Episode 127 - Jasmine Nirody: "A career where I can learn things all the time."

In this week's episode, Assistant Professor Jasmine Nirody from the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy revealed how studying snake movements in her undergraduate years inspired her to become an organismal and integrative biologist instead of a medical doctor. She also shares the practical applications of studying the biophysics of tardigrades and jumping spiders. Tune in to hear how her research focus has shifted to focus more on the why since coming to UChicago. 

Transcript

Stephen 00:00
Hello, and welcome to The Course. I'm your host, Stephen, and today I'm speaking with Professor Jasmine Nirody of the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy.

Professor Nirody runs the Nirody Lab at UChicago, where she and her team study the relationship between structure and function in a variety of organisms, including the smallest animals on earth. We'll talk about tardigrades, why she ended up doing a year of medical school, and how she became a University of Chicago professor.

Professor Nirody, thank you so much for joining me today. How are you doing? 

Jasmine Nirody 00:34
I'm great. How are you?

Stephen 00:35
I'm doing well. Thank you. Just to start us off, could you please tell our listeners who you are UChicago and just in layman's terms, like what it is that you do there?

Jasmine Nirody 00:48
So I am a assistant professor in the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at the University of Chicago, and what essentially that means is I run a research group to study various problems at the level of the organism and that I teach classes that think about how organisms interact with their environments, how they take the form that they are currently in through evolution and how we can learn from how they interact with their worlds to build perhaps some bio inspired systems. 

So basically, what I mean when I say bio inspired systems is to look at biological systems and think about how they're doing the tasks that they do and how understanding the physics of those tasks can help us build systems that do those tasks. So for instance, animals that can burrow in into sand and get through these really, really like complex environments can give us some concept of how to design, search, and rescue robots that can dig through rubble and understanding how you know, viruses target bacteria can give us an idea about drug design.

Stephen 02:06
That makes a lot of sense, I look forward to getting into more of that. Going back into your own history first though. We always ask people like kind of what they, where they thought they might go, you know, what careers they thought they might pursue back when they were maybe like middle or high school age.

And I think if I remember correctly, you said that you, it was basically a given that you were going to become a medical doctor. Is that right? 

Jasmine Nirody 02:32
I think that's true for I think for a lot of people that don't necessarily come from academic families. My parents were both professionals and they didn't really know much about, you know, academic life and I didn't either. So I didn't know that there was a job where you could just be a scientist and do research and be paid a living essentially to answer interesting questions that didn't have anything to do with immediate tangible consequences on human health or on the environment or on building a bridge. 

So, in my head, this, if you were good at science and you like science and this is what you did. And you went to, you went to medical school or you became an industrial engineer. And those were kind of the options that you had in front of you. 

So I knew that I was in high school, good at math and physics. And I really liked math and physics, and I really liked solving problems. And I was initially a bit torn between, you know, which aspect of this very tangible set of jobs would I do? To me, the human body seemed kind of the most mysterious, the most complex, the most interesting of them all because there was so much uncertainty and stochasticity in there and so that was why kind of the shift went to towards biology.

Stephen 03:56
Interesting. So how did that look in terms of like the course of your studies? Like what did you pursue an undergrad and then like what led to you actually pursuing a graduate degree in the field that you ended up entering?

Jasmine Nirody 04:09
So I, I started my undergrad as a math major I loved, I loved math. I love pure math in particular. And I spent a couple of years just really focusing on that before I started to get a little itchy for some of the tangible things. I wanted to see how all of these abstract spaces that I was thinking about all the time would then, you know, apply to the phenomena that I was experiencing all around me.

And then I started thinking more and more about applied math courses. And I took a bunch of those and which then led me to taking a bunch of mathematical biology courses and eventually double majoring in math and biology.

One nice thing, I think about the pre-med curriculum in the US in particular, is that it allows you to essentially study anything you want as an undergrad and explore your interests. So, you know, you can be a history major and still be a medical doctor as long as you take the specific prerequisites that are needed to go to medical school. 

And I think one thing that's kind of nice about that is it creates, creates doctors who are also whole people, which is very nice. And so I was, I felt completely comfortable, you know, being, having a math undergrad and still thinking, well, yes, I'm, of course, I'm going to go to medical school after this. Why wouldn't I?

Stephen 05:30
So yeah, I mean you were still intending to go to medical school at that time Like that was still the plan?

Jasmine Nirody 05:35
I well, I think so. The turning the turning point came essentially when I entered university, I Just happened to come upon a research position, the, my first physics class that I took one of the professors who was teaching it saw that I asked a lot of questions and it was really annoying in class. And then and took me aside and told me that but it wasn't actually annoying it was it was great. And would I like to do research?

