Professor Jasmin Tiro is a professor of Public Health Sciences at the University of Chicago She is the Associate Director of Cancer Prevention and Population Science at the NCI-Designated Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Chicago. Her program of research identifies multi-level determinants of cancer prevention and early detection behaviors. She uses quantitative and qualitative methods to develop, test, and implement interventions. In 2014, Professor Tiro received the Outstanding Mentorship Award from the Center for Translational Medicine at UT Southwestern. In this episode, you will hear her share how her passion for science and experiments led her to the field of Public Health.
Professor Jasmin Tiro is a professor of Public Health Sciences at the University of Chicago She is the Associate Director of Cancer Prevention and Population Science at the NCI-Designated Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Chicago. Her program of research identifies multi-level determinants of cancer prevention and early detection behaviors. She uses quantitative and qualitative methods to develop, test, and implement interventions. In 2014, Professor Tiro received the Outstanding Mentorship Award from the Center for Translational Medicine at UT Southwestern. In this episode, you will hear her share how her passion for science and experiments led her to the field of Public Health.
Julie 00:00
Hello and welcome to The Course. I'm your host today, Julie, and I'm speaking with Professor Jasmine Tiro from the Biological Sciences Division at the University of Chicago, is a Professor of Public Health Sciences and is the Associate Director of Cancer Prevention and Population Science at the NCI Designated Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Chicago.
Professor Tiro’s program of research identifies multilevel determinants of cancer prevention and early detection behaviors. She uses quantitative and qualitative methods to develop, test, and implement interventions. In 2014, Professor Tiro received the outstanding Mentorship Award from the Center of Translational Medicine at UT Southwestern.
She is here today to talk to us about her career path and how she became a professor at the University of Chicago.
Welcome to The Course, Professor Tiro!
Jasmin Tiro 00:58
Thank you for having me.
Julie 00:59
Can you start us off with a brief overview of your career path from your college years to becoming a professor at the University of Chicago?
Jasmin Tiro 01:10
I started at Rice University as a major in biochemistry, graduated in 1997 and realized, you know, halfway through college that I actually didn't wanna work in a cellular biology laboratory. I did two internships and talked a lot to myself in a lab and wanted to do something a little bit more downstream in impacting people's health.
So I went immediately and I got my master's in public health at Emory University's Rollin School of Public Health and I finished that in 1999, and I was debating about whether I wanted to pursue a career in academia or not, and thought I should stop and actually work, in research, in public health research.
So I moved to Houston, back to Houston, and I walked the floors of the UT School of Public Health and saw a job advertisement and did a cold call letter for my first job, where I ran a RO1 to promote breast cancer screening for women veterans. And I ran that for two years and I got to see firsthand what it meant to be an academic.
And to juggle research and teaching, and service and thought, okay, this is actually for me. And so I applied and I decided to stay at UT because I wanted to continue running that grant under my mentor Sally Vernon at the same time as going back to school. And that was one of the best decisions I ever made.
As a result of her mentorship on that grant and in my doctoral program, I ended up pursuing a postdoc at the National Cancer Institute and got to really see how grants are funded, reviewed, and then started my first position at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, Texas. And worked there in their Department of Clinical Sciences, which became the Department of Population in Data Sciences for 14 years before moving to UChicago, just last year.
Julie 03:15
And we'll dig into to some of those key moments in your career path, but before I do that, can you tell me about your research. How would you describe your research in your area of specialty to a lay person, for example?
Jasmin Tiro 03:30
Sure. So I'm a behavioral scientist. I'm interested in what helps, motivates people to do healthy behaviors and stop doing, unhealthy or risky behaviors. I'm particularly interested in socioeconomic and social determinants that help people do their behaviors or don't. And then I design interventions to help individuals carry out what we recommend them to do.
Julie 03:58
Can you tell me what you wanted to be when you were a kid? What did you think your career path might look like?
Jasmin Tiro 04:05
So I was raised by two medical doctors. One was a hematologist oncologist, so a cancer doctor, and another one was a pediatric cardiologist and they really liked their jobs and I thought I wanted to go into medicine and they really, really, really wanted me to go into medicine too. But, you know, I went through my career and my educational journey and I really loved science.
