Season 2 |
Episode 3: Scrappy science from patching bike tires to cell signaling with Dr. Joann Trejo
[00:00:00] RORI: Welcome to Science Wise, a podcast designed to inspire people embarking on a career in science through conversations that will feel like talking with your wisest auntie,
[00:00:07] EMILIA: who just so happens to be a badass scientist. I'm Emilia,
[00:00:11] RORI: and I'm Rori. We're two scientists on a mission to make the world of science more welcoming by learning from the experiences of people who came before us.
[00:00:18] EMILIA: Our guest today is Dr. JoAnn Trejo, a professor of pharmacology in the School of Medicine at UC San Diego. I first learned about Dr. Trejo when we had the privilege of attending the SACNAS conference where Dr. Trejo gave one of the keynote lectures. I was super impressed by her presentation, by all of her accomplishments, and I wonder why I had never heard of Dr. Trejo. I immediately felt that we had to interview her. She received her PhD at UC San Diego, followed by a postdoc at UCSF, and then she went on to University of North Carolina Chapel Hill to start her first faculty position. She was later recruited to UC San Diego, in 2008, and she's so successful. She has received millions of dollars of grant funding over the years from both NIH and private foundations, and she has received many accolades for her research and mentoring.
In particular, she was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2021. She is the director of an NIH Institutional Research and Academic Career Development Award, which is a program for training postdocs at UC, San Diego. And the majority of these trainees have obtained tenure-track faculty positions at academic institutions.
In 2022, she received a $16 million NIH first award, which stands for Faculty Institutional Recruitment for. Sustainable transformation, which provides funding to enhance and maintain a culture of inclusive excellence in the biomedical research community. And did I mention that she also has an MBA? Super impressive.
And so today we are delighted to get the opportunity to talk to Dr. JoAnn Trejo.
Welcome, Dr. Trejo. We are really excited to have you with us today. The first time I. I heard about you at Sagnas last year because you gave a keynote, a very nice and inspiring keynote. Here we are almost a year later, and so we are both really, really excited to chat with you today.
[00:02:26] JOANN: Great. Well, I'm excited to be here with you.
[00:02:28] RORI: Yeah, it's a, it's a total honor. After we saw you talk, I feel like Emilia was like, That's, that's what I want to be someday. She was like, I want to be like Dr. Trejo up there someday. So you are very much a role model for us, and we're very thrilled to be able to speak with you.
[00:02:43] JOANN: That means I'm doing my job, because that's the whole point, yeah.Is to inspire the next generation, so. Thank you for that.
[00:02:51] EMILIA: Well, great. We'll start with who was JoAnn Trejo when you were a kid. Tell us a little bit about your family or your personality.
[00:02:59] JOANN: I'm the youngest of five. I come from a family of Mexican migrant farm workers. My grandparents immigrated to the U. S. and crossed the Mexicali border probably sometime around 19, early 1920s, a very different time. Their intention was to come here and work and to go back to their home country and like millions of other immigrants that never really happened. In any event, my family settled in the Central Valley of California, which is a very, very agriculturally rich area.
Lots of farming, and lots of migrant farm workers in that area. and come from a very large extended family, uh, primarily a matriarch. Um, my mother raised us alone. She had a very strong work ethic. She was what I would say a role model with regards to her love and embracement of humanity. She was the favorite Tia.
Everybody came to our house for the holidays and on the weekends. She was a very devout Catholic and embraced Catholicism. She was a model like that where it was really unconditional love for her family and for her, her children. And I think her influences certainly impacted The way I live my life and the way my siblings and a lot of my family live their lives.
[00:04:20] EMILIA: What was your experience being the youngest?
[00:04:22] JOANN: So there were, uh, good things and bad things. So the good thing was I have an older sister and then three brothers in between. My sister is eight years older than me. And as the oldest, uh, she had a lot of responsibility. She took care of us when my mother had to work on the weekends or late.
She was the first person in our quite extended family to go to college. My mother was not happy that she moved out of the house. And so when it came time for me to make that transition, it was a lot easier. But as the youngest, also, I was lowest. person. When it came to a lot of things, I had to fight for cookies.
I had three, three older brothers, and they played a lot of sports, and I would like to play with them, but I wasn't very good. But, uh, we had a lot of fun. We lived, um, in a rural area in Stockton, and we spent a lot of time outside, um, riding bikes, um, playing all sorts of things. games. Um, we had chickens and ducks and we walked to school.
My mother didn't have a car. We were very poor. So she would receive commodities. And in those days, you, you actually went to a warehouse and picked up bags of rice and government-issued products, um, that had USDA on them. I remember that. And my mother, every meal that we had, she cooked from scratch. We always had beans.
We always had rice. We ate mostly, uh, flour tortillas. And so she would make the masa and she would roll out two tortillas for us each. And then if you wanted more, you had to roll them out yourself. But we, we always had really delicious food. When I think about processed food now and And the expense of trying to eat by making your own food is even more expensive, at least according to some family members, than it is to buy food at Walmart or Costco.
So that, my mother was a really good cook. I mean, she made the best tortillas, the best, maybe that's why my family was always at our house as well.
[00:06:21] RORI: Food helps.
[00:06:22] JOANN: Yeah.
[00:06:22] EMILIA: So your mom would work a full day's work and then come back home and like make you all dinner.
[00:06:28] JOANN: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
[00:06:29] EMILIA: Wow. Yeah.
[00:06:29] RORI: That's impressive for five kids.
[00:06:32] JOANN: Yep. For five kids. Yep.
[00:06:34] EMILIA: What's the backstory of your name, JoAnnne? How, why did your
[00:06:40] JoAnnN: Yeah, that's a very good question, Emilia. My sister is Maria Magdalena. My brother is Gilberto David Gregorio. And I'm JoAnn. My mother, where she lived, um, in a part of Stockton, on Main Street, very close to the church, um, Her neighbors, uh, who she got to know very well, um, were JoAnn and Paul, and I believe they were also members of the church, and she really loved these folks and decided that that was a beautiful name.
And I was blessed with having this name.
[00:07:15] EMILIA: I see.
[00:07:16] JOANN: Yeah.
[00:07:16] EMILIA: So you lived there throughout like elementary school, middle school, and high school?
[00:07:21] JOANN: Yes.
[00:07:22] EMILIA: Did you like school? Did you like a science class? How did you become interested in science?
[00:07:28] JOANN: We went to an elementary school, kind of in a rural area of Stockton where mostly immigrant families and poor whites were the two major populations.
Okay. And I was very good at school. I would finish the workbooks. I would finish all of my work by like 10 o'clock in the morning. I was basically bored in elementary school up to the point where like third or fourth grade, I, I would be a little bit rambunctious because I'd had nothing to do. And so I often got sent to the principal's office.
[00:08:00] RORI: Understimulated JoAnnne Trejo.
[00:08:03] JOANN: Right. Fortunately, very fortunately, I was, uh, often sent to the vice principal's office. And the vice principal was a woman named Dorothea Estorga, who was also Mexican, and she knew exactly what she was dealing with. So instead of sending me home, she created projects for me.
I would go and work with the kindergartners. I would you know, help her with different types of things that, you know, that she felt would would fill my time. And I got to know her and know her very well because I would see her multiple times a week. And she became probably one of the key role models in my life.
When I finished grammar school, then, you know how they funnel all the grammar school kids into the public middle schools. And I didn't like it. It was huge. There was just, there was a lot of pressure from other Mexican girls to be a certain way, to dress a certain way. So at, at some point I decided that I wasn't going to go to school anymore.
And my mother who. I got to know Mrs. Astorga, um, obviously she had met my mother multiple times, um, said, well, why don't you put her into the Catholic school? And my mother's first response was, well, I, I can't afford that. And she said, well, why don't you go talk to them? And so she did. And they created some sort of group mechanism for me to go that was so my mother could afford it. So I went to middle school at San Joaquin Middle School in Stockton. Mrs. Estorga's two daughters were also at that school and we became really good friends, but just long story short, Mrs. Estorga just had her 87th birthday. She has always kept in touch with me and I get to see her about once a month and she's amazing.