And I thought, sure, why not? That sounds interesting. I don't know what that means, but fine. And I joined a lab in the applied math department, which is also what kind of shifted me towards applied math eventually. And I started studying how snakes moved, so how snakes moved on flat surfaces, how their scales interacted with various materials to propel them forward. And it was amazing.

I was learning all these tools and techniques in, in my classes. And all of a sudden I was seeing how those. really manifested in real life things. I was taking videos of snakes and then I was applying math to understand how those snakes did that. And that was crazy, and it was mind blowing to me. And, and to realize that, well, the professor that offered me this position is actually doing this for his job. And that's what he gets to do every day was mind blowing to me. And it finally hit me that, hey, there's this career out there where I can just kind of learn things all the time and, and just keep discovering new things and never stop solving puzzles and answering questions.

And I, it was kind of then that I figured out, well, I need to figure out how to do this.

Stephen 07:34
Right.

Jasmine Nirody 07:35
This exists, this exists, and this is what I want to do now. But it was a slow process. I mean it wasn't something that, you know, clicked immediately because I had, you know, 18 years before that, just thinking that I was going to do something else. And so it took me a longtime to kind of percolate with that. 

Stephen 07:52
Yeah. I just, because it came up, I have to ask, if you have like a quick elevator pitch for how snakes move, what don't we know? Or what doesn't the average person know about how that works? 

Jasmine Nirody 08:07 
 Yeah, absolutely. So when you think about how, how snakes might move, right? So you think they're, they're this flat legless thing that is slithering through. And when they're in a forest floor and there's all these leaves and twigs around. You can imagine their body pushes off of various obstacles and moves forward.

But if you put a snake down on your hardwood floor in your apartment, they can also move incredibly well. They can zip across. And you've seen, you know, videos of snakes on tile floor moving along, right? And the question is, they have nothing to push off of. How are they doing this? 

And that's been a puzzle for a long time, and one of the ways that we figured this out is by filming them doing it on a bunch of different ones.

And how they actually can do it is the bottom of their bodies have different friction coefficients in different directions. So if you rub a snake front to back, you rub a snake back to front, and you rub a snake side to side, the friction coefficients will be incredibly difficult, different, sorry. And when you have a snake making a wave, what that does is essentially creates an imbalance of forces in forward and backward directions such that the snake is moving forward. 

Stephen 09:22
Oh, okay. Wow. 

Jasmine Nirody 09:24
Yeah and a really fun thing that we did to kind of test this hypothesis was to build a little jacket for the snake, which eliminated that difference in friction coefficients. And, once you put on these little, like, snake stockings, and you put them down on the table, they just kind of do a standing wave in place, which is kind of hilarious and sad at the same time, I would say.

So I, we actually built it out of just stockings, you go to CBS and you buy the, you know, the tights, like 10 denier and then you just stitch them tight so that the snake just fits into it. And it's stretchy material. So you kind of just get it to slither in, put it on and then they hate it. 

Stephen 10:10
Yeah, I can imagine. Well, that's really interesting. And I can see how that experience…

Jasmine Nirody 10:19
You can see how that might change the path of one's life. 

Stephen 10:23
Yeah, so I mean, was it, was that the case? I mean, was it like after participating in that research, you were like, okay, I'm going to go to grad school for something like this? 

Jasmine Nirody 10:31
So that was what kind of planted the seed and that, Oh, I really, really like this. It, but like I said, you know, if you have something which has built in your brain for 18 years, it's very hard to just turn that off very quickly. So there were, there were many other things. I, and I still, I would say that one other thing is that it's, it's very difficult to just become confident that you can do this thing that you just discovered exists. 

I knew that there weren't that many jobs that did this thing. I knew that now that I knew that it exists that I looked at the statistics of how one gets there and I knew that those statistics were not super nice to look at. And I needed to have some time to kind of build up my courage and confidence towards that goal, I think. 

I did a summer program in the fourth year of my undergraduate it's called Research and Industrial Programs for Students at UCLA. And it's remarkable. It's one of the only research experiences for undergrads. So REUs that integrates both academic research with industry research. So each team of undergraduates gets a program, gets a problem that's given to them by an industry mentor. And then they also have an academic mentor that helps them solve that problem that they then present as a deliverable to the industry.

