 this is going to be in the final exam okay? This is likable science today. We're going to talk to a real-life dissertation defender person at UH in southwest as an ocean oceanography student who just finished her the defense of her dissertation about the logic ecology. Jessica Perleman, thank you so much for joining us today Jesse. Thank you for having me, glad to be here. So what's it like you know if you must feel somebody laid you got through the whole process five years of studying oceanography and now you are now you are a what'll I say a bar mitzvah a fountain bed you are a fountain bed. There you go yeah it feels really good to be on this side of everything five years is a long time but certainly worth it all. That's great so what was the five years like can you talk about the coursework you had to take and the research you had to do to get through it? Yeah so part of the oceanography department at UH I have to say I really didn't have a strong background in oceanography whatsoever and so taking all the courses was shedding a lot of light on entirely new topics for me so we you know in this program take the the whole suite of courses to familiarize yourself with not only the area of oceanography that you might be focused on but also kind of all the areas so that you can have a general understanding of of all the different topics that people might be focused on so that's physical oceanography chemical oceanography my area focused biological oceanography so just trying to trying to get a good understanding of you know what what this field is all about and then with UH it was about two years of coursework so a lot of focus on really learning the basics as you're developing your dissertation research and trying to figure out what specifically within all that suite of information that you're learning that you want to focus on and want to study. You must see you know a square foot of ocean as a different a different thing than than regular people see it you must see into that square foot and see all these things happening all these animals and microbes and what have you jumping up and down you're not like regular people anymore are you? No I guess it's like you know I hear people say if they study film you can ever just watch a movie again for what it is you always you're always looking deeper so yeah every time I get a chance to get in the water it's you know what am I seeing what what cool critters are in the water and where are they coming from and how am I disturbing them? Yeah right right right and so you must also have a feeling about how very precious the ocean is and how very fragile the ecosystem is I mean how do you feel about that after five years of a PhD? Absolutely yeah I think understanding a lot more about how ocean ecosystems operate and now understanding a lot more about the pressures and the potential threats to that natural state of operation it's it's concerning it's you know there's there's a lot of changes happening there's a lot of potential you know industries and and changes that might happen so one of the areas that I focused on a lot was a developing deep sea mining industry and so I guess in the back of my head throughout the last five years it's always been that question of you know what's going to happen to these precious ecosystems and you know we had a show but we had a show about that and it was one of the most interesting shows in oceanography that we've ever had it was about manganese nodules and about how this you know this industry is waiting on the sidelines that pounce on all the ocean floors in the world and mine these manganese and other and other you know other materials as well but how do you feel about that because I mean there are people who will make a lot of money doing it and what does it take to protect them and what is it you know what will you know wholesale manganese nodule mining do to the world? Those are all really great questions and ones that I've tried to grapple with for the last five years. It is a rapidly emerging industry and there's a lot of increasing demand for the kinds of metals that they want to mine from the deep sea floor so I think interestingly you know these manganese nodules aren't mind the same way that a lot of land-based minerals are mined and they're not drilled for in the way that you think that oil mining or oil drilling might happen. These nodules are sitting kind of just in dense fields in some areas on on the deep sea floor in parts of the ocean so one area in particular is this massive massive area between Hawaii and Mexico that spans about the width of the continental US and I think that's one of the the primary targets for this industry and you know they're figuring out the engineering details of how to physically lift all these nodules several miles up from the sea floor all the way to the surface and as scientists you know we're trying to ask the questions well what you know what harm is this going to have to the ecosystem how can we mitigate that harm and and even more basic questions of wait what even lives in these ecosystems these are areas that really haven't been studied all that much how you know how can we assess what kind of changes or you know threats might be occurring in these waters if we don't even know from a baseline standpoint what's there and and how they behave so yeah it's interesting to see this develop you know I'm I'm curious to see how quickly if at all this this industry really picks up then how it might compete with or rival or kind of add to the existing land-based mining for some of these minerals that are quite important yeah I mean manganese is