[00:09:51] EMILIA: Oh my gosh,
[00:09:51] RORI: that's incredible. I mean, this. this woman, like, completely changed your life.
[00:09:55] JOANN: Yeah, we, we talk a little bit about it. I think the other thing is she saw, you know, potential in, in what I could possibly do.
[00:10:03] EMILIA: You mentioned that watching your bigger sister leave home to go to college made it easier for you.
[00:10:09] JOANN: Well, it made it easier with regards to my mother accepting the fact that I would go to college and, and go to college outside of Stockton. So I was the first one to leave town. I went to UC Davis, which is about, I don't know, 50 miles from Stockton. But let me tell you how I got there. And again, I think the theme here is role models.
So obviously I had my sister as a role model. I had my mother and my aunts as very strong women role models. And then when I went to, to middle school and high school, I had a teacher whose father was a professor at Berkeley. So this is a middle school teacher. At some point, I met her father who was visiting.
And at that, I think my first interest in science happened during high school. So I went to St. Mary's high school and we had We had physics, we had chemistry. I mean, I don't know how well it was taught, but we were exposed to those disciplines. And one of my projects in physics was to build an electrical sort of transformer.
And I had no idea how to do that. And so I asked him to help me and he loved it. His name was Antony Oppenheim, he's a professor in engineering, a Polish immigrant also. And I, I really, I think of him as my first scientific mentor. Now, nobody in my family are scientists. Why did I like science? And when I reflect on that, I think part of it is just that I have a Sort of an innate inclination towards trying to understand how things work.
When we were kids, we, we would ride bicycles a lot and we had all these bicycles and different bicycle parts. And so if your bike broke down, you just had to find another bike that was broken and try to fix it with whatever parts that were there. And I didn't really think twice about it, but just the capacity to see something mechanical and figure out.
how it works and why it's not working and try to fix it. I think that's part of it. It's just some sort of innate inclination to, to try to figure out how things work.
[00:12:15] EMILIA: From a young age, you were curious about how to solve and fix problems. So you developed that relationship with the professor at Berkeley.
And I mean, how did that relationship develop?
[00:12:25] JOANN: I finished high school in 1982, probably when you guys were born, started at UC Davis as a science major and wasn't really sure what kind of science I wasn't going to focus on. Um, but you know, one thing for sure was at that time, there were very few opportunities to get a job.
Laboratory Experience to work in a lab to see what it's really like to do, to do science. And there was a small program that was offered through the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, which is associated with UC Berkeley up on the hill. And as part of that laboratory, I think they still have it. They had a section that was focused on like radiation medicine and cancer.
The government had all of these uranium mill tailing sites all over the country, primarily in the, in the Southwest. And the chemicals and the processing that they did to extract uranium, a lot of that was leaching into the groundwater that people were drinking.
[00:13:28] RORI: major problem.
[00:13:29] JOANN: Yeah, so one of our projects was to test this groundwater and see how it affected breast cancer cells.
So as the summer of my freshman year, I applied to this program, I got accepted, and I was able to work in one of the laboratories. The first, the laboratories that we worked at were the ones down at Aquatic Park, down in the flats.
[00:13:53] RORI: Oh yeah.
[00:13:53] JOANN: And so, I mean, that was like, pivotable. Like, having that opportunity to work in a lab as an undergraduate at that time was not typical.
It was a pretty extraordinary experience. And best of all is that I got paid and Professor Oppenheim, who lived up in the Berkeley Hills, up in North Berkeley, had a cottage at the back of their house that they would sometimes rent. And so I got to stay there. I didn't have to pay rent. I could stay there and that made it very affordable.
All I had was a bike. So I would bike down the Arlington down to the flats.
[00:14:26] RORI: Oh, wow. That's steep.
[00:14:27] JOANN: Yeah. And I spent,
[00:14:28] RORI: you had strong legs.
[00:14:29] JOANN: Yeah. And I do like to bike, but I did that every summer.
[00:14:34] RORI: That's extraordinary.
[00:14:35] JOANN: Yeah.
[00:14:35] RORI: Especially to be able to return every summer and continue on a project and continue developing your relationship with Professor Oppenheim.
[00:14:43] EMILIA: So is that when
you said, Oh, I think this is going to be the path for me. I'm going to be a scientist or
[00:14:50] JOANN: For sure. For sure. I knew I wanted to do science. Exactly.
[00:14:53] EMILIA: I heard you say it in an interview that also having seen what a scientist's life was like also gave you
some encouragement.
[00:15:03] JOANN: Absolutely. Yeah.
So Dr. Offenheimer, he had a great life. I mean, he had a great parking spot on UC Berkeley campus.
[00:15:11] EMILIA: He had a parking spot?
[00:15:12] JOANN: Yeah.
[00:15:12] EMILIA: I thought only Nobel laureates or people who had Nobel prizes had a parking spot.
[00:15:16] JOANN: He didn't get a Nobel laureate, but he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. I saw how much he loved his work and how passionate he was about his work.
And I am the same way. I was impassionate about it. My mother used to always tell me, Miha, you work so hard. I said, Mom, I work hard, but I love what I do. It's not. Her experience of work obviously was very different. She worked very hard labor, physical labor, her entire life. And what I was doing was, is very different.
[00:15:47] EMILIA: Everybody else in your family is not a scientist. You decide to go to UC Davis, are doing a science major. Did they ever say like, don't do that or try to?
[00:15:57] JOANN: No.
No, my family has been very supportive and very proud of all of my accomplishments. I think sometimes they would want me to be around more. But for me, family is really important.
Whenever I lived in California, I would go back and see my mom once a month, even when I was in San Diego. She passed away in 2018, but You know, for the last 10 years in San Diego, I would go there once a month and see her. It was definitely hard for me when I first went away to college. The adjustment for me was really tough.
Living in a very different environment, a very different culture. At that time, I'm sure there were other kids that were Mexican, Latino, whatever, but I never really met them. There wasn't a lot of guidance with, with regards to integrating into the institution. I had a similar experience when I went to graduate school, first year of graduate school.
[00:16:52] RORI: At UC San Diego, right?
[00:16:54] JOANN: UC San Diego was also very hard. I just felt like I didn't, I didn't belong. I didn't feel comfortable. Some of this is what they call imposter syndrome. I mean, these feelings are real. You're put into these environments where you don't feel any connection to anybody. I mean, obviously, I think science has become more diverse.
We've increased our representation of diverse students. at the student population, at the postdoc population, it's getting better at the faculty population, but we still have a lot of work to do.
[00:17:23] RORI: Clearly. In both of those, when you started undergrad and when you started your PhD, like you say, maybe some of it was imposter syndrome, but there were all of these structures that made it clear that these places were not designed for you.
In many respects. How did you persist through that? Clearly you were scrappy, like being the younger Civ who fixes the bikes and is slowest but manages to keep up. But what helped you through those times?
[00:17:48] JOANN: Yeah, well, I think the option was, okay, if I, if I, Go back home. I, I have an idea of what my life is going to be like, and I wanted a different life.
And so that was a very strong motivation to stay in college. And, and it was like the first quarter was the worst and the second quarter got better. I think by the third quarter, I started making friends, great people, but just adjusting to the different culture and different, just a different environment was, was pretty hard.
In graduate school, the turning point was when I started working in the lab and doing the rotations and getting really good data. And having
[00:18:28] RORI: that's exciting.
[00:18:29] JOANN: Yeah. And having a mentor who recognized that and got excited about it. I felt more confident. I felt Like, I was a scientist and helped me develop my science identity.
What was really helpful for me was that work and being successful as being a scientist was probably the biggest influence on my decision to stay and to complete the PhD.
[00:18:56] RORI: Is the science itself.
[00:18:57] JOANN: Right.
[00:18:57] RORI: It's like, you love the science itself. You're like, this, I gotta stay with this because it's too fun.
It's too fun to get cool data and understand things differently. Exactly.
