 Good afternoon and thanks for joining us in likable science here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host Ethan Allen and with me today on likable science are Joanne Cogbel and Kaikulini McCarthy both from Shyamalan University, a biology faculty member and a student. And we're going to be talking about Shyamalan and particularly how Shyamalan really supports its students through a very intrusive advising experience sometimes it's referred to. Before we do that I want to sort of make a little metaphor here as or something I ran into the other day that I thought was pretty interesting. These ants, a particular species of ants in Africa exhibit a deep sort of caring for one another that has not at all been seen before. These ants will raid termite mounds to get termite grubs and eggs to eat and of course the termites defend their mounds and bite at the ants and in some cases it injures them very badly and injured ants will actually be picked up by their comrades and carried back to the nest and cared for by other nurse ants basically. These nurse ants actually lick their wounds and this apparently is very helpful. These ants recover a good deal 90% of the time whereas if they are too badly injured they won't let themselves be carried back and they end up dying but it's very interesting how sort of an intensive support system like that can actually be so helpful and when I saw that and was thinking about this show I was like oh there's a very little parallel there because Chaminade as I understand it does have very intensive support for its students right? Yes absolutely. So I mean most larger universities I mean I recall I saw my advisor a few times I would go in during office hours. Same for me. Intermittently yeah but I mean I've almost no memory of the person you know but it sounds like something's very different at Chaminade right? It's one of the benefits of being a small university I think. So maybe you can tell us a little bit about how you found Chaminade and what your experience was. Yes so I went to High School at Sacred Hearts Academy right across the street and so Chaminade was always familiar to me as well as the fact that both my brothers graduated from there and my mom obtained her master's from there and so that's why I decided to go to Chaminade but I had no idea what I wanted to major in so I picked biology since that was my favorite class in high school and freshman year I was lucky enough to have Dr. Cogbel as my biology professor and she took an interest in the freshman students and what we want to do with our careers as well as what do we just like in general to help guide us to what we eventually want to do and I told her that I was interested in science in the medical field and she encouraged me to try a summer research program and so I heated her advice and tried out for a program which I got into and then I went away to spend that summer but unfortunately didn't finish that. Well but you always learn something in these summer research experiences I used to run research experience for undergraduate program at University of Washington had students coming in every summer and yeah they had different experiences some loved it and went on some thought it was just so so and decided they were going to pursue other other things yeah some students couldn't hack the pressure of. I mean one of the things that I think all of us at Chaminade are very proud about Kaiklin in particular is although she was away she did reach out to us before she made the decision to come home it was the first time away and it was a little bit daunting I think and she reached out both to me and her current PI in the lab which is Dr. Claire Wright and it was about maybe four or five days of discussion back and forth we of course tried to convince her that she could do it but she decided to come home what we're really proud of her about and then I think why she's where she's at today is that she didn't let that experience stop her from trying again and reaching out and and pushing her comfort zone the following year and and it's been a great success for her. Yeah wonderful and so so this first summer you were you were at the National Institute of Diabetes Digested Diseases and Kidney Diseases or something is that the acronym? Yes I was at NIDDK for the summer working in this woman's lab who is actually a physicist and she got into biological research and so I spent the summer living in D.C. and working there and I had a really amazing time and experience that I wouldn't have otherwise been able to get. Right that's I mean it's the value of these kind of research experiences right that you can broaden your horizons you can go off and work on problems that you would otherwise never even know existed right and you really I mean firsthand experience in research is so valuable for students to get there's there's I think it's so different from being what she's saying the teaching lab like how would you compare your teaching labs which are all wonderful but how would you compare being in a teaching lab what for your regular classes as opposed to the the summer experiences you've had? I think in a teaching lab there's kind of more structure to things versus in the research world you see that nothing goes according to plan a lot of experiments don't work you have to think and troubleshoot through things that other people have never done and you do that very collaboratively with your PI and all those things but it's so different because you really have to think and put in extra time and so much other work. Right whereas you know you know sort of standard organized laboratory experience a lot of the bugs have been worked out right there may be a few variables that are going to jitter around but basically a whole lot of the sort of food fraud has been cut out. Yeah absolutely I mean we do especially at Shamanod in our upper division labs and we can do this because