- Welcome everyone, to Wednesday Nite at The Lab.
I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at the UW-Madison
Biotechnology Center.
I also work for UW-Extension, Cooperative Extension,
and on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers,
Wisconsin Public Television, Wisconsin Alumni Association
and the UW-Madison Science Alliance,
thanks again for coming to Wednesday Night at the Lab.
We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year.
Tonight, it's my pleasure to introduce to you Ahna Skop.
She's a professor here in the Genetics department.
She's also on the board of the Wisconsin Science Museum.
She was born in New Haven, Connecticut,
and graduated from high school in Fort Thomas, Kentucky.
She went to Syracuse University for her undergrad
and came here for her Ph.D., did a post-doc
at the University of California Berkeley,
and then came back here to be on the faculty.
Tonight she's going to talk about Too Creative for Science?
Please join me in welcoming Ahna Skop
to Wednesday Night at the Lab.
(applause)
- Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here.
So I just want to apologize ahead of time.
I am getting over a very bad sinus infection,
so I talk low, I have a very deep voice,
but not this deep.
But I'm going to tell you a story about my life.
And then how that has influenced my career.
It's probably a little unconventional,
but it's a great story, especially to tell students
and also the public about one's path in life.
So the title's called Too Creative for Science?
And I'm going to get into what that means
in a few slides down the road.
But first, the outline that I'm going to talk about today is
I'll tell you about my family,
I'll tell you about what this being too creative
actually means,
a little bit about my science, a little bit about
my teaching and then science as art.
So I have a whole bunch of stuff to tell you tonight.
But a lot of it is going to be visual
and it's going to be exciting,
so hopefully you'll keep your attention.
Being a geneticist, most important thing is,
what is my genetics.
So I need to tell you that before you know who I am.
So this is a pedigree, this is my family.
So my father, so I come from a family of artists.
My entire family are artists.
My father was a sculptor and a medical illustrator
and also taught anatomy to medical students.
Right off the bat that's unusual, right?
My mother was a ceramist and an art educator.
They had four children.
I'm the oldest, I became the scientist.
My next two sisters are graphic designer.
My brother is an industrial designer.
So how the heck did I end up a scientist?
You could see that my father had a keen interest
in science so he is more classically trained,
European trained in the arts,
and the art and science for him was no separation.
And so that was my life.
However, as many of you know, in the education system
in America, people have separated science and art.
So my story is of how did I overcome that
from a household like this.
So my father mentor was Ivan Mestrovic,
which is over here.
He was a pupil of Rodin.
Most people know Rodin and The Thinker.
Mestrovic, you may have seen the work.
So if you've been down in Chicago's Grant Park,
The Bowman and the Spearman are by Mestrovic
and my father helped cast those.
So in some ways you've seen my dad's work.
So that's my dad's work.
Here's a picture from my home, where I grew up.
There's my father doing a bust of his football coach.
My father was the winning football player at Syracuse,
played with Jim Brown and went to the Orange Bowl,
as did my brother.
Very unusual as well.
This was his coach.
Ernie Davis was also on the team,
I think right before my father, and so this is
one of the most winningest coach at Syracuse.
But I grew up with very dirty, messy floors
and I became, have a very sterile environment
in a laboratory, but this is what I knew growing up.
My father had an art school at my house,
and people came from all over the world
to study with my father.
From Japan and England,
but as you can see, in the 70's, and here I am at the top,
it's a bunch of hippies, right?
Lots of people,
but not only just a free-spirited bunch,
people who have become actresses and art dealers.
Some of them musicians and architects.
So very eclectic group.
I grew up thinking these people were
my brothers and sisters.
They still are, until today.
And it was just an unbelievably rich environment
in which to grow up.
And so this was my life.
I grew up in a very unusual home.
You may think I'm wealthy.
I grew up in a family of artists.
We didn't have very much money.
I was born in New Haven and then I moved.
This is in Kentucky, in northern Kentucky in a town called Fort Thomas.
It's an old Civil War fort.
And so my father grew up in a very poor single parent home.
And played football, got a full ride to school,
and when he went to art school,
his mentors always gave him opportunities,
and this is a story of
this house is another story of opportunities
and the power of networking.
I always like to tell people this story.
His mentor says, there's an ad in a newspaper.
There wasn't internet.
Back in the days people read the classifieds.
There was an ad in the newspaper that there
was an artist, Julian Bechtold,
who was looking for another artist
because he was getting old and sick,
to take care of this home he had built in Kentucky.
My dad applied for this competition.
Given that he had four kids.
And so we moved from Connecticut to Kentucky.
We won this home,
which had a studio and everything.
The cool thing, a little history about Julian Bechtold,
is the Cincinnati area, if many of you know,
is Proctor and Gamble is housed there.
So the cool thing about this house is
this is where the very first Ivory soap bar was carved,
and that was done by Julian Bechtold.
And so that was my life, we had a series of things
through networking and mentorship
that had allowed us to live a seemingly rich
and wealthy life.
These are pictures of Julian Bechtold around the house.
There's a sculpture and then reliefs, walking into the home.
My brother has purchased the home and renovated it,
so this is the old studio where actually they had
plaster and clay, but my brother's an industrial designer
there working at home.
Unbelievably beautiful place.
And then the backyard, my dad had all of these,
wanted to learn how to garden and pour concrete,
make a rose garden, and all these kinds of things,
in addition to scattering sculptures throughout the home.
By the time when I reached high school,
my father had said,
he loved quotes and you'll see quotes throughout my talk,
is that he wrote quotes and he had them in cement here,
and one of them he said to me,
always remember this when you leave here.