So it's, it's a great way for mathematicians or physicists to see real applications to the work that they're doing while still being, but while still doing essentially real math, not doing, you know, anything that is just, it's still intellectually incredibly stimulating, but you're seeing the real life impacts of your work and it's a program like no other. I think it's fantastic. 

So then after that, I actually, I actually did go to medical school, for a year and while I was in medical school, I pretty quickly realized that, okay, well, this isn't for me. I thought that maybe it might be, maybe there was some way that I could, you know, still stick with this thing that I had thought that I would do for ages, but have fun with it and do something a little bit off beat.

But while I was there, just in my first year of classes, I, all I could think about was asking a ton of questions, but there was never any time because there were so many, so many books and there's just so much to learn and cram into your head that there wasn't really time to ask more detailed questions of, well, why does it work that way?

It's like, it doesn't matter. You have, you just have to know, because we have to move on to the next module. There's just too much to learn. And I really, really missed the time that I had to kind of sit and think more deeply about things rather than more broadly. And I think if I'd, you know, gotten through the initial bits and kind of gotten to residency, I probably would have been able to finally do that again to think kind of deeply about one system.

But, 

Stephen 13:36
But medical school is not famous for how much free time you have

Jasmine Nirody 13:39
 No, no, it isn't. And I wasn't willing to wait that long. 

Stephen 13:44
Yeah, that make sense 

Jasmine Nirody 13:45
So I left after my first year and started graduate school instead. And I went to Berkeley, and I went to study biophysics there. which seemed like the right thing. It seemed like something where I could ask the kind of questions that I wanted about the systems that I wanted to ask about.

And at the time I didn't really know what biophysics was because in my undergraduate, so I did my undergraduate at NYU, there wasn't really a biophysics program. There were physicists and there were biologists. 

And I, knew that I really, really liked physics and math, and I was very interested in learning and being good at those tools and techniques. But I knew that I wanted to ask questions in biology. I wanted to understand biological systems, but I wanted to understand them physically in a way that physics and math would help me tip away at the mysteries there. 

Stephen 14:47
Are there any people in particular who stand out to you as like really important mentors who like really shaped the trajectory of your studies?

Jasmine Nirody 14:55
 Yeah, absolutely. So there, there have been many many. And I think my undergraduate advisor and my PhD supervisor were really seminal on this. My undergrad advisors were the ones that, you know, introduced me initially to this area that that research was a thing that existed and their enthusiasm is the thing that made me believe that this was a fun job to have.

And so I worked at NYU with Michael Shelley and David Hu and they basically by example led me to this path. And then when I went to graduate school, I worked with a biophysicist, I suppose, called named George Oster. And I say, I suppose, because he was a little bit of everything. I think he was trained in nuclear engineering. He was a polymath, like I've never seen before. And his way of approaching science and approaching research was the thing that has shaped me now, which is that he did projects that he thought were interesting and that he thought that he could make an impact with. And they didn't have to necessarily be related to the last thing he did. They didn't necessarily have to be connected to some grant scheme, but he saw a question and he knew that he had to answer it. And there was a visceral thing that came up and that is which kind of shaped my philosophy on research and science, which is that if it moves you, and it's fun, and you really need to answer it then answer it. 

Stephen 16:40
Yeah, so I would love to just kind of hear like where that interest has taken you and like what questions, yeah, what questions you've like looked at over the course of your career or like what you're looking at now.

You know, yeah, it sounds like there are a lot of really interesting avenues to pursue here. 

Jasmine Nirody 16:58
Yeah, totally. So very broadly, I am really interested in the physics of how organisms interact with their environments and how those interactions feedback on the organisms to shape their behavior, shape their morphology. So essentially what I mean by that is that all organisms, so from, you know, bacteria to us have to be able to navigate through our environments, right? 

And we have to be able to move through our environments to survive to do various things that we need to pass on our genes. For instance, you know, bacteria have to be able to colonize our gut in order to get the food and then build a biofilm and make more bacteria And in order to do those things in different environments, the different bacteria need to have different skill sets, different shapes, different underlying biochemical pathways, and different bacterial lineages have evolved those over millions and millions of millions of years. 

And what I'm interested in is how we can understand the what, so what are the actual physical interactions? What are the details of those mechanics? of that complex environment feeding into this bacteria interacting with it, and then in turn, how did those environments over the course of evolutionary history, create the bacteria that we see now? 

So, I've had the really nice opportunity of working with a whole host of really cool organismal systems. So I've worked with geckos, I've worked with bacteria, I've worked with tardigrades. I've worked with now in our lab, we're studying jumping spiders.