only one of them there are a number of them and they could become you know in the 21st century really valuable at the same time the law of the sea is not all that well developed and it's not clear that the law you know say protects them or limits the people who would like to mine them and so you have the science moving on the one side you have industry moving on the other side and you have arguably the law of the sea moving you know to try to mediate between those things and of course concerns about the ecology in general right why did you go into this Jessica I mean and you know it sounds complicated and certainly five years is a biblical period of time so why did you why did you do this did you have some fascination you know with the ocean yeah absolutely I actually grew up nowhere near the ocean I grew up along Lake Michigan which you know seems like a freshwater ocean to some and so I think that maybe that distance from really ever being near the ocean is what drew me to really wanting to study it and to understand more about the animals that live there and and how they live and how they persist and research was always something that I really enjoyed as an undergraduate student having you know having the opportunity to work in different laboratory spaces and dabble in a little bit of research here and there and really feel like this is this is cool I didn't know you could do research as a career and I could ask questions for a living and try to answer them for a living and so you know some of those more basic reasons definitely led me into choosing to pursue you know a degree in oceanography and you know ending up out here perhaps a little bit by happenstance but I really wouldn't change it for the world I think falling into the areas of study that I have and getting to collaborate with folks at UH that I've been able to to do over the last five years has been just an immense undertaking and privilege for me so you know the difference between us is you get to ask questions and satisfy your curiosity for a living and they pay you for that I get to ask questions and they don't pay me for that there's a difference but we can be equally curious you know so when you look at it from the shores of Lake Michigan and you looked you know around the country and the world for that matter because this is you know global science for sure um what attracted you to UH what attracted you to SOAS um I have to say I um when I first found out about SOAS and the programs here and had the opportunity to to chat with and have some discussions with faculty it struck me that this was a place that was ripe with opportunities and you know getting getting to hear about the active research going on here and the importance of some of that research really I think that's what led me to feel like this was this was an area that I would like to study and this is a place that I would like to pursue this degree and um you know and I guess five years ago and I first had a chance to to talk with my my former PhD advisor about the kinds of projects that um that that particular lab was interested in and studying and the areas that I could come in and you know enhance that research and develop my own research um it just seemed like a really great learning environment with a lot of really great people um and I I'm about to took the risk and you can and you stay in touch with them through the whole period they're right there in Manoa and there's some of them doing long-term research projects and I'm thinking of Dave Carl you know the National Academy of Science who who um you know has um have been working on projects that go decades and decades and decades did you have to go out in the ocean did you have to do dive did you have to take those UH ships around and and drop instruments tell us about that yeah quite a bit actually um for a good part of my research um involved going out on two very long cruises um out into the middle of this area that I was just talking about that's that's being targeted for mining so it was you know a five or six day steam from the nearest port just to get out there and being out on these ships for 45 or 50 days at a time um dropping all sorts of instruments into the water and trying to assess the general ecosystem baseline if you have it just what's going on in these areas that really haven't been studied all that much and in terms of what we dropped in the water we dropped a lot of different instruments to measure different properties of water so um instruments to measure temperature and salinity um and productivity and oxygen um you know different variables that might affect the animals that um you know I personally was more interested in studying um we were able to tow really big nets behind ships to collect a lot of the small fish and crustaceans and squid um that we were aiming to study you don't eat them or anything no they uh they don't smell so great all the time when they come up but probably not as tasty as if fish you might be more used to eating okay um but yeah just you know a lot of fun being able to dabble in in different aspects of oceanography being out at sea collecting different um yeah different measurements different animals um one of the collections I was able to do quite a bit was acoustic data collection so kind of sending sound waves down into the water to reflect off animals and get a sense of where they are in the water column and how they're behaving um and so that was a lot of fun to try to use this tool that would allow us to sample a lot more space um and for a lot longer time than just being out there on a ship in the middle of the ocean uh