[00:19:08] EMILIA: Were there people that you could talk to then, like during your PhD, when you had these feelings that could help you, I don't know, supported you in some way, or no? There wasn't really a structure back then.
[00:19:19] JOANN: Not really a structure. I mean, there were a few professors that really wanted me to stay and reached out, but there was this huge power discrepancy, but there was support and wanted me to stay.
was not the reason for me staying. The reason for me staying really was the success I was having in the lab.
[00:19:36] RORI: I'm glad your experiments turned out well. Exactly. What if they didn't turn out? They don't always do.
[00:19:42] JOANN: Right.
[00:19:43] RORI: You applied for faculty positions when you were picturing yourself as a faculty member.
Before you actually got the job, what was your mission? Why did you want to be a faculty member?
[00:19:53] JOANN: So primarily having the independence and the freedom to do the science that I wanted to do. To study cellular signaling, um, these uniquely activated GPCRs and me driving the work. That was really the main, the main motivation.
My expectation of being a faculty member was that I would focus on developing my research projects, writing papers, getting extramural funding, and just doing science, right?
[00:20:26] RORI: Yeah.
[00:20:26] JOANN: That was the
expectation.
[00:20:28] RORI: I love that. Like, clearly, the science drove you so strongly through hard times in grad school, and scientific freedom was why you decided to pursue a faculty position.
Which is it? It is, it's pretty sweet. It's a pretty great thing about the job, right? We get to design our own questions and pursue them.
[00:20:46] EMILIA: After your postdoc, you went to North Carolina at Chapel Hill?
[00:20:50] JOANN: Yeah. UNC. Chapel Hill, yeah.
[00:20:51] EMILIA: UNC. Chapel Hill. Yeah. How did you
make your decision to go?
[00:20:54] JOANN: When I applied, I really looked at departments that, part of their research portfolio was studying signaling and GPCRs and G proteins, and so
[00:21:05] RORI: Mm-Hmm.
[00:21:06] JOANN: had a list of. bunch of departments and applied to probably 10 or 11 or 12 places. And at that time you would find the ads in the back of the science magazine and you would submit these applications. Much to my surprise, I got pretty much an offer at every place I applied to. And so I, I was, you know, Like had nine.
Nice. Yeah, this, this is, this is 24 years ago. Okay.
[00:21:30] RORI: Okay. Yeah.
No one else has done this. Only Dr. Trejo ever has gotten faculty offers everywhere she applied.
[00:21:39] JOANN: This is like 25 years ago. Right. So what I was looking for was a department where there were other faculty who were conducting research that was going to relate it to mine.
So people that I could talk to that had. Big graduate programs so I would have access, uh, to students. Those are the main things that I, that I look for.
[00:21:59] RORI: Colleagues and students.
[00:22:00] JOANN: Exactly.
[00:22:01] RORI: That's what makes science fun and active and vibrant.
[00:22:04] JOANN: Right, right.
[00:22:05] EMILIA: That's something that I eventually realized that that's, those are some things that you need to be successful, but you already knew that, like going in.
I want to have a group who's doing, who can help me and where I can get good students.
[00:22:16] JOANN: Right, right. Now, when I started. I knew eventually that I wasn't going to retire there. I mean, you never know what would happen, but, you know, I, I always had aspirations to come back to California once I felt like I had succeeded there.
And so I got tenure there, I established a lab, had multiple NIH grants and publications and all that sort of stuff. And we decided to come back. to California.
[00:22:43] EMILIA: So why did you want to go back? Is it because you wanted to be closer to family?
[00:22:46] JOANN: Exactly.
[00:22:47] EMILIA: The science was really good in California.
[00:22:49] JOANN: Exactly.
It was more to be closer to, to family.
My spouse, her family's also from California and parents are getting older and those sorts of things. So we wanted to come back to California.
[00:23:00] EMILIA: I saw somewhere that you got an MBA as well.
[00:23:04] JOANN: Oh, yes. Yeah.
[00:23:05] EMILIA: When, when did this happen and why?
[00:23:07] JOANN: So, my expectation was, right, is that I would develop a research program, get NIH funding, do great science, publish papers, and I would train students in postdocs as part of my teaching and service.
But as a woman, as a Latina, I got, Pulled in and was asked very, very early in my career to serve as mentors for students, to be the, the representative on the admissions committee, to do a lot of service for the academy. That was far more than my colleagues were doing and getting very little credit for that, right?
And this, this is pervasive. It happens to a lot to women faculty and faculty from historically underrepresented backgrounds and with students and postdocs. I mean, they're often burdened with doing a lot of the work that the institution wants to do to enhance equity and inclusion.
[00:24:07] RORI: Oh yeah. All of a sudden they're like near peer mentors to like a load of students and you're like, you're a phD student yourself.
[00:24:13] JOANN: Right, exactly. And, and the struggle is that you can't say no, right? These are our people and it's really hard to say no. So that kind of started when I started as an assistant professor. And I also was really exposed to the bias that people have. I saw the discrimination. I saw how the process worked.
[00:24:35] EMILIA: When did you start noticing these things? Like as a grad student, as a postdoc, as a assistant professor?
[00:24:41] JOANN: Mostly as an assistant professor because I was in the room now. I was at the table.
[00:24:44] RORI: Oh, you heard the things that they say.
[00:24:46] JOANN: Right. And I was often the only woman and certainly the only person of color.
And I, I saw it firsthand. It was not rumor or hearsay, as they say. But I also felt like I couldn't do anything. I'm like this little professor. So once I did. Transitioned out of UNC and came to UC San Diego. I was asked to lead some very large programs here and I decided at that point that this work is very important.
I also realized that we really need to have people who are competent. to run these programs if we really want to have impact. And if I was going to do this, I felt like I really needed training in how to do this kind of work. I'm a scientist. I know the field of cell signaling and cell biology and pharmacology.
This is like social science, right?
[00:25:37] RORI: Right. Like institutional transformation is a different Expertise.
[00:25:41] JOANN: Right, exactly, exactly. And so, as part of our faculty development at UCSD, we have a MBA program through the Rady School of Management here, and they have a executive program for people who are working professionals.
I decided, well, I'm going to do this. I'm going to apply for it. And I got in and it was, it was awesome. It's a two year program. And a third of the students were MDs and PhDs, a lot of them from UCSD. And then a third of the faculty were engineers. And then the third of the students were ex military. So we have mostly guys that were from the Marines, from the Army, Navy SEALs.
And all of our projects were done in teams and pre assigned teams. So we had to work with people who were so different than, you get a physician, a scientist, a Ex military person and an engineer and it was the best experience and it really truly showed how having people who have diverse experiences, diverse training, diverse ways of tackling problems and thinking is the best way to solve problems.
It was a perfect example of that. I loved every minute of it. And you see people's strengths, and so we would just figure out, okay, you're really good at that, you take that task, you're good at this, you take that task. It was awesome. I loved it.
[00:27:07] RORI: And so now you are indeed at UCSD. got the MBA in order to prepare yourself for some of the kind of administrative programs that you were going to run, and one of them is the NIH FIRST.
I'm curious, how does what you learned during your MBA help you as you think about this program, which is the goal is to change the university?
[00:27:28] JOANN: Good question. Really, the overarching goal is of the first program is to enhance inclusive excellence of an institution. It's a, it's
[00:27:36] RORI: a thank you
[00:27:37] JOANN: transformational sort of change.
And so our approach is to take a multi pronged approach, which includes recruitment of faculty who will promote and foster inclusive excellence and be like the next generation of leaders. In addition to developing and implementing different types of enhanced faculties, skills and understandings for improving mentorship and inclusion and equity and all of those sort of things.
So how did the MBA help me in that kind of work? The success that I have had in developing and implementing impactful programs that have truly enhanced the success of individuals that are underrepresented in the biomedical workforce. So, um, The way I approach this work is basically using a data driven strategy.
Many of the things that I learned during the MBA were related to project management, personnel management, leadership, training. and Finance. For me, it was important to understand at some level, how do businesses work, right? If you're not successful and the ultimate goal of businesses is to earn profit, I mean, it fails.