So when I went to college, this is what he said,
"Every child is an artist, the problem is how to remain
"an artist once you grow up."
And so I didn't really know what that meant,
but I knew it because that was my life.
I was an artist, genetically an artist.
I was interested in science, and how do I,
I need to remember this.
So here is my path.
I love this, this is a photograph of Norway.
My path is very windy because I went through a lot of
successes but many failures.
I went to Syracuse where my father played football.
Partly because I just had to go there,
that was part of our lifestyle.
Football and Syracuse was a big deal.
And then how I came to Wisconsin is an interesting thing.
Majority of my faculty that I loved,
all went to Madison, and they said,
"You gotta go here, it's the most amazing place on earth."
I said, "There's only beer and cheese there,
I can't imagine you can get a Ph.D."
But I came and applied.
It was the last place I applied, but I fell in love,
and I've lived here the longest.
And so I got my Ph.D. here in 2000.
And then I left and went to Berkeley
and came back as a faculty.
So I fell in love not only with the university,
but also with the state
and the people that reside here, obviously.
So now back to my graduate school,
so this is the title.
This is what happened.
I came here and the first couple of years in graduate school
I joined the laboratory.
And this was said to me.
Too creative for science.
So I've just told you my life story about
how creativity and art was a huge part of my life.
You can imagine that if a mentor would have said that to you,
you'd probably be devastated.
So I was terribly devastated.
I left the laboratory and I said,
"I don't think this is a place for me."
I didn't really-- I couldn't imagine someone saying that
because I thought sciences were super creative, too.
I knew that from my childhood.
My father said it to me, but when I got to college
and I got to grad school, that was a devastating statement
that stayed with me for the rest of my life.
I left here, went to Memorial Library,
and I decided to go back in some old scientific texts.
I always love to go back to when scientists were artists.
So of course I came across Leonardo da Vinci,
as many of you know.
I was trying to soul search and figure out,
is this scientist possibly correct?
Could I possibly be too creative?
And I realized that was not true.
So this was when scientists were actually
appreciated on both sides of the isle.
They're both scientists and artists.
And that was consoling to me because I felt like,
"Should I leave science because I don't feel like
"I'm welcome here?"
But I kept going and I kept discovering scientists
throughout my life.
Another scientist that I found that I was
really enamored by was Ramon y Cajal.
So he's the father of neuroscience
and like myself, he loved the arts.
And his father didn't encourage him,
but these drawings of Purkinje neurons in the brain
were key to his scientific discoveries.
And if any of you know, there's a show now
in Minnesota Art Museum with Cajal.
I encourage you to go do that.
So again, another scientist who also used art
for discovery.
Another person I stumbled upon, probably many of you know,
was Rosalind Franklin.
This is another story of the importance of
visualization in discovery.
So this X-ray diffraction image here,
which is the first picture of the DNA structure,
was enormously impactful for these two men
that all got the credit, Watson and Crick,
took that image and built a sculpture.
Many call them science models, it's actually a sculpture.
It's a three-dimensional image of what
Rosalind Franklin saw.
And so I looked at all of those pieces
and I said to myself, all those things I see,
this is like an armature that you would see
in a sculpture studio.
These scientists were using the visualization
to actually make discoveries.
And so I felt like, well, if these people are using it,
then I belong in science.
This is really important to me and I should be here.
Creativity is super important.
Along the way, I've met a lot of interesting scientists,
some with similar backgrounds.
One of them is Eric Demaine, I don't know if any of you
know him, he's at MIT and I actually think
he's still younger than me.
So at the age of 22, was an MIT faculty.
He won the MacArthur genius award,
and he used origami to solve mathematical problems
that no one ever solved before.
In addition, both his parents were artists.
He's also an artist. He makes origami art.
In addition, he also applies this origami idea to robotics.
And this is a movie of his self-folding paper.
That's also a great movie if you can find it online,
of he used the design of a crab and also the idea
of origami to create robots that can flatten themselves
and go in places where maybe a building has been destructed
and go under small crevices and help people out.
So you would have never thought that origami
would have been something that could have helped
and saved people and also solve math.
It's enormously amazing to actually meet people like this
who have similar backgrounds,
who've come up with stuff that you would have never imagined
that is amazingly impactful to normal human life.
Let's see.
So what have I learned from this?
So I learned from this, you know,
sometimes people say things to you and they upset you.
They change your mind about it.
But also, I realized that sometimes you have to make up
your own decisions for yourself
and you've got to do the research and find the facts
and realize that you're right.
And what I also learned is that
scientists and artists have a lot of things in common.
And they develop ideas that are new and useful,
which is actually the definition of creativity.
So I belong here.
It's definitely where I need to be.
And I found a quote recently that I really love.
So there's a psychologist at UC Berkeley.
She says, "Scientists are actually the few people
"who as adults get to have protective time
"when they can just explore, play,
"figure out what the world is like.
"Scientists are simply big children."
So I realize I'm probably the biggest child around
and I know many scientists are that way.
And so I realize, you know, in addition to this
really creative side of scientists' life,
they're also simply very playful and inquisitive people.
And so I decided to pursue science.
I'll share a little bit about what I do in my lab.
When I first joined the lab at Syracuse,
I joined a lab working on RNA splicing.
I don't know if anyone, you love RNA splicing.
I don't really like it still today.
But this is how you assay it, with a DNA gel.
Don't know how many people have seen a DNA gel here.
I think this is terribly boring and I don't find it biology.
Some people actually like to put it in their home as art.
I don't really care for it.
It's maybe better as art than for me as science.
I don't really get anything out of it.