I loved the testing of hypotheses and the gathering of evidence and recording things in my laboratory notebook. And so I thought, okay, well maybe what I'll do is I'll pursue an MD PhD and develop drugs and treatments. And, you know, I ended up working, as I said, in a lab in my undergraduate years, and just feeling that it was a little upstream of actually having an impact on health. Like I didn't totally see how messing around with cells of rats was actually gonna help me improve the health of people. And I ended up taking a class in medical anthropology called Becoming a Doctor or they really read a book called Becoming a Doctor, by Melvin Konnor.
And one of the things that he said in the book was that the greatest impacts on the population's health was through public health, not through medicine. And that kind of stuck with me and got me interested in public health and led me to pursue that area of education and decide I wanted to actually do research in that area.
Julie 05:40
A lot of our audience are prospective college students or students who are starting out their undergraduate careers. And I'm curious for you, when you look back at yourself as a prospective college student, kind of those high school years, even middle school years, what were some of the things that you were interested in or the activities that you were a part of that kind of echo your interest now as, as an adult, as a professor. Do you see any similarities in the things that you were interested in and the things that you are interested in now?
Jasmin Tiro 06:15
Yeah, it's funny you say that because I have a high school senior, her first day of school was today and so she's, you know, just beginning the journey of describing herself and her interests. I'll tell you that I was always really interested in health and health promotion.
I volunteered for health fairs and I did a lot for my university in the health education office, from a volunteer perspective and in that I did things that health education offices do, right? Educate undergraduates about wellness; both physical and mental wellness, as well as the various things that can negatively impact their health at that age.
So, safe sex, condom use, healthy dating relationships and what a healthy dating relationship is, and what it's not, and how to recognize that and protect yourself. And so those are the things that really I enjoyed volunteering and doing and were really important for me while I was doing my education.
And I didn't realize that those type of activities could actually be something that you researched. And so, I was really interested in the design of what we call interventions to people, so that they actually follow through with the healthy behaviors that we recommend as opposed to just rolling our eyes at some of those recommendations.
Julie 07:49
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I wanna talk now about mentors, you've had, you mentioned a couple, like your parents and the professor you had, who really supported you. I wanna hear a bit about both personal mentors, professional mentors, who were the people that really shaped your career, and specifically, how did they shape your career? Was it just being someone who was encouraging? Was it just being someone who connected you to specific opportunities? Who were the mentors in your life and what impact did they have on you?
Jasmin Tiro 08:20
That's a great question. So I would say with my parents, they were really passionate about their careers and really enjoyed their careers. So that was a great role model that I wanted to emulate and I didn't know if I would be as passionate about a career in medicine as I would be about a career in science.
Because I knew what their daily life was like of practicing medicine and I really liked the investigation and testing of hypotheses and more of the activities that I'd be involved in pursuing, a career in science and academia than in the practice of medicine so that was important to me.
And then, understanding all the different ways that different people contribute to promoting people's health through my mentors. So, the director of the health education office at Rice University was a great mentor for me, and she was someone who was going back and getting her PhD at the same time of working in university.
And so I got to see what it was like to be both a student and working full time. So she was an incredible role model, Dr. Lanier. And then, you know, all through my career, just finding other people who found the health topic that was really, that they were really passionate about that they wanted to try and address.
At first for me it was addressing sexual violence and domestic violence and mental health and suicidality. I did that study, those studies, in my master's program through affiliations with various research studies, Dr. Nadine Kaslow, et cetera. And the CDC, because I interned at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
I finished my master and that was when The Violence Against Women's Act funding was ending. And I saw a lot of my mentors and colleagues at the CDC having to shift their attention to a different health topic because there wasn't funding in that area. It was hard to kind of watch that ebb and the flow because of decisions happening at a governmental level about what to invest research in.
And so, I shifted over to cancer prevention in part because of the stability of that funding as well as the National Cancer Institute's recognition of the importance of investing in methods development, at the same time as studying cancer and cancer prevention. And so I could do both a pursuit of studying better scientific methods, at the same time, I could also impact health.