It's, it's gone, right? And so some of the things that I do in, in my administrative role as the Senior Assistant Vice Chancellor for Faculty Affairs is when we start thinking about programs, we pilot. Very small. We think big, start small.
[00:29:04] EMILIA: How do you fund the pilot programs? Is that through a small grant and then you expand or you ask the university for a seed grant?
[00:29:10] JOANN: Yeah, I think a lot of institutions struggle with funding for these types of programs. I, I was very fortunate with when I started this administrative role, I had conversations with leadership and I Pitch them basically a, was it like a business project or whatever of what I wanted to do and how much money I would need to pilot these programs and what a potential return on investment would be.
For them too, it's always about the bottom line, right? They want a return on investment and they approved it and they gave me seed money for, for five years. The money was about, I think it was over five years, it was about a million dollars, so dollars per year, but based on that initial investment, our office has brought in about 30 million in various types of funding to support primarily faculty development, but we also have a postdoc program.
And. They like that. They like when you bring money in and being resourceful too. You, I, I don't have all the answers. And so being able to interact with and establish relationships with people that can help develop ideas was really critical. I think. Being successful at this job also requires that you be able to identify stakeholders and people that can help you get this work done because it's, it's not possible just as a single person.
You need a lot of people to help you.
[00:30:32] RORI: Which is true in science. What you're saying, like the scientific reasoning of finding problems, identifying what's going on. Also, the scientific fact that like we do our science in collaboration now.
[00:30:41] JOANN: Right.
[00:30:42] RORI: So both of these. are important for the other work you're doing.
[00:30:44] EMILIA: I was just going to say, when you were talking about stakeholders and people helping you, did you ever feel any pushback or people were like, no, go for it?
[00:30:53] JOANN: Oh, of course. And what I did was just pivot. I mean, you, you know, who's going to be supportive and who's going to buy in and who's not. When I first started doing this work, I went to the office that you would think would be the most supportive.
And they were not. And I'm like, well, that's not going to work. So I need to figure out how to basically work around it, do a workaround. And that was successful. And if you're really passionate and care about these things, you got to be scrappy, right? You have to figure out how to get it done. And sometimes you have to go back and rethink.
because that's not working.
[00:31:27] EMILIA: I feel like you really have to be super committed to this mission. When did that sort of desire manifested itself in you?
[00:31:35] JOANN: I think all of this happened once I was full professor and that I think I was promoted to full professor in 2012, I think. So then I felt like, okay, I'm here now let's, let's see what I can do.
I know that younger, More junior assistant professors and postdocs. And students really struggle with their passion and their desire to do more.
[00:31:58] RORI: Totally.
[00:31:58] JOANN: Balancing that with their own career development, their own professional development. And it's a really hard thing to balance. Because every minute you spend doing work that's not related to your science is one less minute you have to do your science, right?
So I think for me, I was obviously interested in this, in this work and doing a little bit, doing more than most faculty do, but not an extraordinary amount and not in a very, uh, formalized way where I didn't have an administrative appointment. or so. And I was able to balance it and not detract from my research career.
And this is really, really important because I see people from our community, amazing scientists, extremely talented and, and get pulled in to doing too much service. And then they can't get their grants funded and they're not publishing. And then it's just a spiral and we cannot afford to lose people. We really can't.
Everyone has their own personal demands and their own things that they have to balance. For me, when I started doing this, I started doing it big time. One of the things I learned in business school also, is that I had to build infrastructure. I had to have people who could help me. And so I would have to.
Manage these programs and structure the finances so that I could pay for program managers instead.
[00:33:26] RORI: Yeah.
[00:33:26] JOANN: And, and then I got some administrative appointments that then helped cover salary and, and other things. So the business training and aspects certainly has helped a lot with building the, the infrastructure and developing.
that work group so that they understand the kind of work that we're doing and the, and the expectations of the work and the quality of, of the work. It's a really important, um, question is like, how much time do you devote to, to doing this work and still maintain a research program? Because it's hard. I mean, it's hard getting R01s.
It's hard writing grants. It's hard getting funding. I mean, it's extremely competitive. You guys know that.
[00:34:07] RORI: Oh yeah. It's a, it's a full time job.
[00:34:10] JOANN: Right.
[00:34:10] RORI: It's like, you can just do that and it can fill all your time without doing the mentoring information work.
[00:34:17] JOANN: Yeah.
[00:34:17] RORI: Well, now you've been a professor for all of these years, and I'm thinking back to Dr.
Oppenheim, who you saw living a happy life, and you were like, yeah, that's what I want to do. How has it been? Do you feel like you've lived? A happy life in and out of science?
[00:34:33] JOANN: Absolutely.
First of all, being a scientist, being an academic, it is a privilege. It really is. I mean, it's a very stimulated environment.
I mean, we, we always complain though, right? We've got too much, too much bureaucracy, blah, blah, blah. But really on a day to day basis, it really is a privilege to, to engage in this, in this type of work. And I I work hard to maintain a work life balance. I love to be outdoors. I love nature, and I take advantage of that as much as I can.
The biggest thing is, again, it's work life balance, and you can control that, but you have to work hard to make sure you have enough support that can help you get your work done.
[00:35:13] RORI: I could have learned that sooner.
[00:35:15] EMILIA: So we have a segment called Revise and Resubmit. And so the idea is, that you thought about?
What is something about your academic path or, or academic or science culture that you would change?
[00:35:29] JOANN: I've thought a little bit about that and it's something that I've also talked about before. When I started my lab, which was in 2000, so 24 years ago, if you look at my papers, like my first 10 papers as an assistant professor, I collaborated with nobody.
I worked. solo in my lab with my folks. And I wish I had understood the value of collaboration and networking better when I started as an assistant professor and how I could have benefited more from that. I think nowadays, science is, you know, has gotten more complex. We're almost forced to collaborate, right?
Because we have to use all these specialized techniques and those sort of things. So that does force you to interact more with, with people. But that is something that it's really important to think about as you start. Even as a postdoc, I have my students and my postdocs, they should be collaborating with someone in the lab.
And as postdocs, I really encourage them also to try to collaborate with someone outside of the lab. I'm just trying to. Foster that sort of thinking and culture and first of all, science is more fun, uh, to do it with, with other people. And there's just a lot of benefit for doing that. I didn't interact at all.
It wasn't that it was looked upon badly because all the guys were collaborating.
[00:36:51] RORI: That's interesting. There's some expectations about like independence. I don't know if you felt like you were keeping yourself to a different standard or you were just that's just how you were focused at that time.
[00:36:59] JOANN: Yeah.
I just, I didn't know how.
I didn't know how to. Approach it. I didn't think about projects that I could work on collaboratively with anybody. It was just very, yeah.
[00:37:09] RORI: Very focused.
[00:37:10] JOANN: Yeah.
[00:37:10] RORI: And now I see how you, you include this in the mentoring of your students. You're like, they will learn how to collaborate.
[00:37:16] JOANN: Yeah.
[00:37:17] RORI: And now people approach you to collaborate, I'm sure.
[00:37:18] JOANN: Right.
[00:37:20] RORI: Thank you for that. Thank you for that.
[00:37:22] EMILIA: Thank you.
[00:37:22] RORI: We're all going to be learning from it. Dr. Trejo, it has been a complete joy to talk with you. I feel like I've learned so much. Your path and your stories are super inspiring and give me practical ideas about how I'm going to move forward and I know other listeners.
Thank you so much for talking with us today.
[00:37:39] EMILIA: Thank you so much. I brought some things down that I learned and that I will try to implement myself.
[00:37:45] JOANN: Thank you. Well, it's been a pleasure. I'm happy that I've been able to offer some bits and pieces of advice that will hopefully help you succeed in your career.
[00:37:54] EMILIA: Thank you for listening to this episode. If you like what you heard, share it with someone.
[00:37:58] RORI: You can also support this program by writing a kind review, if your listening platform allows it.
[00:38:02] EMILIA: This episode was produced and edited by Maribel Quesada Smith. Sound engineering by Keegan Stromberg. Special thanks to Dr.JoAnn Trejo. The hosts of Science Wise are Rori Rolfs and me, Emilia Huerta Sanchez.