But what I fell in love with in my textbook
was an image like this.
This is a mitotic cell embryo of a nematode that I
still work on today that I started in my undergraduate.
And those are the DNA and the chromosomes
labeled in the middle.
I thought this was the Picasso.
I'd never seen anything like this.
I was like, it's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
And so I wanted to figure this out because it was
so beautiful.
Not because it needed to work out.
I didn't know what it was important for.
I had no clue what it was important for.
But I knew it was beautiful and I knew that some kind of
molecules and machines had to be involved in
building that, and that's something my lab works on today.
So for me, this idea of beauty inspiring curiosity
is really important to me and so everything I do
comes from that visual.
I am a visual learner.
I'm also dyslexic, like Einstein was,
like Leonardo da Vinci was, so this visual learning thing
is really important to how I understand and learn.
So my lab studies the cell division process
from one cell to two cells.
And so the big question in the field is that
we don't know all the molecules that are
to get this one cell to two,
but we know if we do, we can inhibit cell division.
And that's important for several reasons.
Many of them, as you probably know, when cell division
goes out of control, you get a tumor, right?
You get a cancerous cell, so it divides out of control.
The other thing you probably know is also
you get birth defects, trisomy 21, chromosomes are
going in the wrong way.
Right?
The other part of it is there is often asymmetric division
in which it helps to arise to stem cells.
So you get one cell becoming different from the other.
And that cell division is involved in that process.
What you may not know,
and something I'm working on in my lab,
is that cells actually in neurodegenerative patients,
in the brain, are actually failing to divide.
And this is really really new,
and some hypotheses we're trying to test.
Before I actually go study my problem, I like to go back
to the first science artist
that actually looked at my process.
So Walther Flemming is sort of my icon.
He's actually the father of mitosis, also an artist,
which is great.
And the red arrows here are marking something
that he thought was really important.
And so this was in 1891.
So this structure is often called the Flemming body.
Today it's called the mid-body.
And so he thought this was super important.
At the time when I was in graduate school,
in the mid 90's, people thought this was the garbage can
of the cell.
But however, this guy in 1891 thought it was the greatest
thing since sliced bread.
Something is really important because all cells have it.
So what did I do?
Well, applied new technology.
So my lab is sort of famous for doing
isolating the structure and doing something called
midbody proteomics.
So we isolated the structure and we seek and solve
the proteins in there.
So just like DNA sequencing, you're getting all the DNA
base pairs out, these are all the proteins
within the structure.
So it's not a garbage can, there's stuff there
that's important, and I knocked out all these genes
and they all have cell division defects.
That was the surprise to many.
So not a garbage can.
One of the proteins I'm working on currently
is something called Ataxin-2.
So these are mammalian cells,
this is mammalian gene, Ataxin-2.
So one of the reasons why I want to study it,
is it belongs to, in humans, when it's mutated,
it causes a human neurodegenerative disease.
And it's called Spinocerebellar Ataxia Type 2.
So in normal patients, this is what your cerebellum
looks like.
And then if you have neurodegenerative disease,
and often Alzheimer's and Parkinson's as well,
you often will have an atrophy of the cerebellum.
It actually shrinks and gets smaller.
So these patients, sort of the test of it,
it's a tremor disease,
so that's what an ataxia actually means.
So if you're going to go point at something,
a child or an adult, you can't point at it
because you have an ataxia.
That's the test for ataxia.
So that was interesting to me.
How did something identified in cell division
actually possibly have something to do
with neurodegeneration?
I was totally surprised by that.
If we look closer into the cerebellum,
these are just schematics of what this looks like.
Here's the cerebellum.
The cells that come from it are these things
that I just showed you that Cajal used to draw,
the Purkinje Cells.
They form these unbelievably dense and unbelievably
beautiful dendritic arbors.
So they call them dendritic kind of trees.
And they're very extensive.
However, in the patients here, they're actually short
and small, they're like shrubs.
So there's different ideas in the field about why this is.
Some people think that it's actually because the neurons
themselves are miss-regulating.
I, however, think that it's the cells around them.
And I'll show you why I think that.
So let's go to a beautiful image here.
So this is a picture in the cerebellum.
These are these neurons.
However, these little nuclei, right here,
are all over the place here.
These are the cells that are always actively
dividing in your brain, all the way up until death.
And here's another image here is that
there are generally nine of these glial cells
to one neuron in the brain.
So they're probably the most abundant cell in the brain.
And what's interesting is that they have to go through
asymmetric divisions and multiple divisions
throughout your lifetime to maintain that beautiful
neuron structure.
So that's actually a pretty cool point.
And so how am I studying this Ataxin-2
in this model organism I'm going to share with you?
So I study it in C. elegans because we have embryos
that are actually quite large.
And they have rapid cell division.
So I'll show you what this looks like.
This is my favorite organism.
This is a hermaphrodite organism crawling across the stage
and inside of it, so this is a millimeter long,
this is smaller than a pinhead.
So what I do is I cut that in half and we take the embryos.
You can see these little embryos here.
Those are what I love in there.
So they have sperm and egg and they lay tons of embryos.
They live for about two weeks.
If you cut them open, this is what it looks like.
This beautiful embryo.
This is sperm and egg meeting.
This is where all the magic happens.
And mitosis occurs and then you're going to get a cleavage.
I did this movie when I was a grad student here.
If you look, it's only twenty minutes
and you have a division.
Human cells, it takes about 24 hours just to make
that division itself.
That's a really long time for a scientific thing.
The other thing about it is light actually
is passing through this embryo so you can see that.
So it's very easy to see the division process.
