doesn't include the submitted stuff, so. Other questions. Hello, congratulations on the start of your startup, but also your promotion. What tips do you have for aspiring faculty entrepreneurs on how to balance the demands of both worlds? Yeah. It's not easy, that's for sure. And I was fortunate because my startup aligns quite well with what we do in the lab. And everything is relatively streamlined in the sense that we're developing technologies for our research for the lab and we license that out. The startup comes over here and turns it into a product, right? So that part is pretty clear and Purdue has good systems for making sure there are conflicts of interest that are in place and so on. So what I did was actually Purdue had an entrepreneurship learning academy that really helped figure out whether you have a market or not, whether you're in the right place or not. And that's a big, big aspect of entrepreneurship that we as faculty members don't really get trained on typically. So I encourage people to look through that if you haven't already. That's pretty light-paced, so it's easy to manage. They give you lunch every week. So, and then from there, we had internal support first, so we raised some funds from Purdue. Things are changing at the time, it was Accelerator. Having those funds in place is also beneficial because it helps you get the startup set up properly from the legal and IP perspective. Once that's done, I would actually recommend getting outside help for managing the business aspects and that's what we did. That was actually a Purdue PRF kind of recommendation. They helped connect to the right people. We worked, we interviewed a few and then we found a person who had business expertise but also, in my case, the animal health expertise which is what we needed and several years, a lot more years than I did. So that really helped because now he can take care of all the business aspects and I can focus on the technology aspects. That works out quite well, so. Thank you. All right, thank you Mohit. We'll move on to our next speaker. Thank you.