[00:00:07] EMILIA: who just so happens to be a badass scientist. I'm Emilia,
[00:00:11] RORI: and I'm Rori. We're two scientists on a mission to make the world of science more welcoming by learning from the experiences of people who came before us.
[00:00:18] EMILIA: Our guest today is Dr. JoAnn Trejo, a professor of pharmacology in the School of Medicine at UC San Diego. I first learned about Dr. Trejo when we had the privilege of attending the SACNAS conference where Dr. Trejo gave one of the keynote lectures. I was super impressed by her presentation, by all of her accomplishments, and I wonder why I had never heard of Dr. Trejo. I immediately felt that we had to interview her. She received her PhD at UC San Diego, followed by a postdoc at UCSF, and then she went on to University of North Carolina Chapel Hill to start her first faculty position. She was later recruited to UC San Diego, in 2008, and she's so successful. She has received millions of dollars of grant funding over the years from both NIH and private foundations, and she has received many accolades for her research and mentoring.
In particular, she was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2021. She is the director of an NIH Institutional Research and Academic Career Development Award, which is a program for training postdocs at UC, San Diego. And the majority of these trainees have obtained tenure-track faculty positions at academic institutions.
In 2022, she received a $16 million NIH first award, which stands for Faculty Institutional Recruitment for. Sustainable transformation, which provides funding to enhance and maintain a culture of inclusive excellence in the biomedical research community. And did I mention that she also has an MBA? Super impressive.
And so today we are delighted to get the opportunity to talk to Dr. JoAnn Trejo.
Welcome, Dr. Trejo. We are really excited to have you with us today. The first time I. I heard about you at Sagnas last year because you gave a keynote, a very nice and inspiring keynote. Here we are almost a year later, and so we are both really, really excited to chat with you today.
[00:02:26] JOANN: Great. Well, I'm excited to be here with you.
[00:02:28] RORI: Yeah, it's a, it's a total honor. After we saw you talk, I feel like Emilia was like, That's, that's what I want to be someday. She was like, I want to be like Dr. Trejo up there someday. So you are very much a role model for us, and we're very thrilled to be able to speak with you.
[00:02:43] JOANN: That means I'm doing my job, because that's the whole point, yeah.Is to inspire the next generation, so. Thank you for that.
[00:02:51] EMILIA: Well, great. We'll start with who was JoAnn Trejo when you were a kid. Tell us a little bit about your family or your personality.
[00:02:59] JOANN: I'm the youngest of five. I come from a family of Mexican migrant farm workers. My grandparents immigrated to the U. S. and crossed the Mexicali border probably sometime around 19, early 1920s, a very different time. Their intention was to come here and work and to go back to their home country and like millions of other immigrants that never really happened. In any event, my family settled in the Central Valley of California, which is a very, very agriculturally rich area.
Lots of farming, and lots of migrant farm workers in that area. and come from a very large extended family, uh, primarily a matriarch. Um, my mother raised us alone. She had a very strong work ethic. She was what I would say a role model with regards to her love and embracement of humanity. She was the favorite Tia.
Everybody came to our house for the holidays and on the weekends. She was a very devout Catholic and embraced Catholicism. She was a model like that where it was really unconditional love for her family and for her, her children. And I think her influences certainly impacted The way I live my life and the way my siblings and a lot of my family live their lives.
[00:04:20] EMILIA: What was your experience being the youngest?
[00:04:22] JOANN: So there were, uh, good things and bad things. So the good thing was I have an older sister and then three brothers in between. My sister is eight years older than me. And as the oldest, uh, she had a lot of responsibility. She took care of us when my mother had to work on the weekends or late.
She was the first person in our quite extended family to go to college. My mother was not happy that she moved out of the house. And so when it came time for me to make that transition, it was a lot easier. But as the youngest, also, I was lowest. person. When it came to a lot of things, I had to fight for cookies.
I had three, three older brothers, and they played a lot of sports, and I would like to play with them, but I wasn't very good. But, uh, we had a lot of fun. We lived, um, in a rural area in Stockton, and we spent a lot of time outside, um, riding bikes, um, playing all sorts of things. games. Um, we had chickens and ducks and we walked to school.
My mother didn't have a car. We were very poor. So she would receive commodities. And in those days, you, you actually went to a warehouse and picked up bags of rice and government-issued products, um, that had USDA on them. I remember that. And my mother, every meal that we had, she cooked from scratch. We always had beans.
We always had rice. We ate mostly, uh, flour tortillas. And so she would make the masa and she would roll out two tortillas for us each. And then if you wanted more, you had to roll them out yourself. But we, we always had really delicious food. When I think about processed food now and And the expense of trying to eat by making your own food is even more expensive, at least according to some family members, than it is to buy food at Walmart or Costco.
So that, my mother was a really good cook. I mean, she made the best tortillas, the best, maybe that's why my family was always at our house as well.
[00:06:21] RORI: Food helps.
[00:06:22] JOANN: Yeah.
[00:06:22] EMILIA: So your mom would work a full day's work and then come back home and like make you all dinner.
[00:06:28] JOANN: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
[00:06:29] EMILIA: Wow. Yeah.
[00:06:29] RORI: That's impressive for five kids.
[00:06:32] JOANN: Yep. For five kids. Yep.
[00:06:34] EMILIA: What's the backstory of your name, JoAnnne? How, why did your
[00:06:40] JoAnnN: Yeah, that's a very good question, Emilia. My sister is Maria Magdalena. My brother is Gilberto David Gregorio. And I'm JoAnn. My mother, where she lived, um, in a part of Stockton, on Main Street, very close to the church, um, Her neighbors, uh, who she got to know very well, um, were JoAnn and Paul, and I believe they were also members of the church, and she really loved these folks and decided that that was a beautiful name.
And I was blessed with having this name.
[00:07:15] EMILIA: I see.
[00:07:16] JOANN: Yeah.
[00:07:16] EMILIA: So you lived there throughout like elementary school, middle school, and high school?
[00:07:21] JOANN: Yes.
[00:07:22] EMILIA: Did you like school? Did you like a science class? How did you become interested in science?
[00:07:28] JOANN: We went to an elementary school, kind of in a rural area of Stockton where mostly immigrant families and poor whites were the two major populations.
Okay. And I was very good at school. I would finish the workbooks. I would finish all of my work by like 10 o'clock in the morning. I was basically bored in elementary school up to the point where like third or fourth grade, I, I would be a little bit rambunctious because I'd had nothing to do. And so I often got sent to the principal's office.
[00:08:00] RORI: Understimulated JoAnnne Trejo.
[00:08:03] JOANN: Right. Fortunately, very fortunately, I was, uh, often sent to the vice principal's office. And the vice principal was a woman named Dorothea Estorga, who was also Mexican, and she knew exactly what she was dealing with. So instead of sending me home, she created projects for me.
I would go and work with the kindergartners. I would you know, help her with different types of things that, you know, that she felt would would fill my time. And I got to know her and know her very well because I would see her multiple times a week. And she became probably one of the key role models in my life.
When I finished grammar school, then, you know how they funnel all the grammar school kids into the public middle schools. And I didn't like it. It was huge. There was just, there was a lot of pressure from other Mexican girls to be a certain way, to dress a certain way. So at, at some point I decided that I wasn't going to go to school anymore.
And my mother who. I got to know Mrs. Astorga, um, obviously she had met my mother multiple times, um, said, well, why don't you put her into the Catholic school? And my mother's first response was, well, I, I can't afford that. And she said, well, why don't you go talk to them? And so she did. And they created some sort of group mechanism for me to go that was so my mother could afford it. So I went to middle school at San Joaquin Middle School in Stockton. Mrs. Estorga's two daughters were also at that school and we became really good friends, but just long story short, Mrs. Estorga just had her 87th birthday. She has always kept in touch with me and I get to see her about once a month and she's amazing.
