Interview with Evelien De Meulenaere, PhD, Staff Research Associate at Scripps Institution of Oceanography
(Interview transcribed and edited for readability and length)
D: Welcome! Thank you for talking with me. I see that you did your studies in Belgium at the University of Leuven. You obtained your Masters in Biochemistry and your PhD in Bio-Engineering. You started as a post-doc researcher in Dr. Deheyn’s lab at Scripps Institute of Oceanography in 2014. How did you get started in Science?
E: It’s kind of funny. I was always good at languages. My teachers thought I was going to study languages later on. I never really excelled at sciences but somehow I was much more attracted by it.
D: And, how many languages do you know?
E: 4 that I can manage in and 9 or so total, including Latin and ancient Greek.
For some reason my brain is more wired to logical things. In college classes using logic were more interesting to me. For example in Biology studying taxonomy and learning all those names I could not imagine liking anything like that. The hardest class I ever took was mathematical physics. I struggled with it until 3 days before the exam. It finally clicked, I even had fun at the final, and I passed with flying colors which was so awesome. I think I have this weird pattern in my life where I say “I will never do this” and I end up doing it.
D: You think you go for the maximum challenge?
E: Maybe if I was a psychologist that is probably what I’d say. I was going to do Chemistry but probably never Biochemistry but then I ended up doing biochemistry. I thought I would do Latin but not Greek and did both.
D: Latin and Greek are not standard choices here; how does the education system work in Belgium?
E: After primary school (which is age 6-12), you select whether you take a general education, prepping you for college, or an education that prepares you to enter the work force when you’re 18 or 19. In the general high school (age 12-18), your “specializations” are Latin, Greek, math, economy, sciences, or, in the technical and professional high schools, you get less of the higher level basic skills but more technical skills getting you ready for specific jobs. My parents pushed me to take the general education and go to University.
D: What would you now tell your 16 year old self?
E: Sometimes parents make good decisions for you ;) But there is more. I made the decision to drop Greek for sciences. What they were offering for Latin and Greek did not seem very valuable to me. Even though I was good at it, I didn’t see how it would help contribute to the world. Looking back, I wouldn’t do it any differently at this point. I guess I always followed hunches rather than having a big plan, but it has worked out pretty well so far. So maybe I should also tell my 16-year-old self to keep doing just that.
D: Great. How did you meet Dimitri Deheyn?
E: My previous supervisor and Dr. Deheyn were introduced to each other by a member of the US Air Force Research Labs. Our lab was helping him with a project on the characterization of fluorescent proteins, which is what my PhD was about. Dimitri traveled to Belgium on a regular basis for his support to European fellowships and we ended up meeting in Brussels. We stayed in touch and met occasionally to go out for beers together.
D: Probably showed you pictures of the sunset and pier at La Jolla!
E: No, nothing of the like. This was more than 3 years before I started working for him. I wasn’t even a postdoc yet and he also asked for help with a paper he was writing. After a few years the money was running out on my lab’s grant and I was looking for a position abroad. In order to be successful in academia in Belgium it is important to have foreign experience, and the US is considered a good place to get that experience, so it would help my resume. So here’s an interesting vacancy with someone I already know I can get along with for a 2 1/2 year position that I know I’m fit for, so why not apply?
D: The Deheyn lab studies “light production (via bioluminescence, fluorescence) and light manipulation (via structural coloration, pigmentation) in organisms…with potential application for biomedical, bioengineering and/or biotechnological applications”. They also have been doing work on the effect of micro plastics and microfibers in our environment, among other projects. You started in 2014 and stayed longer than you thought.
E: Yes, the project was going well and was extended after the 2.5 years. UCSD had given me a 5-year visa, so the extension was really easy, and I’m assuming Dimitri was happy with my work and wanted me to stay, too.
My main project has always been to study the bioluminescence of the parchment tube worm (Chaetopterus). A lot of pieces of the puzzle are still missing, but when I first arrived in San Diego, they were just onto ferritin being a molecule of interest and I started characterizing it before moving on. It became much more than a side project. The person I was replacing had already purified the ferritin. Based on her notes, there are still other proteins of interest and every now and then we go back to the drawing board and get something new out of it.
There are many side projects in our lab as well, often partially carried out by undergrads and volunteers. Projects on nudibranchs, seeds, brittlestars, many of which I supervise. There isn’t always a lot of “sample” available and there is a lot of learning and training involved, so every project is a new challenge.
D: Did you lose animals in the extreme algal bloom this year?
E: Yes, we have none and it’s been 4 months that we haven’t been able to get any. We’ve had another time that 3 big storms had wiped out the entire local population and we had none left in the aquarium either, so we had to work on side projects for 6 months then, too, until the colonies were re-established.
D: What other responsibilities do you have? How much bench time and how much talking to students?
E: It comes and goes in waves. When we have new students, they need more training and when they have been in our lab for a while, they can work by themselves more. Sometimes you really get rewarded and the students make your day twice as productive . I once had a summer intern who was phenomenal, best intern I have had in 10 years. It was so much fun brainstorming on the white board with him, and he really was helping me in just a 10-week internship.
D: What is the largest number of students you have mentored at one time?
E: At one time I was working with nine students.
D: How long do grants last?
E: Roughly 6 months to 5 years.
D: Do you think the pandemic will be detrimental long term?
E: It is very challenging to get grants for anything but COVID-19 related so it’s a matter of refocusing or rephrasing our research now. Now’s the time to write something about it. Dimitri has already found things that he can plug into the COVID-19 research and is writing proposals.
D: What are the practical uses of long lasting bioluminescence?
E: In research, bioluminescence can be used as a tracking tool inside animals, but ours could also be used outside animals. In technology, it could possibly be applied towards lighting with solar panels that last well throughout the night, because it’s got a battery. Glow sticks the way we know them now also last for 8 hours, we could make them for 3 days on a biochemical rather than a chemical reaction, which would make them much more environmentally friendly and bio-degradable. I have found many light-sticks washed up on the beach.
D: Any other animals that we know of that have this?
E: Not that we know of now, but new bioluminescent species keep popping up all the time!
D: Would you recommend your career path?
E: The students that ask me every now and then, have to remember that my career path is largely outside the U.S., which is very different, but… if possible, personally, yes, I’d still recommend that. I also dipped my toes in as many related fields as I could, to be able to engage in interdisciplinary research: either to try and do the research myself, but also to be able to talk to researchers in those fields and understand what they try to explain to me.
I typically address this question depending on what I already know about the student but in general I recommend to focus more on methods than topic knowledge, which is what I tried to do. A lot of the students in our lab are very biology focused and if you have passion about what you want to do, like save the whales or the corals, that’s fine and you should absolutely go for that! But if you don’t have a particular passion, it’s time to think realistically about what your career might look like, and what your next employer will do with all your knowledge about this one particular nudibranch or worm. How are you going to sell yourself on your topic? How are you going to help your future lab or employer? Instead, they may be interested in the methods you have learned to analyze your specimen. The more general the method, the more chance that you will use it in your next job. I trained one of our former students the week before she left the lab on a few molecular biology skills and a month later, she said that 90% of her new job was based on what she learned in that week instead of the 6 years of classroom and lab training.
D: Any advantages or obstacles being a woman in science?
E: In general, no advantages. In Belgium it didn’t matter being a woman but in America it is harder.
D: If you took a year’s sabbatical to take classes what would you take?
E: Genomics and programming. Traveling to an island in Japan to study!
D: Thanks so much for sharing your path.
E: You’re welcome.
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