I love looking at this.
I see things different every day.
And eventually, these divisions are going to divide,
and it's inside an egg, if you can see here,
this little membrane,
this is going to divide and become that whole worm,
and it's going to hatch and come out of the egg.
And that takes, depending on the temperature,
takes less than a day and a half.
So that's pretty remarkable, so that's why we do it.
The other cool thing that is great about C. elegans
is this is where GFP was actually first used.
So the Nobel Prize, for using the green fluorescent protein,
which lights up any protein you want in the cell.
So every organism, this is just an example,
Marty Chalfie is a C. elegans biologist
who actually first fused the green fluorescent protein
to genes to light up proteins.
But nowadays everyone uses this jellyfish gene
to light up proteins of interest in any organism.
So I do that myself and I take live videos of that.
So that's that same embryo you saw but now we're tagging it
to the DNA and the spindle that holds up the DNA.
We can watch this mitosis happening live in the images.
So that's what I do a lot of in my lab, is using the visual,
and you could see if I come from a family of artists,
this might seem very attractive to someone like me.
And so I love this because I learn from looking and seeing.
And I can look at it all the time and people,
there's hundreds of people around, scientists around
the world that are looking, actively looking at this process.
One, because it's beautiful but two,
it has potential targets for cancer and neurodegeneration.
So what happens when we knock out this human disease
gene in C. elegans?
So what I have here is I'm labeling the plasma membrane now
with the GFP and then also the DNA
so we can look at mitosis.
For size scale, here's the worm and here's the embryo
down here, so it's pretty small.
It's blown up here on the microscope.
So in the normal cells, see it there,
we're going to look at mitosis,
so we're going into telophase and the cleavature is
going to pinch in the cell.
The cell is larger and this one's smaller.
And now we're going to look at Ataxin-2.
So we've knocked down the gene, we're going to see what happens.
One, we could already see off the bat there's another
little piece of DNA here.
This is actually from a failure myosis.
So extra DNA has to be jettisoned out before fertilization.
That fails, but I'm going to show you what happens after that.
So if you watch this, you'll see metaphase.
It's already going into the inner phase
but the cleavage furrow hasn't pitched in
but it's going to try to pinch all the way down.
And it's going to make an attempt to pinch all the way down.
It's also extremely asymmetric and it's going to
go back up.
Most of you probably used a balloon animal at a party.
Same kind of idea, you kind of twist it.
The only way to get it down, you really got to twist it.
In the cell it's the same idea.
You pinch down and you try to seal it off.
And that's actually where that little midbody point is.
So the molecules that aren't getting to seal off the cell
aren't there anymore, and then the cell retracts.
And this is a cancer cell.
It's dividing out of control because it has too much DNA.
And so that's what we can do with this kind of imaging.
And so that was pretty cool.
What are we doing now to try
to tackle this neurodegeneration,
and my hypothesis that these glial cells are failing
in division.
So we're collaborating with Shai Shaham's lab
at Rockefeller.
And so the awesome thing about C. elegans as well
is in the adult worm, the entire nervous system
has been mapped.
And that no organism has that.
And that actually was done by my mentor
who was formerly here in Wisconsin, named John White.
And they mapped all the nervous system
so they know exactly where all the nerves arise.
And so in this cell, in the head of the worm,
there's actually glial cells that support the nerve ring
in the worm, which allows it to survive in mechanosense
and understand it's environment.
And these are just examples of GFP lighting up different glial cells.
So what we're doing now is trying to knock out
Ataxin-2 to see if we actually have glial cell defects.
And we've done preliminary data.
We think that's actually happening.
It's really really interesting.
The other interesting thing about that
is lots of people with neurodegeneration
actually lose their sense of smell very early.
It's that early onset idea.
And what they think is happening is that
inside the glial cells, their endoplasmic reticulum
is no longer functioning.
And so we see that actually in the embryos
but we want to look also in the adult nervous system
in the head of the worm.
And so that's what my, in a nutshell,
is as easy as I can say what I'm doing in my laboratory.
And so I want to leave you with my science part
and really talk about--
I love what I do partly because,
I delight in this because it's unbelievably beautiful.
And I love this quote for that reason.
"If nature weren't beautiful, it wouldn't be worth knowing.
"And if nature were not worth knowing,
"life would not be worth living."
And completely true for me.
Again, this beauty is really inspiring my life
and the curiosity.
So onto my teaching.
So you can imagine someone from an art background
how they might approach teaching.
Or not, you might not imagine it.
Listen, how many people have been to an art museum?
A lot of people.
How many people thought they were an artist
after they came out of there?
No, right?
Okay, how many people have picked up clay
and made a sculpture, maybe?
Ceramics, yeah?
How many people felt more like an artist there?
Most people probably say yeah.
How many people in a big lecture room like this?
Do you think you're a scientist after you sat
in a room like this?
I didn't either. I didn't think this was science.
So my own experience and my own experience
from my background,
I had to get in there and see it and do it
in order to learn and understand.
And it wasn't until I had courses like that
where I was actively learning and doing stuff.
So that was inherent for me to do that
in the classroom as well.
The other part that's really important to me also,
is I always felt that "The only thing that interferes
"with my learning is my education."
It's a famous quote.
I put this photo together with it.
I think it's really important.
Most of you probably shot yourself in the face
with a water gun, right?
You probably may never have done it again.
But you've done it to someone else because it's funny.
Education has always been a place where
I wasn't able to get my hands in because a lot of people
are lecturing.
You need to really get students engaged with science
by doing.
The other thing driving also the way I teach,
is the education system itself.