[00:09:51] EMILIA: Oh my gosh,
[00:09:51] RORI: that's incredible. I mean, this. this woman, like, completely changed your life.
[00:09:55] JOANN: Yeah, we, we talk a little bit about it. I think the other thing is she saw, you know, potential in, in what I could possibly do.
[00:10:03] EMILIA: You mentioned that watching your bigger sister leave home to go to college made it easier for you.
[00:10:09] JOANN: Well, it made it easier with regards to my mother accepting the fact that I would go to college and, and go to college outside of Stockton. So I was the first one to leave town. I went to UC Davis, which is about, I don't know, 50 miles from Stockton. But let me tell you how I got there. And again, I think the theme here is role models.
So obviously I had my sister as a role model. I had my mother and my aunts as very strong women role models. And then when I went to, to middle school and high school, I had a teacher whose father was a professor at Berkeley. So this is a middle school teacher. At some point, I met her father who was visiting.
And at that, I think my first interest in science happened during high school. So I went to St. Mary's high school and we had We had physics, we had chemistry. I mean, I don't know how well it was taught, but we were exposed to those disciplines. And one of my projects in physics was to build an electrical sort of transformer.
And I had no idea how to do that. And so I asked him to help me and he loved it. His name was Antony Oppenheim, he's a professor in engineering, a Polish immigrant also. And I, I really, I think of him as my first scientific mentor. Now, nobody in my family are scientists. Why did I like science? And when I reflect on that, I think part of it is just that I have a Sort of an innate inclination towards trying to understand how things work.
When we were kids, we, we would ride bicycles a lot and we had all these bicycles and different bicycle parts. And so if your bike broke down, you just had to find another bike that was broken and try to fix it with whatever parts that were there. And I didn't really think twice about it, but just the capacity to see something mechanical and figure out.
how it works and why it's not working and try to fix it. I think that's part of it. It's just some sort of innate inclination to, to try to figure out how things work.
[00:12:15] EMILIA: From a young age, you were curious about how to solve and fix problems. So you developed that relationship with the professor at Berkeley.
And I mean, how did that relationship develop?
[00:12:25] JOANN: I finished high school in 1982, probably when you guys were born, started at UC Davis as a science major and wasn't really sure what kind of science I wasn't going to focus on. Um, but you know, one thing for sure was at that time, there were very few opportunities to get a job.
Laboratory Experience to work in a lab to see what it's really like to do, to do science. And there was a small program that was offered through the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, which is associated with UC Berkeley up on the hill. And as part of that laboratory, I think they still have it. They had a section that was focused on like radiation medicine and cancer.
The government had all of these uranium mill tailing sites all over the country, primarily in the, in the Southwest. And the chemicals and the processing that they did to extract uranium, a lot of that was leaching into the groundwater that people were drinking.
[00:13:28] RORI: major problem.
[00:13:29] JOANN: Yeah, so one of our projects was to test this groundwater and see how it affected breast cancer cells.
So as the summer of my freshman year, I applied to this program, I got accepted, and I was able to work in one of the laboratories. The first, the laboratories that we worked at were the ones down at Aquatic Park, down in the flats.
[00:13:53] RORI: Oh yeah.
[00:13:53] JOANN: And so, I mean, that was like, pivotable. Like, having that opportunity to work in a lab as an undergraduate at that time was not typical.
It was a pretty extraordinary experience. And best of all is that I got paid and Professor Oppenheim, who lived up in the Berkeley Hills, up in North Berkeley, had a cottage at the back of their house that they would sometimes rent. And so I got to stay there. I didn't have to pay rent. I could stay there and that made it very affordable.
All I had was a bike. So I would bike down the Arlington down to the flats.
[00:14:26] RORI: Oh, wow. That's steep.
[00:14:27] JOANN: Yeah. And I spent,
[00:14:28] RORI: you had strong legs.
[00:14:29] JOANN: Yeah. And I do like to bike, but I did that every summer.
[00:14:34] RORI: That's extraordinary.
[00:14:35] JOANN: Yeah.
[00:14:35] RORI: Especially to be able to return every summer and continue on a project and continue developing your relationship with Professor Oppenheim.
[00:14:43] EMILIA: So is that when
you said, Oh, I think this is going to be the path for me. I'm going to be a scientist or
[00:14:50] JOANN: For sure. For sure. I knew I wanted to do science. Exactly.
[00:14:53] EMILIA: I heard you say it in an interview that also having seen what a scientist's life was like also gave you
some encouragement.
[00:15:03] JOANN: Absolutely. Yeah.
So Dr. Offenheimer, he had a great life. I mean, he had a great parking spot on UC Berkeley campus.
[00:15:11] EMILIA: He had a parking spot?
[00:15:12] JOANN: Yeah.
[00:15:12] EMILIA: I thought only Nobel laureates or people who had Nobel prizes had a parking spot.
[00:15:16] JOANN: He didn't get a Nobel laureate, but he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. I saw how much he loved his work and how passionate he was about his work.
And I am the same way. I was impassionate about it. My mother used to always tell me, Miha, you work so hard. I said, Mom, I work hard, but I love what I do. It's not. Her experience of work obviously was very different. She worked very hard labor, physical labor, her entire life. And what I was doing was, is very different.
[00:15:47] EMILIA: Everybody else in your family is not a scientist. You decide to go to UC Davis, are doing a science major. Did they ever say like, don't do that or try to?
[00:15:57] JOANN: No.
No, my family has been very supportive and very proud of all of my accomplishments. I think sometimes they would want me to be around more. But for me, family is really important.
Whenever I lived in California, I would go back and see my mom once a month, even when I was in San Diego. She passed away in 2018, but You know, for the last 10 years in San Diego, I would go there once a month and see her. It was definitely hard for me when I first went away to college. The adjustment for me was really tough.
Living in a very different environment, a very different culture. At that time, I'm sure there were other kids that were Mexican, Latino, whatever, but I never really met them. There wasn't a lot of guidance with, with regards to integrating into the institution. I had a similar experience when I went to graduate school, first year of graduate school.
[00:16:52] RORI: At UC San Diego, right?
[00:16:54] JOANN: UC San Diego was also very hard. I just felt like I didn't, I didn't belong. I didn't feel comfortable. Some of this is what they call imposter syndrome. I mean, these feelings are real. You're put into these environments where you don't feel any connection to anybody. I mean, obviously, I think science has become more diverse.
We've increased our representation of diverse students. at the student population, at the postdoc population, it's getting better at the faculty population, but we still have a lot of work to do.
[00:17:23] RORI: Clearly. In both of those, when you started undergrad and when you started your PhD, like you say, maybe some of it was imposter syndrome, but there were all of these structures that made it clear that these places were not designed for you.
In many respects. How did you persist through that? Clearly you were scrappy, like being the younger Civ who fixes the bikes and is slowest but manages to keep up. But what helped you through those times?
[00:17:48] JOANN: Yeah, well, I think the option was, okay, if I, if I, Go back home. I, I have an idea of what my life is going to be like, and I wanted a different life.
And so that was a very strong motivation to stay in college. And, and it was like the first quarter was the worst and the second quarter got better. I think by the third quarter, I started making friends, great people, but just adjusting to the different culture and different, just a different environment was, was pretty hard.
In graduate school, the turning point was when I started working in the lab and doing the rotations and getting really good data. And having
[00:18:28] RORI: that's exciting.
[00:18:29] JOANN: Yeah. And having a mentor who recognized that and got excited about it. I felt more confident. I felt Like, I was a scientist and helped me develop my science identity.
What was really helpful for me was that work and being successful as being a scientist was probably the biggest influence on my decision to stay and to complete the PhD.
[00:18:56] RORI: Is the science itself.
[00:18:57] JOANN: Right.
[00:18:57] RORI: It's like, you love the science itself. You're like, this, I gotta stay with this because it's too fun.
It's too fun to get cool data and understand things differently. Exactly.
[00:19:08] EMILIA: Were there people that you could talk to then, like during your PhD, when you had these feelings that could help you, I don't know, supported you in some way, or no? There wasn't really a structure back then.