yeah well I want to I want to drill down on that it's not it's not a pun I want to drill down on water column I want to drill down on pelagic and when I first saw the title of your phd which was um let me let me read this so I know what I'm saying it's uh oceanographic influences on pelagic ecology acoustics and combined sampling approaches I I don't know if you can put that to music actually you have to really work at it first thing I said pelagic is this some sort of skin disease a skin condition because if I watch mb and mbc long enough I'll find 10 modern high-tech cutting-edge drugs that will help me with my pelagic skin condition but it's not that at all is it what does pelagic mean not quite um pelagic means open ocean so um if you think about different habitats in the ocean you might think of coral reefs or um habitats at a right offshore that you can see just you know from hopping in the water when you think about pelagic it's when you move further offshore and suddenly the water gets quite a bit deeper and you have these increasing expansive expansive volumes of of water that have no no boundaries in the horizontal and might be further and further away from the seafloor um that's what we're referring to when we say pelagic so it's just the kind of the whole water column nowhere near shore nowhere near the seafloor you know I was talking before about that you know one foot square of water but you're not putting your arms around that you're putting your arms around the whole thing and actually it's it's beautiful to think of it that way isn't it when you're putting your scientific arms around the whole enchilada you know it's it really it really is a beautiful experience so it is yeah a lot to take in yeah why that why did why did you turn in that direction I imagine you had a meeting with one of your former advisors because right now they're all former advisors former advisors and former committee members hi guys you can call them by their names everything so yes so you sat down with somebody and and and he said Jessica you know what about doing ocean our oceanographic influences on pelagic ecology is that what happened or did you wake up at two in the morning and decided uh maybe somewhere in between it was maybe more a year or two of taking all the questions buzzing around and trying to fit them together into a coherent story of several chapters so with a dissertation you have you know three or more chapters of of different projects and trying to fit them all into a topic or a category hence the very long name of of a dissertation as you have found out yeah but I I think a lot of the questions that I was interested in and that my lab was focused on fell into this this really large habitat the pelagic ocean and part of the reason for that is there's just not been a whole lot of focus on studying some of these habitats as you can imagine they're they're quite hard to get to you know takes several days just to steam there in a ship they're a bit out of sight and out of mind for a lot of people and and you know the amount of money and time and you know resources that it takes to get out there makes them quite difficult to study and so being able to contribute research in an area that certainly needs it and is certainly important to study but has perhaps been a bit neglected overall I found to be a good reason to pursue it oh yeah well so um let's talk about influences on pelagic ecology you you wanted to identify them you wanted to measure them what are the influences on I know we only have a few minutes but but what did you find what are the ones that count yes that is a great question so I was interested at different scales of influence and so thinking at the scale of this whole massive region that I've mentioned before you know what what oceanographically drives the behaviors of some of the animals that live in this really big region and at that really broad level I found that one of the biggest drivers is something called an oxygen minimum zone and that's a really big feature in this region and it's basically an area of the water column that has really really really low oxygen and so it's as you can imagine quite hard for a lot of animals to live there because it's just not enough oxygen and so while you do have some animals especially adapted to living there it drives the behaviors of a lot of you know different communities living in that area maybe makes them live at shallower depths so they are not you know migrating too deep into these really low oxygen waters so at a really broad scale we found that that was an important oceanographic influence and at smaller scales um one of the things we found really important was what we call mesoscale features or or features that are on the scale of just a couple you know 10 to 100 kilometers and that includes features such as eddies and eddies you can think of as these these water masses propagating across this big region rotating bodies of water that have their own unique properties to them and can affect you know a particular area for a finite period of time perhaps a week or a month and we found that a lot of animals are actually responding to the passage of these eddies coming through this region at smaller spatial and smaller time scales so in a in a broader context putting this into something like deep sea mining that we were just talking about if you really want to understand how mining might be affecting this ecosystem or changing the behaviors of these animals you have to understand that the natural scales of variability and their behavior and so that was what what we were aiming to do wow that really