This quote by Ken Robinson is saying that
we're educating out of their creativity.
Why, because these horrible things called bubble sheets.
And the idea is that conformity and not diversity
of thought is actually what's awarded in the classroom.
And that's a horrible thing.
Because everyone needs to fill in the same bubble.
And so how do we get around this?
What are the thoughts of how to change that?
It's a numbers game.
The other thing that drives me,
given my mother has native American background,
but in addition I have very diverse family, is this problem.
And so in the National Science Foundation,
if you look at the percentage of STEM doctorates
over time, what has happened is the number of women,
like myself, have increased over time,
as has the number of international students.
But what has stayed the same is the numbers
of Hispanics, Blacks, Pacific Islanders
and Native Americans, less than 5% of all Ph.Ds.
So the question is, why is this happening?
So my idea is change the way you teach.
Simply, we're losing this because maybe there's
different ways of learning, culturally.
Backgrounds, arts are really important in culture.
And so trying to include both of those things
in the classroom is really important.
The other thing comes from this learning period
that a lot of teachers actually look at.
So average student retention rates actually increased
if you practiced by doing and discuss
and you teach others.
Here's the lecture up at the top, that's the default.
You get very little retention by sitting at a lecture
like you're sitting here.
You may, hopefully, more.
But you know, actually doing things is really important.
The other thing, given my diversity interest, is this.
This is a famous picture probably many of you have seen.
For a fair selection, everybody has to take the same exam.
Climb the tree, who's going to climb the tree?
Probably the monkey.
But the other important thing is that
I can have a classroom of all elephants,
but the thing is, diversity is not just on the outside,
it's actually what's inside.
We all have different modes of learning, like myself.
I'm dyslexic, I learn by seeing.
Some people are really good at doing.
I'm seeing and doing.
Some people can just listen and understand it.
I have students like that, I don't even know what they're talking about.
I have to doodle it.
So understanding and being very sensitive to the fact
that there's different modes of learning
is also equally important to try to get the success rate
up of the students.
So what did I do?
I created a course with completely no lectures,
where actually the students do the lecturing
and do the hands-on learning.
This is a picture from last year.
Unbelievably crazy bunch of students.
I take them bowling as sort of fun.
I'm going to tell you a bit about what it is.
If you want to look up more. So this is the website.
It's genetics564.weebly.com.
It's completely open to the outside world,
tons of visitors coming.
This is from my National Science Foundation award.
I created this course to try to see if I can include
those students that are falling behind or come in my course.
I've had dyslexic students, students that have
maybe come into my course as a C,
they're often the best students in the class.
And I'll tell you the structure of it.
So what I do, like I'm doing today,
is giving how to give good presentations.
I think that's really important to communicate science.
As you can see, what's happening out in the public,
science is not being supported.
So what's happening is scientists aren't really good at communication.
So I want to be able to try to do that
and teach the scientists, the young scientists,
how to communicate science.
I do that and I learn, prior to the talk,
I do a one on one and have them learn to
get the visuals down.
The students in the audience are also peer-reviewing.
We're all doing it, we're learning the scientific.
We are also peer-reviewed on our grants,
I want the students to always grade themselves.
The amazing thing is students often grade the speakers
harder than myself.
And so we all learn together.
It's a very welcoming environment.
And the way I teach how to communicate is pretty important.
And you've been experiencing that right here today.
And so when you effectively communicate science,
what you've been looking at today, what's been impacting
you in the audience is actually 55% of my talk
has been visual.
And that's actually what you've been retaining.
The rest of it is what I'm saying, that's the oral part.
That's 38% you're remembering what I say.
And very little, 7% is the verbal.
Probably many of you have been to multiple lectures,
and it's been all text.
You've probably been to them where the professor
will read off the slides.
So there is actually research on this that says,
if you actually add pictures with words,
the retention of ideas goes up to 65% from 10%.
That's enormous.
So we got to get away from that writing and text
because it's a default, it's easy.
But there are a lot of kids out there,
a lot of people are visually stimulated
and they learn that way, myself included.
I use a textbook, so the textbook is not a science textbook,
but something called Presentation Zen
and Presentation Zen Design.
This was written by Garr Reynolds.
He actually helped Steve Jobs become the guy who he was.
He helped do all of those lectures that you've seen
Steve Jobs do, amazingly simple.
It's all from Garr Reynolds, I highly recommend it.
But I use it every day.
A lot of the things I've been showing you today
are coming from these books.
I do that with the students.
So I make it fun for students to learn to communicate.
And what I call it is I call it "Please Ahna--Pimp my slides."
Right?
So what I have students do is try to give me--
I teach them how to do it in a one day sort of format,
hands-on format.
And I have them craft their slides as they normally would.
And listening to me they come up with a slide like this.
A small image that you, sitting out there,
probably can't see or read.
And then a lot of text with bullets in.
Looks pretty standard.
And then what they do, they send it to me,
and I help them try to do that.
And I ask them, do you really need all this stuff?
I know you know this information.
So why do you have to put the written stuff here.
Because you know it, and people are there to listen to you, not read your slides.
So that's a common fault.
So what happens is I get them to turn it around like this.
It's finding a better visual and one word to remind them
what they're talking about, and they project their voice
outward and it changes the confidence of the student.
They know they have to know it in their head
instead of relying as a crutch on the slide.
And so it's actually enormously amazing.
Students will say, what is the best thing you learned
in the class and they'll always tell me confidence.
And that's actually an amazing thing.
After four years at school, they should be confident
of having to articulate knowledge
to the world themselves and being respected
for that knowledge.
And that's what I'm trying to do in that class.