we're small we have come away a little bit from the more cookie cutter type of lab work to try to give all of our students an experiential learning experience that our students who go away get but it's still not the same right it's still a little bit more of a safe zone and and you don't have as much time they have other classes that they're worried about when they go away to these experiences that's all they're doing right and it broadens their horizons and lets them really see that what their professors are telling them in their classes have relevance in the real world yeah yeah that that authentic research and actual research getting involved in that is it can be really life-altering for some students and it can it can do so in a variety of ways now I've had students tell me after doing a summer RV experience you know I'm I'm quitting science now I'm going to go into law or whatever that's that's fine I mean better they do it then than they wait two years into graduate school and decide that no this really isn't working out and they've you know spent a lot more time and energy for something that's not not that they're liking so yeah we've had quite a few students a large portion of students come into biology and they're going to go to medical school you know that's I was the same way as an undergraduate student going to medical school I'd leave kai kalini you were going to go to medical school and we have a good portion of them that when they try research it was not what they expected and they end up kind of changing their focus some they love it but they say okay I actually never thought about doing research as a doctor I think I'm going to do that and they still want to go to medical school then we have our other students who realize you know I don't really have the mentality I think to be an MD and I think I want to do graduate school instead one of our students who are she's an alumni Devin Roster first her name she's currently an environmental planner in Michigan she got her master's over there she was one of these students who was all over the place she loved everything and she was part of our Hogan entrepreneurs program which is a certificate program that's an enrichment program for students who want to learn about business and it puts them in touch with Hawaii business owners and let them figure out how to start you know asking the questions of how do I you know pursue starting something up she loved that she goes I'll do my own business she wanted to go to medical school she wanted to go into the Peace Corps I mean at some point in her four years with us she was everywhere and she did do research with Dr. Helen Turner our dean and she loved that she was all I'm gonna get a PhD and it was her senior year I believe I took her with me to an undergraduate research conference so all of our students who do research we encourage them to send an abstract in the fall there are two conferences SACNIS and ABR CMS and we say pick one and then we find funding for them to go so they don't have to pay for it out of their pocket and I usually attend with them just to help navigate the whole process and they present a poster so they have a whole poster symposium they have professionals come around and ask them questions about their research and judge them and so they get kind of that real-world experience and she went with we said we want you to go she didn't have any research to present but we do every once in a while with some of our students we say we think this will benefit you because there's hundreds of federal government agencies there and graduate schools that are looking to recruit and they'll go in the exhibitors hall and listen at work let's get you out there and see all the opportunities and I'll never forget her coming back from that she she found herself at that conference and she goes I know what I want to do and and she had a love for the environment but she loved science and she loved policy and she goes that's I'm doing that I met these PhDs and these fields and this is what I'm going to go to graduate school for and she's doing it and she loves her job but I remember that aha moment for her that as an instructor and an advisor is really enriching and again this is this is a nice example of how this rich sort of student advising intrusive advising almost as it were is is a very powerful thing and it really helps give students that engaging those opportunities to engage and engage again and fine okay here's my love of science here my interest in policy and planning there and suddenly finding oh there's there's a fit here there's a fit right and without again getting away to a conference or another lab it'd be very hard-pressed to know that right especially being in Hawaii you know being in an island and we're a little bit isolated in ways and and students don't realize that the science that we do here is just as good as the science but they get to see that they get to feel some pride in where they come from as well exactly exactly I think we have some photos of some of the students and we can be just be bouncing these in and out as we continue our conversation here but it's a really you know there's a poster session that you were talking about and that's again that's a you've done this right you've presented it so talk a little bit about that that's I mean that's an interesting experience I always found as a student yeah so it's really interesting to be able to go and show and talk about what you've spent your summer doing or the semester anything like that and being able to be judged and so you can always do better and all those things and it's really a true test of things outside of lab how well do you communicate science how well do you know your project and you can talk about it to people who maybe aren't as familiar or aren't scientists and so that's a really interesting thing and we always have professors who go with us and they really