[00:19:19] JOANN: Not really a structure. I mean, there were a few professors that really wanted me to stay and reached out, but there was this huge power discrepancy, but there was support and wanted me to stay.
was not the reason for me staying. The reason for me staying really was the success I was having in the lab.
[00:19:36] RORI: I'm glad your experiments turned out well. Exactly. What if they didn't turn out? They don't always do.
[00:19:42] JOANN: Right.
[00:19:43] RORI: You applied for faculty positions when you were picturing yourself as a faculty member.
Before you actually got the job, what was your mission? Why did you want to be a faculty member?
[00:19:53] JOANN: So primarily having the independence and the freedom to do the science that I wanted to do. To study cellular signaling, um, these uniquely activated GPCRs and me driving the work. That was really the main, the main motivation.
My expectation of being a faculty member was that I would focus on developing my research projects, writing papers, getting extramural funding, and just doing science, right?
[00:20:26] RORI: Yeah.
[00:20:26] JOANN: That was the
expectation.
[00:20:28] RORI: I love that. Like, clearly, the science drove you so strongly through hard times in grad school, and scientific freedom was why you decided to pursue a faculty position.
Which is it? It is, it's pretty sweet. It's a pretty great thing about the job, right? We get to design our own questions and pursue them.
[00:20:46] EMILIA: After your postdoc, you went to North Carolina at Chapel Hill?
[00:20:50] JOANN: Yeah. UNC. Chapel Hill, yeah.
[00:20:51] EMILIA: UNC. Chapel Hill. Yeah. How did you
make your decision to go?
[00:20:54] JOANN: When I applied, I really looked at departments that, part of their research portfolio was studying signaling and GPCRs and G proteins, and so
[00:21:05] RORI: Mm-Hmm.
[00:21:06] JOANN: had a list of. bunch of departments and applied to probably 10 or 11 or 12 places. And at that time you would find the ads in the back of the science magazine and you would submit these applications. Much to my surprise, I got pretty much an offer at every place I applied to. And so I, I was, you know, Like had nine.
Nice. Yeah, this, this is, this is 24 years ago. Okay.
[00:21:30] RORI: Okay. Yeah.
No one else has done this. Only Dr. Trejo ever has gotten faculty offers everywhere she applied.
[00:21:39] JOANN: This is like 25 years ago. Right. So what I was looking for was a department where there were other faculty who were conducting research that was going to relate it to mine.
So people that I could talk to that had. Big graduate programs so I would have access, uh, to students. Those are the main things that I, that I look for.
[00:21:59] RORI: Colleagues and students.
[00:22:00] JOANN: Exactly.
[00:22:01] RORI: That's what makes science fun and active and vibrant.
[00:22:04] JOANN: Right, right.
[00:22:05] EMILIA: That's something that I eventually realized that that's, those are some things that you need to be successful, but you already knew that, like going in.
I want to have a group who's doing, who can help me and where I can get good students.
[00:22:16] JOANN: Right, right. Now, when I started. I knew eventually that I wasn't going to retire there. I mean, you never know what would happen, but, you know, I, I always had aspirations to come back to California once I felt like I had succeeded there.
And so I got tenure there, I established a lab, had multiple NIH grants and publications and all that sort of stuff. And we decided to come back. to California.
[00:22:43] EMILIA: So why did you want to go back? Is it because you wanted to be closer to family?
[00:22:46] JOANN: Exactly.
[00:22:47] EMILIA: The science was really good in California.
[00:22:49] JOANN: Exactly.
It was more to be closer to, to family.
My spouse, her family's also from California and parents are getting older and those sorts of things. So we wanted to come back to California.
[00:23:00] EMILIA: I saw somewhere that you got an MBA as well.
[00:23:04] JOANN: Oh, yes. Yeah.
[00:23:05] EMILIA: When, when did this happen and why?
[00:23:07] JOANN: So, my expectation was, right, is that I would develop a research program, get NIH funding, do great science, publish papers, and I would train students in postdocs as part of my teaching and service.
But as a woman, as a Latina, I got, Pulled in and was asked very, very early in my career to serve as mentors for students, to be the, the representative on the admissions committee, to do a lot of service for the academy. That was far more than my colleagues were doing and getting very little credit for that, right?
And this, this is pervasive. It happens to a lot to women faculty and faculty from historically underrepresented backgrounds and with students and postdocs. I mean, they're often burdened with doing a lot of the work that the institution wants to do to enhance equity and inclusion.
[00:24:07] RORI: Oh yeah. All of a sudden they're like near peer mentors to like a load of students and you're like, you're a phD student yourself.
[00:24:13] JOANN: Right, exactly. And, and the struggle is that you can't say no, right? These are our people and it's really hard to say no. So that kind of started when I started as an assistant professor. And I also was really exposed to the bias that people have. I saw the discrimination. I saw how the process worked.
[00:24:35] EMILIA: When did you start noticing these things? Like as a grad student, as a postdoc, as a assistant professor?
[00:24:41] JOANN: Mostly as an assistant professor because I was in the room now. I was at the table.
[00:24:44] RORI: Oh, you heard the things that they say.
[00:24:46] JOANN: Right. And I was often the only woman and certainly the only person of color.
And I, I saw it firsthand. It was not rumor or hearsay, as they say. But I also felt like I couldn't do anything. I'm like this little professor. So once I did. Transitioned out of UNC and came to UC San Diego. I was asked to lead some very large programs here and I decided at that point that this work is very important.
I also realized that we really need to have people who are competent. to run these programs if we really want to have impact. And if I was going to do this, I felt like I really needed training in how to do this kind of work. I'm a scientist. I know the field of cell signaling and cell biology and pharmacology.
This is like social science, right?
[00:25:37] RORI: Right. Like institutional transformation is a different Expertise.
[00:25:41] JOANN: Right, exactly, exactly. And so, as part of our faculty development at UCSD, we have a MBA program through the Rady School of Management here, and they have a executive program for people who are working professionals.
I decided, well, I'm going to do this. I'm going to apply for it. And I got in and it was, it was awesome. It's a two year program. And a third of the students were MDs and PhDs, a lot of them from UCSD. And then a third of the faculty were engineers. And then the third of the students were ex military. So we have mostly guys that were from the Marines, from the Army, Navy SEALs.
And all of our projects were done in teams and pre assigned teams. So we had to work with people who were so different than, you get a physician, a scientist, a Ex military person and an engineer and it was the best experience and it really truly showed how having people who have diverse experiences, diverse training, diverse ways of tackling problems and thinking is the best way to solve problems.
It was a perfect example of that. I loved every minute of it. And you see people's strengths, and so we would just figure out, okay, you're really good at that, you take that task, you're good at this, you take that task. It was awesome. I loved it.
[00:27:07] RORI: And so now you are indeed at UCSD. got the MBA in order to prepare yourself for some of the kind of administrative programs that you were going to run, and one of them is the NIH FIRST.
I'm curious, how does what you learned during your MBA help you as you think about this program, which is the goal is to change the university?
[00:27:28] JOANN: Good question. Really, the overarching goal is of the first program is to enhance inclusive excellence of an institution. It's a, it's
[00:27:36] RORI: a thank you
[00:27:37] JOANN: transformational sort of change.
And so our approach is to take a multi pronged approach, which includes recruitment of faculty who will promote and foster inclusive excellence and be like the next generation of leaders. In addition to developing and implementing different types of enhanced faculties, skills and understandings for improving mentorship and inclusion and equity and all of those sort of things.
So how did the MBA help me in that kind of work? The success that I have had in developing and implementing impactful programs that have truly enhanced the success of individuals that are underrepresented in the biomedical workforce. So, um, The way I approach this work is basically using a data driven strategy.
Many of the things that I learned during the MBA were related to project management, personnel management, leadership, training. and Finance. For me, it was important to understand at some level, how do businesses work, right? If you're not successful and the ultimate goal of businesses is to earn profit, I mean, it fails.
It's, it's gone, right? And so some of the things that I do in, in my administrative role as the Senior Assistant Vice Chancellor for Faculty Affairs is when we start thinking about programs, we pilot. Very small. We think big, start small.