The other part of my class that's really important is
participation, which actually also creates this confidence.
And I also doing that for the diversity problem.
I make sure every single student in my class
asks a question that day.
It's a class of 20.
So I do that because everyone in that class is of value.
It's not the smartest kid, it's not the dumbest kid.
There's no such thing.
There's no previous biases.
I don't know who has the A coming in or who has the C.
Everyone's participating.
And when you set a course up that way,
it completely changes that C student into an A student.
The other thing that I do which I'm just going to touch on,
is I actually change the way I grade.
I don't give them a grade,
I give them an A on the first day.
And what they do throughout the semester
is they lose points and so everyone is an A,
on top of their game from the get go.
And that also changes, that's a mindset theory.
It's all positive and you're only losing points
throughout the semester.
And so it seemingly seems like everyone's got an A
at the beginning and so there's no stress.
And that actually is also equally great for a student.
So if you're struggling and always think you're
going to be struggling, you're never going to get
to where you need to be.
But you having that positive input is really important.
The other thing I do is have them create a website
of a gene or disease of their choice.
And so what we do is I teach them how to make websites.
They put YouTube videos-- And they do research within
a lab on a Thursday.
And they work on data and they choose to work on
part of the project that is completely unknown,
just like a scientist.
They have to find what to work on.
And it's published, they can put it on their resume,
and they have a final presentation where they
communicate it back out.
So what happens in this lab?
So what's amazing, what happens in this lab,
I will give a little demonstration at the beginning,
and then they start to teach each other,
which is really important part of that retention of knowledge.
This is happening constantly.
And what happens out of this is you get these amazing websites.
So this is one of my first years I had it.
I love this partly because I love humor
and a lot of fun and I want them to try to grab attention.
Immediately you're grabbed towards,
you know George Costanza's bald, right, he's funny,
he has a classic episode of that.
But what is really getting to you when you're trying
to communicate your idea.
This title seems very crazy and it probably
wouldn't reel you in if there wasn't
a picture of George Costanza,
but that wants you to go in
and see what the student has to say.
So I want them to be creative and come up with
their own ideas and themes.
And we use this platform called Weebly,
which is free and anyone outside the university can see it.
Over the time, themes have gotten better.
I'm going to go back to the slide I just showed you.
Is one thing I found that was interesting
was students don't realize when they're doing research
is that other people care about their research.
And as a scientist that's really important for me
in my success.
So I started putting-- I have a food blog,
and I understand the importance of a hit map,
of who's looking at your stuff.
So if you put hit maps, it's amazing.
So this one student, the Gene for Speed,
still to this day is actively being looked at
from people all over the world.
That's like enormous for that student.
And the cool thing about it's from the secondary thing
that happened from this,
is the students see that other people are looking at it, their writing gets better.
And so I have less to grade.
And so it actually works wonders.
And throughout the semester as a student's projects
get more and more intense and more pages get put up,
these hits actually go up.
And the confidence level goes amazingly high.
Here's another example of one of these websites.
You could see the power of a visual.
Just finding the right visual.
She's looking at aggression, the DNA,
what's the genetics of aggression.
Again, all of these people are coming to look at
these sites and this is year in and year out.
What did I learn from all this?
Science is not all about facts.
I learned that, it's not about memorizing things.
It's a process that informs critical decisions and ideas.
And I want to encourage lots of faculty and teachers out there
to use your classroom as a laboratory.
I think it's really important to try out
new things that work.
And create engaging environments that require students
confront the unknown.
Confronting the unknown is really important
because you realize that you might be able to find something
that no one has ever thought before.
And that's what really exciting about science,
especially for me.
And then encourage them and give them ability
to use their creativity in any which way they want.
How to use the information and effectively communicate
the ideas and solve problems, which is what they're
going to do after they graduate.
That's my philosophy, you should really educate
how people are going to think and attack the world.
You can have the facts but if you don't know how
to communicate and solve a problem,
you're not going to go anywhere.
So that's my philosophy.
So now to the end part of my talk.
Science as art.
So I grew up in the household of artists.
So when I came here as a grad student,
I began to go to scientific conferences.
And it was clear that there was sort of an art component,
but I saw logos happening.
And then I started doing logos for meetings.
So this was one of my first logos.
This is for the worm that you saw.
So it was all iterations of ...
And I became very famous for these,
by one of the most famous images in my model organism
all over the world, everyone knows I've done these.
And so I gained a lot of confidence from that.
I realized I could use my skills in the arts
to help the scientific community communicate
or at least to have fun.
Throughout grad school I also was keenly aware
that there is very little that the normal public sees
or yourself can see with the naked eye.
But as scientists, the tree of life, we often get to see
a lot of these things.
And I'm keenly aware as a scientist who's funded publicly,
that if we could see all these beautiful organisms here,
why can't we share it with the public?
And so I put my ideas together of growing up
in a household of artists and doing art shows,
and I came up with a C. elegans worm art show.
So I started as grad student.
I was told in my lab that I'm making a huge mistake.
I'm a big mistake, it'll ruin your career for life.
I'm still here, right?
And it's now an ongoing event.
This is my 20th year that I'm doing this summer.
It's gotten a lot of press in a lot of scientist magazines.
This is sort of what I became famous for.
And so when I went up on the job market,
most people introduced me as the girl who does the art show
but also is an amazing scientist.
So it was a really cool marketing tool for me.
But for me it's just a passion.
It came from my-- This is a normal part of my life.
That visual and art.
So I'm going to show you some examples.
It also was part of that soul searching again,
where I struggled to find a mentor that really understood
my creative level.