really sounds really interesting and when you think about you know the different areas in the world and how it might be different from one to the other and how it might have participated or influenced the the evolution of the animals that are in the water calm you know I'm sure that when you go and look at them today in a snapshot kind of way you have to think about where they've been for the last hundred thousand years and how they have evolved and therefore how the oceans have changed for them in the last time wow that's pretty exciting and how they might change in the future right yeah yeah wow exciting so okay so how long is it to take you to write the dissertation you know it's a threatening word for anybody who hasn't done it in fact I would say it's a threatening word for everybody who who has done it yeah the the feelings it brings up are are always going to be there uh for me I I kind of spread it out across the whole process so I I never had to sit down for months and months at the end just to just to write it all I kind of took it one project at a time did all of the you know the research collected the data did the analysis wrote up a chapter moved on to the next maybe worked a little bit on the other projects here and there but definitely spread it out over probably about two and a half or three years um is that is that common is that difficult I yeah I think there's a mix I think part of it just depends on on how things work out and how your data collection and and research flow just just turns out um and I was fortunate that it that it turned out in a way that allowed me to just progress through each of these chapters in a in a more fluid way I think then trying to cram at the end and just put it all together so so are you expected to send drafts to your advisors um and and connect the dots with them and get some ideas about where to go next on this is is it a sort of an exchange of ideas is a collaborative effort in that way absolutely yeah it's very collaborative uh between you and your committee and you and your co-authors um you know I say me here but certainly none of this was done alone and and all of the ideas and analysis and research have had you know lots of exchange among um all of the people involved and um you know yeah there everything that goes into a dissertation is it is a team effort but at the end of the day it is you know you as a PhD student who who has to really do the branch of the work and put it all together and connect all the dots um obviously getting input along the way and it's your signature you're at the end of the day you're the one who wrote it and you're the one who has to stand by and defend it you know yes exactly that is why they call it a defense yes well I'm interested in that I mean I went to law school and we had defense in law school so you know my my impression though is that when you finish a degree like this and you focus on Bellagic ecology and and the instrumentation and so forth um that is actually a narrow aspect of the work you have done because in the process you have learned about all kinds of alternative and additional things about the way animals work the way the oxygen works the way the sea swells and eddies work um and so you're you're only covering putting it this way you're only covering a small amount of what you've learned and you have learned lots more than what you write about am I right yes you're 100 correct it at the end of the day it feels like you've done a lot more work than you're really able to kind of put in in the booklet at the end of the day and even less so that you're able to present in a you know 45 minute defense at the end of it all so everything you learn along the way all of the you know the methods and the tools and the different topics some that you might you know go down one route and decide you know that's not working or you know you don't want to pursue that and there's a lot of trial and error that nobody sees at the end of the day it's just the finished dissertation so how long is it what six seven thousand pages what oh a couple hundred pages that might take a bit more than five years how many chapters uh mine is about five chapters there's three data chapters and then a introduction chapter and a conclusion chapter and I think that's maybe the the standard length okay and the the English has to be perfect um that I know that from talking to people who've taken phc's they really have to be careful about every word and you know the grammar the the punctuation all that uh what about the footnotes um is it loaded with footnotes you have a separate bibliography of footnotes uh definitely a lot of appendices and supplementary information and and a ton and tons and tons and tons of references you know you pull thoughts and ideas and comparisons from a lot of different published work and um yeah there there's a lot more than just the actual research that goes into it so what are the footfalls you want to avoid in writing and dissertation I mean I suppose you you don't want to misquote uh a source or reference an authority um you don't want to come to the wrong conclusion uh about you know how to how to put it all together what else I mean when what what are the things you're trying to steer clear of yeah that's a great question and part of the reason um that it's nice to have a committee to you know to go through everything with and make sure that you are making the right conclusions or at least that everybody's in agreement uh on those conclusions um I think when you you know if you go to publish those individual chapters and journals um you have this whole peer review