[00:29:04] EMILIA: How do you fund the pilot programs? Is that through a small grant and then you expand or you ask the university for a seed grant?
[00:29:10] JOANN: Yeah, I think a lot of institutions struggle with funding for these types of programs. I, I was very fortunate with when I started this administrative role, I had conversations with leadership and I Pitch them basically a, was it like a business project or whatever of what I wanted to do and how much money I would need to pilot these programs and what a potential return on investment would be.
For them too, it's always about the bottom line, right? They want a return on investment and they approved it and they gave me seed money for, for five years. The money was about, I think it was over five years, it was about a million dollars, so dollars per year, but based on that initial investment, our office has brought in about 30 million in various types of funding to support primarily faculty development, but we also have a postdoc program.
And. They like that. They like when you bring money in and being resourceful too. You, I, I don't have all the answers. And so being able to interact with and establish relationships with people that can help develop ideas was really critical. I think. Being successful at this job also requires that you be able to identify stakeholders and people that can help you get this work done because it's, it's not possible just as a single person.
You need a lot of people to help you.
[00:30:32] RORI: Which is true in science. What you're saying, like the scientific reasoning of finding problems, identifying what's going on. Also, the scientific fact that like we do our science in collaboration now.
[00:30:41] JOANN: Right.
[00:30:42] RORI: So both of these. are important for the other work you're doing.
[00:30:44] EMILIA: I was just going to say, when you were talking about stakeholders and people helping you, did you ever feel any pushback or people were like, no, go for it?
[00:30:53] JOANN: Oh, of course. And what I did was just pivot. I mean, you, you know, who's going to be supportive and who's going to buy in and who's not. When I first started doing this work, I went to the office that you would think would be the most supportive.
And they were not. And I'm like, well, that's not going to work. So I need to figure out how to basically work around it, do a workaround. And that was successful. And if you're really passionate and care about these things, you got to be scrappy, right? You have to figure out how to get it done. And sometimes you have to go back and rethink.
because that's not working.
[00:31:27] EMILIA: I feel like you really have to be super committed to this mission. When did that sort of desire manifested itself in you?
[00:31:35] JOANN: I think all of this happened once I was full professor and that I think I was promoted to full professor in 2012, I think. So then I felt like, okay, I'm here now let's, let's see what I can do.
I know that younger, More junior assistant professors and postdocs. And students really struggle with their passion and their desire to do more.
[00:31:58] RORI: Totally.
[00:31:58] JOANN: Balancing that with their own career development, their own professional development. And it's a really hard thing to balance. Because every minute you spend doing work that's not related to your science is one less minute you have to do your science, right?
So I think for me, I was obviously interested in this, in this work and doing a little bit, doing more than most faculty do, but not an extraordinary amount and not in a very, uh, formalized way where I didn't have an administrative appointment. or so. And I was able to balance it and not detract from my research career.
And this is really, really important because I see people from our community, amazing scientists, extremely talented and, and get pulled in to doing too much service. And then they can't get their grants funded and they're not publishing. And then it's just a spiral and we cannot afford to lose people. We really can't.
Everyone has their own personal demands and their own things that they have to balance. For me, when I started doing this, I started doing it big time. One of the things I learned in business school also, is that I had to build infrastructure. I had to have people who could help me. And so I would have to.
Manage these programs and structure the finances so that I could pay for program managers instead.
[00:33:26] RORI: Yeah.
[00:33:26] JOANN: And, and then I got some administrative appointments that then helped cover salary and, and other things. So the business training and aspects certainly has helped a lot with building the, the infrastructure and developing.
that work group so that they understand the kind of work that we're doing and the, and the expectations of the work and the quality of, of the work. It's a really important, um, question is like, how much time do you devote to, to doing this work and still maintain a research program? Because it's hard. I mean, it's hard getting R01s.
It's hard writing grants. It's hard getting funding. I mean, it's extremely competitive. You guys know that.
[00:34:07] RORI: Oh yeah. It's a, it's a full time job.
[00:34:10] JOANN: Right.
[00:34:10] RORI: It's like, you can just do that and it can fill all your time without doing the mentoring information work.
[00:34:17] JOANN: Yeah.
[00:34:17] RORI: Well, now you've been a professor for all of these years, and I'm thinking back to Dr.
Oppenheim, who you saw living a happy life, and you were like, yeah, that's what I want to do. How has it been? Do you feel like you've lived? A happy life in and out of science?
[00:34:33] JOANN: Absolutely.
First of all, being a scientist, being an academic, it is a privilege. It really is. I mean, it's a very stimulated environment.
I mean, we, we always complain though, right? We've got too much, too much bureaucracy, blah, blah, blah. But really on a day to day basis, it really is a privilege to, to engage in this, in this type of work. And I I work hard to maintain a work life balance. I love to be outdoors. I love nature, and I take advantage of that as much as I can.
The biggest thing is, again, it's work life balance, and you can control that, but you have to work hard to make sure you have enough support that can help you get your work done.
[00:35:13] RORI: I could have learned that sooner.
[00:35:15] EMILIA: So we have a segment called Revise and Resubmit. And so the idea is, that you thought about?
What is something about your academic path or, or academic or science culture that you would change?
[00:35:29] JOANN: I've thought a little bit about that and it's something that I've also talked about before. When I started my lab, which was in 2000, so 24 years ago, if you look at my papers, like my first 10 papers as an assistant professor, I collaborated with nobody.
I worked. solo in my lab with my folks. And I wish I had understood the value of collaboration and networking better when I started as an assistant professor and how I could have benefited more from that. I think nowadays, science is, you know, has gotten more complex. We're almost forced to collaborate, right?
Because we have to use all these specialized techniques and those sort of things. So that does force you to interact more with, with people. But that is something that it's really important to think about as you start. Even as a postdoc, I have my students and my postdocs, they should be collaborating with someone in the lab.
And as postdocs, I really encourage them also to try to collaborate with someone outside of the lab. I'm just trying to. Foster that sort of thinking and culture and first of all, science is more fun, uh, to do it with, with other people. And there's just a lot of benefit for doing that. I didn't interact at all.
It wasn't that it was looked upon badly because all the guys were collaborating.
[00:36:51] RORI: That's interesting. There's some expectations about like independence. I don't know if you felt like you were keeping yourself to a different standard or you were just that's just how you were focused at that time.
[00:36:59] JOANN: Yeah.
I just, I didn't know how.
I didn't know how to. Approach it. I didn't think about projects that I could work on collaboratively with anybody. It was just very, yeah.
[00:37:09] RORI: Very focused.
[00:37:10] JOANN: Yeah.
[00:37:10] RORI: And now I see how you, you include this in the mentoring of your students. You're like, they will learn how to collaborate.
[00:37:16] JOANN: Yeah.
[00:37:17] RORI: And now people approach you to collaborate, I'm sure.
[00:37:18] JOANN: Right.
[00:37:20] RORI: Thank you for that. Thank you for that.
[00:37:22] EMILIA: Thank you.
[00:37:22] RORI: We're all going to be learning from it. Dr. Trejo, it has been a complete joy to talk with you. I feel like I've learned so much. Your path and your stories are super inspiring and give me practical ideas about how I'm going to move forward and I know other listeners.
Thank you so much for talking with us today.
[00:37:39] EMILIA: Thank you so much. I brought some things down that I learned and that I will try to implement myself.
[00:37:45] JOANN: Thank you. Well, it's been a pleasure. I'm happy that I've been able to offer some bits and pieces of advice that will hopefully help you succeed in your career.
[00:37:54] EMILIA: Thank you for listening to this episode. If you like what you heard, share it with someone.
[00:37:58] RORI: You can also support this program by writing a kind review, if your listening platform allows it.
[00:38:02] EMILIA: This episode was produced and edited by Maribel Quesada Smith. Sound engineering by Keegan Stromberg. Special thanks to Dr.JoAnn Trejo. The hosts of Science Wise are Rori Rolfs and me, Emilia Huerta Sanchez.