So different places, different people, who changed kind of my perspective and how I nest my scientific interests along with my desire to improve health and in particular the disparities that certain populations experience relative to others.
Julie 11:25
I've heard you mention a couple of time this feeling that you understood you'd probably be more passionate about a career in science and research than a career in medicine or as a doctor. Was there a moment for you when you decided you really wanted to pursue a career as an academic, as a professor, rather than going into, you know, an industry where you're just purely doing research. Was there a moment for you when it felt like an academic path felt like the right choice for you?
Jasmin Tiro 11:57
Yeah, I mean, that's a really great question. So, for me academia, it's a tripartite mission, right? You're pursuing research and you have the independence to pursue the research you are interested in the responsibility and the accountability to do that. But the other thing is you are responsible for teaching. And you're responsible for service and giving back to the broader academic community and I believed in that tripartite mission, I wanted to do all of thosethings. It's an interesting juggle to do early on in your career when you're trying to launch an independent research program.
But that was something I was committed towards.
Julie 12:39
Is there anything that you are currently hoping to do in your career in kinda the next five or 10 years? What are your current aspirations for your career?
Jasmin Tiro 12:49
You know, once you become a tenured full professor, you have the luxury of self-reflection on your path and your journey through the ranks the promotion process and what it takes to succeed in academia as well as to be a leader. So I also have a leadership role in the cancer center. And cancer centers across the country are really trying to impact their what we call catchment area, their local geographic area, where they're trying to improve and reduce the burden of cancer.
And cancer centers have a lot of responsibility in terms of how they try to do that through community outreach and engagement, through increasing the diversity of the cancer research workforce through training the next generation. One area that we've discovered is a need for more leaders and succession planning.
And so, one of the things that I'm really invested in is thinking through how to train and support the next generation of leaders in cancer prevention and control and help give them the skillset to succeed in the pursuit of that leadership, at the same time that they're pursuing their research programs.
Julie 14:12
What or who or what problems, what ideas are inspiring you right now? What drives your work on both a personal and a professional level?
Jasmin Tiro 14:24
You know, being trained and raised by two clinicians, I really feel like I understand more of the challenges of the practice of medicine and the challenges that we have in the United States in optimizing the delivery of healthcare and in my area cancer care.
The fragmentation that we have, and the structural factors that hamper people's ability to be healthy and to get access to care is very real and, you know, the stats that we can talk about in terms of how we spend more per capita on health care in the United States without not necessarily much better outcomes in comparison to other countries is, you know, frustrating for a lot of my colleagues and I. And so trying to figure out what are the levers that we can do to improve, the delivery of healthcare as well as how people can best promote and protect their health, is something that that really motivates me and I think really energizes me because I think we're moving in the right direction as a field in recognizing more of the structural elements that hamper our ability to deliver care and be healthy.
Julie 15:50
What would you say is the most enjoyable part of your job about being a professor, about being at the University of Chicago, about being in your field? What are the things that feel fun about your job?
Jasmin Tiro 16:03
So, you know, science is not really a solitary pursuit anymore, right? Science is, you know, a team sport, right? So I do a lot of things that involve collaboration and discussions about how to design interventions, how to test interventions, how to evaluate whether they're working the way that they're supposed to work. And that involves discussions with other scientists in other fields because it's multidisciplinary in nature and so each bringing our own respective disciplines is really exciting to our evaluations as well as involving students, and research assistants and staff in those studies is really fun.
So, I enjoy the meetings that I have to discuss how we can best analyze our data and collect our data in collaboration with our partners.
Julie 16:58
And conversely what are the things that are not as fun about your job? What are some of the challenges or. Frustrations that you face.
Jasmin Tiro 17:06
When you move up the ladder, you have a lot more administrative responsibility. A lot more meetings to keep things running. And so a lot of my time is spent in meetings and not as much sometimes in thinking and writing. So sometimes I miss that, but the trade-offs are strong when I get to support other team members through my administrative responsibilities.