process and so you actually have people completely external to what you've been working on that might come in and and have you know a lot of gripes perhaps with what you've written that neither you or your co-authors or committee may have had and so um there's a lot of uh not really knowing what you know whether what you've written is um incorrect in the eyes of somebody else until you go through that process and um certainly also maybe you're realizing mistakes that you and your committee who have been looking at the same work for several years now might have missed so you definitely want to go into that review process trying to make sure you've dotted all your eyes and crossed all your t's but um at the end of the day there's there's some amount of just not knowing until you until you go through that process yeah but you know when you when you say peer review and you say well these people have to agree um that your work is right that your conclusions are right and defendable and so forth don't you have the risk of somebody out there in the scientific community going to say Jessica you're all wet isn't that possible absolutely and you know to some extent nobody's ever right and you know we're all wrong to some extent and I think there's a there's a uh a skill to the way that you write a scientific publication because it is really difficult to say with absolute certainty what you found and what your conclusions are are you know are what they are and so there's um there's definitely a certain way of writing that leaves room for error that leaves you know a lot of your conclusions might be suggestions for example because you you know at the end of the day you really might not be able to prove with absolute certainty what you are trying to stay and I I think there's rarely a circumstance where you are truly able to prove something as 100 percent fact but the idea is that you are advancing science that's the mission isn't it you're making a material contribution to the state of science in this area isn't that what it is it is yeah that's correct and you know you you do as much as you can and um you know try to put that information out into the world to be used to be you know put into management or you know just to kind of expand the basic knowledge of the field that you're studying so um you know inherent in all of this is that when you finish a paper like this and you go through the the process um you get published right uh so where is this going to be is it going to be in the the food section of the star advertiser if it could be on civil bead or maybe pacific business news where will i be able to find your work uh well you can find the whole dissertation on the pro quest website um they published uh entire dissertations and then each of the individual chapters will be published uh in different uh oceanographic journals so yeah a handful of different journals that i can certainly share the links with but um okay well that's great so now what about tuning it up you know so you've you've done it you defended it you got through um you're going to get your phd soon enough you're going to get published on these various sites i was only kidding about the star advertiser if we saw if we saw your dissertation dissertation on the star advertiser i for one would need smelling salts um but but what about tuning it up you know what about you stumble into something six months down the road a year down the road and in the course of other work that you do wait a minute you know i want to add something want to change something i want to expand this uh i want to make a uh you know uh um something else about it another paper or an expansion of the existence what about that does that happen yeah i i think that's more common than not uh especially when you become such an expert in in whatever area of expertise that you've spent the past five or more years studying i think you do relate a lot of what you do down the line your future research back to what you know so well from that dissertation work and i think a lot of new ideas for projects and a lot of expansion of the work that you might have done during a phd into your future research is is probably more common than not and i'm excited to try to answer some of the questions that we weren't able to answer along the way just in in the five years that i had to uh to conduct all the science that i did during my phd and so i i think that's something to look forward to so uh you were telling me before the show that you've got a job out of all of this and you will be paid for your curiosity and it's a research job my right it is yes it's a continuation of the academic experience except you this time you know you get paid for your time um and your product and so what what is that job what is it going to be like and and let me go further and say how do you see your career unfolding you know in in a logic ecology um all great questions uh i'm now working at the noah fishery center at fort island so it's the pacific island fishery science center and i'm able to take a lot of the skills and tools i learned during my phd to answer some similar questions and some slightly different questions uh particularly about some um you know local fish communities or on hawaii and the u.s pacific islands and trying to understand um you know what what are the oceanographic influences on on some of these different communities of animals and then also continue expanding those questions into the pelagic uh you know everything is connected so a lot of a lot of what happens to near shore communities has uh you know influences or is influenced by what's happening