I found other scientists, this is my first year,
Steve Johnson's now professor.
This is C. elegans, stained glass C. elegans.
People love this nematode. It's loved by all.
It's amazingly beautiful. Here's another one.
This is worms having sex.
On a boutique arena.
Some people get inspired by Andy Wormhol,
this is a real science.
People are getting inspired.
These are things that aren't shared in publications,
but it's really great at engaging the public
because they know what that is.
They've seen it.
This is probably the most beautiful gonad
you'll probably look at.
This is C. elegan's gonad, this is all the DNA
labeled in the hermaphrodite.
And Abby Dernberg is my first Howard Hughes investigator
who, she won the very first art show.
And so all the people I've showed you have all
become faculty members.
So it became over the years a testament to the fact
that people who are amazing at doing imaging and art
are also really good at science.
And so that made me feel really good
that I was in the right group and crowd.
So here's a few things that I've done.
These look like lips but these are gonad lips.
Something you wouldn't imagine.
Anyone want to guess what this might be?
There's the little worm here.
Anything?
What jumps out at you?
Coffee beans, I always get coffee beans.
Looks like a UFO, maybe?
These are actually air bubbles.
So these are air bubbles,
so these are on petri plates on agar.
And so the amazing thing is that
the time and temperature to solidify the agar
amazingly made these air bubbles at a perfect UFO shape.
And I think sometimes when you're
looking down the microscope some days,
you jump back and you try to wonder how that happened.
And you're like what the heck is it,
is it a coffee bean, is it a UFO?
But it puts your place in the world.
You know you see the worm and it is sort of this extraterrestrial thing.
But the great thing about an example of image like that,
the public knows what a UFO is,
the public knows what the coffee bean is,
and so if you can introduce them to something they know
and then give them the scary thing called
the nematode that is everywhere on the earth,
you can connect them and talk to them about science.
And so that's what's really been great about
these art shows.
From these shows, when I became a faculty back here,
given a little more opportunities,
so I came back here and my lab is in the next building over,
which is a little newer than we are here.
And I came here and I walked in the foyer
and was like, "Oh my God, I can't work here."
It was all white walls, giant white walls.
I was like this is impossible, a daughter of an artist can't
be in a building with nothing on the wall.
So I walked myself up to the dean's office and I said,
I got an idea.
I would like to do a scientific art installation
in the building, and I was given $15,000.
I've never been given that amount of money,
just by talking.
So if you've walked into the foyer over there,
that is the installation I did of all the science art
that is coming from our department.
And now busloads of students come through here
and see that science.
And so this is what it looks like.
You maybe have seen this if you walked in
through the other door.
So from that, the art department got word of that,
and I went to a couple talks down in the art department.
And they said to me, omigosh,
you've been doing these shows, we all know who you are.
Let's do something together.
So we ended up doing this tiny scientific art show
which was at the airport in 2009 to 2010.
This is the most popular show that's ever been
in the airport, partly because there were all of these
awesome, beautiful images but no one knew what they are,
so you had to really go look around and guess what they were.
There was an overflowing comment box, of like,
this is amazing, I want to see more.
And these were all images from the university.
So again, this idea of engaging with the public.
And there are a lot of this on campus
that do imaging, who are part of this show,
that have just got enormous support.
And also the Alumni Association as well,
thought this was great, to connect with those outside.
Here's an example of a few things that showed up here.
I love this image because it looks like a bunch of needles.
What is this?
It's actually zinc oxide nanorods.
You may not know what it is, but it's what's in
the solar cells and collects the sun.
Amazingly beautiful at this scale in EM here.
This is a drosophila fruit fly embryo by Sean Carroll.
This is your fruit fly that eats your bananas.
This is probably the most beautiful thing that eats your bananas.
So this is an embryo where all these genes are
expressed in different stripes.
And this ended up on the front cover of the
New York Times one Easter,
thinking it's an Easter egg development.
That's also over on that wall.
This is probably, I love this image a lot.
I'm not a plant biologist. This is on a plant.
Does anybody know what this is?
Trichome, yay, we got it.
So if you've hiked in the woods and you got attacked
by a plant, this is the thing that attacks you.
It looks extraterrestrial.
It actually comes from this little mustard plant
that all scientists, a lot of people on this campus use,
to do genetics.
And it's been sequenced.
And so this is on the underside of the leaf.
And the trichomes are used, actually, to fend off
any herbivores that are going to eat the plants.
And so you can imagine if you're a bug about that size,
this is going to be a scary thing to keep away the plants.
So this show led to something called
the Cool Science Image Competition.
Its in it's seventh year.
This was our winner last year. This looked like a Monet.
I saw this come through and I was like,
holy cow, amazing.
But this is actually blood vessels in the eye,
in the retina.
And so I was like, some things you think you know,
and then you see this and you're like wow,
I just totally can destroy your mind,
and you go this is amazing.
But people love this for that reason.
It looked like Monet but it was in your eye,
it's a teachable moment.
I'm going to tell you who the winners were this year.
We're releasing them tomorrow,
for the 2017 winners.
These are the top three that I think are pretty cool.
So this is your tongue.
The nuclei in your tongue are sort of lined up
in all these different sort of patterns.
I love this.
This is a picture of gold melting.
And then this is a picture of your cerebellum, the thing I work on.
Sort of looks extraterrestrial.
So unbelievably amazing things are in your body,
around every day and that don't get seen,
but also funded by taxpayers.
And so this is a great way,
this is your taxpayer dollars at work.
But they're used for reasons.
We need to see what's in there at different levels
of microscopy to see what's happening when things go wrong.
So that's what they're for.