You know, I used to run this, my own question, right? To all the academics, you know, if you had a superhero power, what would your power be. And if you ask pretty much any academic, it's something that's getting more time in their day. You know, either freezing time or having a doppelganger or someone else so that they could, you know, have another person, their doppelganger kind of attend meetings so that they could think and stuff.
Julie 18:01
Yeah, that makes sense.
Mm-hmm. Can you tell me about moments of resistance or challenges that you've been met with throughout your career? It could be at Chicago or previously in your career, but a challenge that you faced and how you overcame it or perhaps how you are still overcoming it if it's a challenge that you continue to face.
Jasmin Tiro 18:22
When you engage in science, you engage in debate and discussions, and I'll tell you, being a female in science can be challenging at times because you can question their approach and how they're pursuing or their arguments of why they're pursuing what they're pursuing and sometimes it gets caught in issues of gender and the way in which people want males versus females to be perceived. So in terms of resistance, The issue of quote unquote female aggressiveness and how to be more likable in your interactions sometimes entered into my engagement with colleagues and the perceptions that my mentors were giving me feedback on in terms of productive scientific collaborations.
And that's a tension that I see other women experiencing in their pursuit of science. Right. How do you disentangle the way to give feedback in a constructive way and get past this idea of are you being an aggressive female in that delivery of feedback if that makes sense. It's a hard line to walk sometimes when you're working through things. I'm not questioning them, I'm questioning the way in which they're presenting something, and the argument, the scientific argument for it and that's not a fun thing that women have to negotiate as a scientist that I don't see as big of an issue for men, unfortunately,
Julie 20:09
Yeah.
Jasmin Tiro 20:09
And I don't think it's unique to science. You know, and in conversations with my husband who is in business, he sees the same, you know, critiques level that his female colleagues of likability and, and style of communication.
Julie 20:27
I'm curious what advice you might have to a young person who is interested in pursuing a career in public health, or more specifically an academic career in public health, what advice would you have for a young person, both, you know, in terms of what should they study or what should they make sure they're interested in, but maybe also what sort of things should they expect? What sort of things should they prepare for? What advice would you have for young people who are interested in pursuing a similar career path to yours?
Jasmin Tiro 21:01
I would say communication is key both oral and written communication, being able to collaborate and let your voice be heard, but also to hear other voices in the discussions and integrate different perspectives. Public health, you know, post pandemic is at a really challenging time point of polarization and it can be frustrating when, you know, you manage both scientific uncertainty as well as manage the misinformation and this, the disinformation that is so prevalent. How your interventions that you develop and how your messages that you're trying to send to the public so that they can be healthy, can get distorted,can be frustrating. And I see, and I've seen a lot of burnout happen in public health academics and public health professionals but we've had more and more evidence in the last few years how important our role is in the ecosystem and more responsibility and attention at levels that, you know, people never have paid attention to us in the past before so it can be incredibly rewarding, but it can also be very frustrating.
Julie 22:24
Yeah, that kind of brings us to my final question, which is, what is the most gratifying part of your job?
Jasmin Tiro 22:32
You know, when one of the interventions or the knowledge discoveries that we've made, changes practice, changes policies, influences how people act and the policy makers make decisions. That's incredibly gratifying, because you know, the reach of what you're doing is beyond just my one-on-one interaction with the student or a trainee That's incredibly gratifying. But also knowing that I'm also transmitting those skills to my trainees and my mentees, and that they're going on to discover and develop interventions that have that broader reach into populations is also kind of gratifying, right? So both are reinforcing and both are helpful in managing what might be some daily frustration.
Julie 23:27
Professor Tiro, thank you so much for your time.
Jasmin Tiro 23:30
Thank you so much for having me, and hopefully I'll gave you a little bit of insight into what it means to be a professor of public health.
Julie 23:38
Thank you again for your time, Professor Tiro. And Course Takers, if you enjoyed listening to today's episode, please check out the other ones. Leave us a comment, subscribe, follow and share this episode with your friends and family. You can find out more about the University of Chicago through uchicago.edu or the University's campus in Hong Kong through uchicago.hk.
Stay tuned for more. See you around.