to offshore pelagic communities and so trying to couple and better understand the interactions between you know what's happening close to shore and what's happening offshore is it's definitely an interest moving forward and um hopefully something that my career will allow me to continue to pursue and ask questions about for the next uh hopefully foreseeable future 100 years or so yeah so what about these uh former committee members and former advisors you know the ones you now call by their first names uh would you have contact with them would you have uh you know either formal or schmooze contact with them going forward certainly yeah i think um you know one of the nice things about being able to work with the committee for so many years is you build up a a network of people who are experts in the various topics that you're also interested in and so having having a rapport with them already and having collaborated with them already makes it a lot easier um you know to both collaborate and continue interacting with them in the future whatever future projects come up and and just you know interesting topics in oceanography that you want to discuss with people that you've been able to discuss for the last five years or so um i look forward to keeping those connections oh yeah that's great you know and and of course uh i'm sure in the last five years you've had contact with other people doing other research and other institutions uh in the u.s and elsewhere and um so part of being a scientist uh wow the people call you scientists and everything i bet they do i'll call you scientists feels very formal so uh you know when you have when you have when you grow this community of people who are you know also into the same area or similar areas of research now you have a a global network and you can send your papers to them they'll send their paper it's just what it's like i mean how much how much connection connectivity do you have now and how much connectivity do you think you'll have going forward uh that's a great question and and i've actually been able to have quite a bit of connectivity uh during my phd um some of the biggest collaborators that i've had are actually folks over in new zealand that i connected with just out of you know curiosity and having questions and you know choosing to reach out to folks and i've found that building connections um through that that uh communal curiosity has been really really rewarding and i think the people that i've had a chance to work with both throughout the u.s and internationally will be people i continue to work with um for years and years and i think that's that's a good precedent for how i'd like to go about expanding that network of of people down the line and into the future yeah and and that's a a measure of your success um the quality of your community is a measure of your success you heard it here on think tech but um let me let me just ask you one more question and i i'm trying to put myself in the room with you when you when you finish a few weeks ago when you finish you know your defense and everything so you have a committee you're in the room um are you sitting or standing and if you're standing you have to stand in attention uh if you're sitting can you have a glass of water with you um and do they sit and how many of them are there and you know what's the attitude in the room what's the the tone uh and tenor of the conversation so i think that varies depending on the committee and and even perhaps the university um for me there is well there's the public defense so that's giving a big presentation to um to the public and uh so that's uh you know a well-prepared presentation and you're standing and walking around and and trying to answer people's questions and then once that completes everyone leaves the room and then you're right it's just you and your committee and it was about an hour and a half of the committee asking me questions and um really more just having a discussion with me about the broader implications of all the research um additional questions that people hadn't thought of previously or or interests and um i have to say it was a lot more uh it was a lot more of a discussion than i had expected it was nothing like the comprehensive exams that you take two or three years into your degree when you're just getting drilled on everything you know about oceanography and it really feels like you're the expert and you're having a conversation with your peers about all of the research that you've done um and you know we were sitting we were standing we were joking and um yeah it was a it was a great atmosphere to be honest it's great and and i have the sense that when you when you are drilling down in that conversation with them on something that you've been focusing on in your research actually you know more than they do it's a good feeling it's a reversal from feeling like you don't know nearly as much as anybody else to actually i do know a bit more about this particular topic at this moment i what a great experience in life i i envy you uh you know your success your achievement and your future it's wonderful to talk to you jessica and uh i hope we meet again and i wish you well in all particulars thank you so much jay i really appreciate you having me and it's been a great chat jessica perlman and and please call her doctor thank you thank you so much for watching think tech hawaii if you like what we do please like us and click the subscribe button on youtube and the follow button on vimeo you can also follow us on facebook instagram twitter and linked in and donate to us at think.kawaii.com mahalo