prepare us and make sure that we know what we're talking about and we can actively present our research to other people it's a key aspect of science is the communication aspect and scientists unfortunately don't tend to get very much training in communication outside the narrow realm of writing scientific articles right I used to work with the graduate students at the University of Washington Center for Nanotechnology and have them do five-minute non-technical presentations and many have never done this yeah I've had the idea of well I've got five minutes I've limited three slides I can't use any jargon and I've got to somehow talk about my work and make it understandable and interesting I think some of the excitement for the students too is they're judged right but it's a very enriching and supportive environment they don't feel it's constructive and so when they get feedback from PhDs from all over the United States that is positive they feel like this is real it's not just Dr. Cogville trying to make me feel good or Dr. Wright trying to make me feel good someone else who's never met me before said this to me wow I can do this right and so it gives them a whole different level of confidence that we as their instructors are not able to give them sure no somebody comes up to you at a poster session starts asking probing questions and you're able to address their questions and and sort of talk to them from what it is you found out that we're looking to inform them that that's got to be I mean you know yeah that's that's enriching right that's that's empowering so Kai Kalina has enough experience now that she's going to her first professional conference in about 10 days oh excellent and she's been presenting and this is a conference that most of them will not be very many undergraduates there but her research was accepted as an abstract and she will be giving a poster presentation there with postdocs and graduate students and other PhDs so we're very proud of her excellent excellent where where is this this conference is international so next year it's in Paris but this year it's closer to home in San Diego okay okay and for what organization um this is the society for reproductive investigation oh okay okay uh what we're into people who I actually knew I worked for a while in a reproductive biology lab so uh it's all kinds of interesting stuff this is their big their big conference for the year so excellent so you you also had a second um uh research experience right you went to stanford for a summer yes I was at stanford funded through amgen um so amgen has scholars all over the u.s and in japan that they fund every summer to do research and you can get other funding opportunities through them throughout your career but um I was at stanford working in the lab of um the man who basically founded hematopoietics themselves and so he's the father of hematopoiesis and that was a really interesting experience okay and what what sorts of things no I mean what what project did you do in that lab um basically what I was doing that lab is working on this sub-population of hematopoietics themselves that they discovered and understanding where it goes in the bone marrow and what it differentiates into so that we can better figure out what kind of treatments to give people who have leukemia or have to face chemotherapy for some sort of um bone marrow cancer excellent well we're going to dig more deeply into into your experiences shamanod's program when we come back uh kakalini mccarthy and julian cogbill or with me here from shamanod university i'm your host ethan alan and we'll take a brief break and then be back in one minute aloha i'm kelly akina and i'm here every other week on mondays at two o'clock p.m on think tech hawaii's hawaii together in hawaii together we talk with some of the most fascinating people in the islands about working together working together for a better economy government and society so i invite you into our conversation every other monday at two p.m on think tech hawaii broadcast network join us for hawaii together i'm kelly akina aloha hi i'm dave stevens the host of cyber underground uh every friday here at one p.m on think tech hawaii.com and then every episode is uploaded to the cyber underground that library of shows that you can see of mine on youtube.com and i hope you'll join us here every friday we have some topical discussions about why security matters and what could scare the absolute bejesus out of you if you just try to watch my show all the way through hope to see you next time on the cyber underground stay safe yeah and welcome back to the second half of our show here on likable science i'm ethan alan with me today our dr julian cogbill and kakalini mccarthy both from shamanod university uh biology faculty and a student and we're talking about shamanod's programs and ways they support students in getting authentic research experience and it's such a such an important thing students can easily in some places just sort of drift through an undergraduate career without really doing anything sort of really firsthand in science and it's great to see that shamanod really pushes holes pride supports absolutely in you know getting out there and getting into a real authentic lab doing actual first first hand research and it's gonna be a good experience on a lot of levels i mean you must have from your you had two different summer experiences can you talk a little bit about sort of what science skills you learned i think i learned a lot of science skills at those institutions that otherwise in an instructional lab you don't necessarily get exposed to and i think also a really important thing that i gained from those experiences is working with animals so working with model organisms instead of just cells although cells are exciting most undergraduates don't get to work with animals um and the kinds of research that you gain the different