But these are shared so that we get engaged with science.
So from all these art shows, I have been able to get
a lot of interaction with artists.
So people have seen my displays, but I had students come,
who are in the art department, say, "Hey,
"I heard you love art, I never knew a scientist who love art."
So I said, "Sure, come to my lab."
So I had an undergrad, my very first artist in the lab
was Chanel Matsunami Govreau.
She got a Guggenheim Fellowship.
So for artists, this is a really big deal.
She was an undergrad in the lab,
and actually a performance artist and costume designer.
I would consider her sort of a Lady Gaga-ish
kind of person.
She used this fellowship, she came to my lab.
She looked at worms, she came every Friday.
And she saw that the skin of the worm was in this pattern
and she made this fabric that became part of her show.
And so it was really awesome to have this artist
interacting with the scientist.
She was looking at things and seeing things
that my students weren't seeing.
And so there was this mutual idea,
like omigosh, different eyes on the same thing
can often come out amazing results.
Since then I'm now an affiliate
in the UW-Madison Art Institute.
So I can actually train art students in my lab.
Angela Johnson just got her MFA last year.
She's a photographer, so if you ever come visit,
you can visit my lab on the second floor.
These are images from zebra fish from another scientist
on my floor.
And she's mounted them and it is sort of antiqued
the pictures of the zebra fish embryos developing.
So my next-door neighbor also works on cell division,
but in zebra fish embryos.
And she got really attracted to this taking different
photos of them and visualizing them in another way.
But again, another way to engage with the public.
Her opening, she had her MA opening here,
we had 150 people who had never even set foot
in a scientific building before.
And so that's the power of art to engage.
A lot of people on the street don't know that
labs are open, they can come visit, it is their money.
It's taxpayer money.
So this is a great way to engage with the public.
So I want to sort of say, is it just me?
Am I the super creative person?
And a lot of scientists, and many of you out there
are like, has this been quantified?
Someone alerted me to this article.
And what's really interesting is that scientists tend
to have hobbies in music and photography
than the general US population.
So that's a really actually interesting.
So here we have arts, crafts, music, photo and writing.
And so scientists, and a lot of people,
are really interested in music, like myself, and photography.
So I was like oh, that's interesting.
But if you look at Nobel prize winners,
they tend to have the hobbies-- It shifts a little bit.
They tend to have hobbies in the arts and crafts
in addition to music, and also writing.
So there's interesting things that are going on here.
And what they found is that in general,
compared to other scientists,
Nobel Prize award winning scientists here
are 2.8 times more likely to have a hobby in the arts.
And so that's really interesting.
And it says that that creative sense is really important
for discovery.
And someone like myself who comes from an art background
should be here because there's discoveries being made
that are really important for human health
and welfare across the world.
So a lot of people ask me, what is it about art
that makes scientists more productive and successful?
I often get this.
I love this quote, as you may have seen,
I have a lot of quotes.
So this is a picture of a genome that's been visualized
in a very unique way.
So this quote says, "The richest aspects of any large,
"complicated problem arise from factors that cannot be
"measured easily, if at all.
"For these, the artist's approach, uncertain, though it
"inevitably is, seems to find and convey more meaning."
So that is the key here.
So someone who is looking at computational data
decide to visualize it in a different way,
and they're able to find connections between genes
and the genome that they never thought before.
So it's a great example of where science and art
is really important.
And data visualization is even more important nowadays.
Although in science, but a lot of people aren't trained
in the arts.
And so that's why I think it's really important
to make sure that all of our scientists
get art training and also children from a really young age.
So what have I learned about all these art shows?
Is that you can use science and art to inspire
and engage the public.
And artists can communicate complex ideas
to a wide variety of audience.
The coffee beans sre really important.
And working with artists can actually inspire
new ideas within the laboratory.
And then generally, scientists are pretty creative people.
I feel like I'm in the same group.
I feel comfort and welcome, especially when I go to
science meetings it's like an oozing of creativity.
And I really think you need to encourage students
to pursue art and science and that's what leads
to discoveries.
And just to end on things, if you think I don't have any time in my day,
I do do something on the outside.
And it was in my little bio.
So I have a food blog.
I make cakes that look like mitosis.
I make a lot of cakes that are scientific cakes.
It is my passion, I love cooking,
I often review restaurants around Madison.
But it's always nice to have a hobby.
I like to draw in sugar sometimes.
This is just an example of that.
I often make cupcakes or cakes that look like
a paper that I've just published,
so students like that.
So it's my gift for their hard work.
I put it up there.
I cook and bake a lot of different things.
If you're interested, go, you can certainly follow me
and go look at my blog.
So I want to leave, I have a few last slides.
I want to leave you with this.
I love this quote by Steve Jobs.
It sort of sums up how did I put all of this together.
So, "creativity is just connecting things.
"When you ask creative people how they did something,
"they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it,
"they just saw something.
"It seemed obvious to them after a while.
"That's because they were able to connect experience
"they had and synthesize new things."
So many of you know why this thing is so amazing,
is because he studied Zen philosophy,
and that button is the Zen symbol.
So putting those two ideas together
made people love this thing and its simplicity.
And that itself is Zen.
And so that's a perfect example of
if you have an interest in your background,
how it feeds into your science and into the design.
And it's really important.
And for me, I love this, I found this Venn diagram.
For me, I found this success at the overlap
between science and art,
and that sense of wonder is really important to me.
And most importantly, I realize after all of this,
was I too creative?
No, and being able to see things differently
than other people doesn't make you a crazy person or not welcome.
It really makes you valuable.
So thank you.
(applause)