Stephen 18:48
All right. There a lot of directions I could go there, but I hear tardigrades. I have to ask about tardigrades. Also, can you explain what that is for listeners?

Jasmine Nirody 18:57
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So tardigrades are a small animal species that lives in a whole variety of environments. So tardigrades, there are species that live in the marine environments, in the ocean, there are species that live in freshwater, there are species that live in limnoterrestrial environments, so on moss.

So essentially if you go out and pick any puddle on the street and scoop up some puddle water, you probably will find a tardigrade in there, and there's a reasonably high chance that that will be a new tardigrade species that nobody has discovered before. 

Stephen 19:32
Wow. 

Jasmine Nirody 19:32
Yeah, there, there are, it's, it's a pretty large clade, and it's a phylum where not much of it has been discovered yet.

So there's, there's quite a bit more to be done there, and they are very, they're microscopic legged animals that live in these  whole host of environments and they have gained kind of notoriety in recent years because they're able to survive almost anything. So there are species that can survive, you know, incredibly high radiation. There are species that can survive, incredibly high heat. There are species that can survive being frozen. 

And the way that they do this is they kind of go into hibernation and then come out of it a hundred years later completely fine when the danger is gone.And also they're really cute. 

Stephen 20:20
And I mean, yeah, they're literally microscopic, right? I mean, you have to, yeah. 

Jasmine Nirody 20:23
The biggest species that we know of is about the size of the period at the end of a sentence in a typeset book, 12 point.

Stephen 20:31
Wow. Okay. Zooming out a little bit, We ask everyone like what they enjoy about their role at UChicago and if there's anything specifically that maybe they don't enjoy so much about their role.

So taking the last question first, are there any parts of the job that you find that you would rather not do?

Jasmine Nirody 20:51
Oh, gosh. Honestly, no, I think that feels like a cop out, but honestly, no, because I think all of the parts of the job inform the others. And, for me, one of the reasons that I wanted to in some sense, where it, I think the only other kind of job that comes become so, I guess I'm gonna use the word holistic again, the holistic is maybe running a startup or something where we don't really have a designated role. 

We're not just teaching a class. We're not just doing a research project, but we have to essentially run a lab. And what that means is kind of, you know, managing our finances and answering 500 emails a day and doing a ton of our own admin work and doing the research and mentoring students and teaching and being mechanics for when the freezer breaks down.

Like there's a lot of stuff that we have to do to keep things running, but I kind of, I kind of like that. I kind of like that no day is really the same as the others. And yes, there are times when I don't want to answer emails, and there are times when I don't want to fix the freezer, or there are lots of times where I don't want to do any one particular thing, but I like that they all exist, and I like that they're all under my purview.

Stephen 22:19
And I was going to ask what, you know, what it really means to run a lab, but I think that's actually, that's a great description. Like, you know, you're leading the research and I assume you have, you know, kind of mentoring the people under you, but also like when the appliances break that's also…

Jasmine Nirody 22:19
 That's I guess, I can say the thing, it's not the thing that I don't like about the job, because I like having all these jobs, but I think the thing that maybe we as, An academic system could do a little better is to train incoming professors for it, what the realities of that job are.

Because I think one thing is that at every stage, we essentially hire people just based on their research abilities, right? So we hire, you get a postdoc based on how great your, you know, thesis was. And you apply for faculty positions and those depend on your postdoctoral research work.

But once you actually get a faculty position, research is not a huge, I mean, it's the core of your job, but of your day to day, it's not a huge part. You have graduate students and postdocs and undergrads, that you're mentoring that are actually in the lab doing a lot of the things that got you the job, essentially.

So those skills that you built all those years, for all those years. You're not actually using them as much as you did in your postdoc. And nobody ever taught me how to negotiate the cost, negotiate, you know, a minus 80 freezer price. 

Stephen 23:51
Right. That's not something that you're going to think about that anyone's thinking to teach you until you're 

Jasmine Nirody 23:56
No, and the thing is nobody ever, nobody ever actually does teach you. You get here and then it's just like, Oh, you have to do this. You have to choose the specs of this freezer. And it's, it's very important because if it fails, your lab will lose all their supplies. So choose well, because nobody's going to tell you what exactly what you should be looking for. 

Stephen 24:17
 Yeah, well, I bet I think that's great for listeners to hear. oming off that, I'll ask, I mean, is there any other advice, you would give to someone who's considering following in a path similar to yours? 

Jasmine Nirody 24:26
I think my advice is to focus on your local environment and time. So make sure that you like what you're doing day to day. And think very locally in that sense, because like I said, statistically, getting an academic job at every stage is there's a huge filter.