skill set is really interesting because otherwise you don't necessarily get exposed to that if you just go to class then go to your instructional lab you know and certainly i'm working with animals if you're going to be a biologist that's that's something you should get familiar with and it has a whole sort of set of things that come with that caring for the animals seeing the animals well being the rules and regulations are critical and presumably then at these conferences and presentations you've been learning some science communication skills too right yeah you definitely learn how to effectively communicate your science what you've done and you also learn how to network with other people and talking about different things that you can do i think another really great thing about these conferences is you can meet other people who you want to collaborate with or you talk about how your project fits into theirs and vice versa and so it's really interesting and you're able to collaborate and network in that sense as well yeah and that happens actually it's funny we're doing a project at prel out in the pacific islands uh the pi from the project was back at an nsf conference for others in the same program she met somebody who's doing all the parallel work in main and now now we're going to collaborate on on another proposal together to take this to the next level yeah i think i mean it's it's nice for the students because they see that there's all these people who are like me like doing the same thing and and it's not just the networking they get to make friends from other institutions that are their peers and the opportunities that they get to see programs because the colleges are there recruiting and for for graduate programs and medical school programs and programs that they never even heard of or thought of and career choices that they never even heard of that we although we try would not necessarily be able to bring to their attention right so it's it's so many different levels they go to at the conferences they have sessions for the students to learn how to better write personal statements learn how to do a good interview we all all the types of things they need to not just be good scientists but just to be good in the career field and and how to pursue whatever the next step is for them yes and give it given how competitive science funding is it's very important to learn those things absolutely um but yeah that that really the enrichment though of talking to other students and hearing about their work and then having these sort of aha moments about oh i see they're doing they're asking this sort of question i'm asking this sort of question maybe maybe their perspective can inform my my next set of questions that i'll do you know yeah absolutely yeah and and then those sort of serendipitous finding somebody who's working on very similar stuff to you and maybe one step ahead somewhere or one step behind yeah um and i think a really interesting thing that comes out of these conferences is also you realize at the end it's about presenting your research not just doing the research and you knowing what you're doing but being able to share with others and and you really gain appreciation for all the people who support you and get you there so like our professors we gain such an appreciation for them having the time to practice with us and for them pushing us to go away and spend our summer working instead of just at the beach and things like that so you really gain this appreciation for people pushing you to do things that otherwise you may not be interested in because sometimes the application process is a little daunting wouldn't you say you know and i think i mean as the student enrichment coordinator one of my roles is to just help demystify that process so they they do all the work still sometimes because all the information is out on the internet it's not magic anything that i do it's just helping them not be scared to attempt it um when they're writing their personal statements you know saying send it to me and then we'll go over and over and over again until your personal statement is you know beautiful otherwise they just kind of send it right and and those personal statements are really important so it sounds like you sort of you could think of it in terms of this uh popular term these days the equity right that is people start out at very different points and it's not not enough to give everyone a treatment you know right different people are still going to end up with very unequal things but absolutely you know people who need some yes there's people who would not don't have a strong academic background don't have a family history of academics to really help them and say you know here's some exception we have students that i mean and kai kalini's one of them i i don't question that she's going to be successful and she's going to get into a graduate program and she's going to do great things and i don't think any of our faculty do and we have quite a few students we're very fortunate shaman on to have some excellent students we have other students who are good but they lack confidence in themselves and they have to work a little harder to get the grades and you know that the smart kids right it's not that they're not smart but they don't see themselves as smart and i think them having that little extra face-to-face time the feeling that they can come to us one of our alumni mya corpus she just texted me three or four days ago to let me know where she's in her journey that was her word i wanted to just take in and let you know where i'm on my journey and she just got accepted to a phd program in pharmacy at usc and she was one of those students who we knew she was smart we knew she had it and she didn't have the confidence and we kept telling her no try this try that and she did it and she's like well i kind of like it i think go for it and she