So not every graduate student will be a postdoc. Not every postdoc will be a faculty. And when I say not every, it's a very small percentage at each level that gets filtered out. I went to graduate school not necessarily thinking, Oh, I'm definitely going to get a faculty job. I went into graduate school thinking, I really like what I'm doing right now. And if this stops being fun, I'll stop.

And I got a postdoc and I thought, if this, this is great, I'm still really, really enjoying what I'm doing. I'm intellectually stimulated. I have. A great time doing this. If I don't get a faculty position, I'll have had a fantastic time doing this, and if this stops being fun, I'll stop doing it.

So I think the thing that I would say for people who want to be in graduate school or in a postdoc, is don't do it to get the job. Do it because you're loving what you're doing right then and there. 

And I tell me myself this all the time too, that if it ever stops being fun, I would stop doing it. Because I wouldn't do it well. I mean, I think, I think one of the ways that I'm confident that I can kind of do things, do this job reasonably well is because I'm really truly enjoying every minute of it.

Stephen 26:02
That's lovely to hear. Just a couple of questions that we usually ask towards the end. It sounds as if you have already worked with a really wide range of species and like on a lot of different problems and questions. But, is there anything in particular that you are hoping or looking forward to in the future, like anything on the horizon that you're particularly excited or, you know, keen to look into?

Jasmine Nirody 26:24
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think so. I study biomechanics. So I study how organisms move and navigate through their environments, right? And in particular, how they navigate through these complex environments that you see in nature that are changing all the time, that are really heterogeneous in space. And there's a lot of kind of how questions there, right?

So there's a lot of questions of how do these physical interactions happen. What are the physical interactions? What are the features of snake scales that give them this ability to move across this substrate. And I've been really, really excited about answering those kinds of questions now, but since I've been at UChicago, one thing that I've been really excited about is answering questions that focus more on the why.

So, we have an organism that is doing all these things. We know perhaps the mechanism of how it's interacting with its environment. And then you want to ask a little bit of why does it look the way that it does? Why do those interactions exist? And that's when you get into the evolutionary history of the organism.

And you can think about this similarly to the way that we think about human history, right? So if we look at, you know, the way that the national, some country borders are, or some states are, and you think, this is how they look, but how did they get this way? And for that, you have to think about all of the forces that led to that moment.

And it's the same in evolution. And that's what's fascinating to me about biological systems is that you can't really think about them just as a static entity that exists now. But as this thing that has a very complex history that you can't truly understand it without considering.

Stephen 28:12 
 Right. Like organisms, they're not, they're not necessarily built for the environment they're in right now, they’ve been shaped through eons…

Jasmine Nirody 28:16
Exactly. Yeah. Millions and millions of years of forces. And, and that's what I'm kind very excited about now is, is understanding not just the present and the, and the future of, of biomechanical system, right? 

So how does this organism interact with this environment and what can it teach us about building things for our future? Building robots, building drug delivery systems, but what can it tell us about its past, about the past of both the organism and the environments that it came from.

Stephen 28:55
Well, your enthusiasm for this is palpable and I feel like I, it's a little bit superfluous to ask the question, but this is the question we usually ask at the end. So what would you say you find most fulfilling about what you do? 

Jasmine Nirody 29:08
So I imagine that this is the answer that you get almost always because this is, this is what I feel when I talk to my colleagues that this is what they love about their jobs. It's mentoring and talking to my students. And  in particular, I think When I have a new student, and then this is happening to me now kind of for the first time because I've only been at UChicago for a year, is when you have a new student and they come in and they're really excited about a project, but they don't have that much background and you start kind of giving them some advice and you start giving them some papers and they read it and there comes a moment, they're learning and they're learning And there comes one meeting where all of a sudden they're explaining to you instead of you explaining to them. And it feels really good. 

It's happened to me a couple of times over and it feels great because it feels like   you did something right. 

Stephen 30:02
You're right.  That is pretty much the most common answer, but no, but I've never heard it put quite that way before. That's really funny to think that there's like a tipping point. 

Jasmine Nirody 30:12
Yeah. It's just a really nice feeling. And I think back to like my professors who were really, you know, great with me and that this might've happened to them. And that I wonder how they felt when that happened.

Stephen 30:27
Yeah, well, you, you probably have some idea. 

Jasmine Nirody 30:29
Yeah.

Stephen 30:30
Thank you, Professor Nirody, for your time today. And Course Takers, if you enjoyed today's interview, 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, and thanks for listening.