kept going for it and she graduated and was like i don't know i can't get into a program but we just kept encouraging her and then she was in a master's program at u h and she would come back and be like this is great i'm loving it and she graduated last year and she kept going and and i don't know you know i get emails from students at least all of us get one or two a year that say i just wanted to check in i'm at this program now and i'm so thankful for being at shaman odd and for what you know you did for me or what dr right did for me or the time you took i mean i you know i only one or two a year that i get but they make my year sure now you realize you have that profoundly really helped somebody it lets us know that what we think we're doing we're doing yeah and you're helping people really unlock their potential basically uh that they might not have been able to do that about your system so that's that's truly uh that's got to be very gratifying it is it is so so we're after you presented this uh conference what's what's your next step um well this is my final summer before i graduate and so i've decided to just stay here and finish up my project in the lab we publish um and then apply for programs and see what happens from there okay excellent excellent and what what uh have you you've hopefully by this time decide a little more of what direction you want to go within the vast field of biology right uh yeah so at this point i want to do md phd or phd i'm still figuring that out a bit but that's pretty much where i want to go excellent excellent it's very exciting stuff in that in that sort of interface between medicine absolutely chemical engineering people go with that and tie that into clinical work bioengineering it's just a hot field these days right yeah it's all kinds of different different ways you can take that and you can take a good life sciences background and move forward yeah yeah move move any even number of different directions so that's very exciting and it must be uh interesting for shaman on to track all their students we definitely track we we started a database in our department to try to keep track of where everybody goes and what they do um and we've been i think very successful not just phd and research we've got plenty of students who are going on a medical school uh and or professional jobs in industries that they want to be in so we're we're proud of what we're doing and and we're always trying to find ways to do it better and try to reach as many students as we can because like i said there's always those students who are going to succeed no matter what right so it's it's fighting it's supporting them and helping those who don't have as much confidence and kai kalini is talking about she does her summer research but we have a certain amount of positions throughout the year of what she's been fortunate enough to be part of with dr right to do research at shaman on throughout the year so she's had the benefit of not only going away but having year-long research experiences which is why she's at a place now where she could potentially be an author on a paper which is not often for an undergraduate to have that experience super and you should always seize those opportunities whenever you whenever you have that chance uh get your name into print you know does does a wonderful thing this absolutely one of my fellow graduate students got a soul a soul authorship in in science and your science as a graduate student absolutely exciting so she became the world's foremost expert on snail shell and how snail shells form wonderful you know one of the things that we're really getting excited about is the saknis conference yes which is i said a national undergraduate conference hawaii just won the bid to have it hosted here in 2019 dr haylani chang over at u h is on their board of directors and she has been for years trying to get them to convince them that hawaii is the place to have this conference and she brought together all the stakeholders shaman odd was lucky enough to be at that table they had the uh visitor's bureau was there she got kamehameha schools involved everyone in the u h system was at that table and uh we we made it happen so we're very excited because now i can in 2019 i'm not only going to have to take four or five students because we pay everything we pay airfare now it's here at home and and i'll be able to take that money that usually has to be divided among maybe five and we can maybe take 20 or 30 students and they're all going to get that experience at home plus the students who've already been to that will know how to help out at the conference that help make a successful conference to help all those conferences require a sort of huge it's a big effort i'm waiting for haylani to to call me and a couple of my colleagues here in the next year and started asking for some help getting that thing started i hear you know how that one goes certainly it's it's fascinating well i promised you i was going to do a quick off the wall thing here and so the time the time has come now so completely switching subjects so both of you in turn you can think about it if you could have the superpower of either being invisible or flying which would you choose and why invisible or flying what do you think i would choose flying because traffic is really bad good answer i don't know i'm a parent so i might want to be invisible so that i can you know kind of sneak in there and see what's going on and not just with my kids with my students too that might be beneficial that could be helpful that's wonderful well thank you so much i learned a lot today as i always do in the show it's great for more shamanod's programs wonderful to hear about your journey i thank you very much kakaluni mccarthy join cog bill from shamanod university i'm your host ethan alan and i hope you'll join us again next week on another episode of likable science