Professor Rachel Austin
Image Credit: https://barnard.edu/profiles/rachel-narehood-austin
In this episode of “What is Global Health,” Eliana Weinsaft (BC’27) spoke with Professor Rachel Austin from Barnard College’s Chemistry Department about her research journey, and what students should keep in mind if considering a career in science or research. Professor Austin gives insight into opportunities within the institution and describes her experience with discovering her research focuses throughout her career.
Professor Rachel Austin is the Diana T. and P. Roy Vagelos Professor of Chemistry at Barnard College of Columbia University. Her research focuses on understanding the mechanisms of metal ions and metalloproteins in biological reactions, as well as developing catalysts for use in environmental applications. She is a current editorial board member for the Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry, an editorial review board member for the Frontiers in Microbiological Chemistry, and the past chair for the 2010 Environmental Bioinorganic Chemistry Gordon Research Conference.
At Barnard, Professor Austin teaches several courses in the Chemistry department, as well as running and working in the Austin Laboratory, which has received funding from the NSF, NIH, Pfizer, and other research organizations, as well as a Henry Dreyfus Teacher Scholar Award. In this podcast, Professor Austin delves into her experience as a chemist and a science researcher, and shares words of encouragement to undergraduates who wish to pursue research as a career.
Transcript (via Sonix)
Eliana Weinsaft: [00:00:06] Hello and welcome to the next episode of What Is Global Health, a student run podcast series by the Journal of Global Health at Columbia University. In this series, we interview experts in the field to learn more about topics ranging from Covid 19 to menstrual health and hygiene. We aim to factor all elements of identity, race, gender, sexuality, religion and more into discussions of global health. My name is Eliana Weinsaft, and I’m a first year at Barnard College. I got to speak with Professor Rachel Austin about research at Columbia University as undergrads. So let’s get started. Hi everyone, and welcome back to the podcast. Today we are joined by a very special guest, Professor Rachel Austin, who is the Diana T. and Roy P. Vagelos Professor of Chemistry at Barnard College. Professor Austin conducts fascinating bioinorganic chemistry research. So welcome, Professor Austin. How are you doing today?
Professor Rachel Austin: [00:01:04] I’m well, thank you. How are you?
Eliana Weinsaft: [00:01:05] I’m good. So I wanted to talk about research, undergraduate research at Barnard and Columbia. So it’s so important for students who are interested in science and health to begin exploring research. And so I was hoping we could talk a little bit about your research journey on the podcast. So could you tell our audience a little bit about the projects that you’re studying in your lab now?
Professor Rachel Austin: [00:01:30] Sure. Right now I’m primarily focused on two projects. The first project is a Bioinorganic project, as you suggested. And in that project, we’re studying an enzyme with a metal, so metallo-enzyme called alkane monooxygenase or alkB, which appears to be the most important enzyme in oxidizing alkanes to alcohols, which is the first step in the carbon cycle, depending on how you start it, and [00:02:00] is used by microorganisms that can grow on alkanes. So when oil spills in the environment or when oil bubbles out in the environment, naturally there are organisms that can use that as their sole source of carbon and energy. And the first step in breaking down that molecule to extract energy uses the enzyme alkB. So we study the structure and the function and try to connect them. And then I’ve always kept a project in my lab that’s not biological. I am an inorganic chemist. And I would say by training I am a bio-inorganic chemist. But I’ve still kept a purely inorganic project in my lab, partly because the stuff I’m interested in and also partly to offer undergraduate students a couple of options for research in inorganic chemistry. And that class of projects has always involved heterogeneous catalysts, which, like enzymes, catalyze reactions, but they’re non-biological and they tend to be solids, which has some advantages in practice. And so at the moment, my lab is looking at catalysts that are capable of degrading halogenated aromatic compounds. And these are classes of molecules that are widely used as pesticides and other things, but then they build up in the environment and become toxic. And so we’re looking at catalysts that could dehalogenate them and then render them less toxic. So those are the two things we’re working on right now.
Eliana Weinsaft: [00:03:34] Okay. Wow, those sound like such intricate and specific topics. And a lot of the time when I hear researchers who give summaries of their projects, I’m just thinking about like the labs that correspond to courses and wondering, how do you get from studying titrations to projects like those, especially when you have such like specific subspecialties? So I’m wondering, [00:04:00] like, how did you figure out that you wanted to study those projects and what was your path to that?
Professor Rachel Austin: [00:04:06] So it’s very, very non-linear. What I’m doing now is very different than what I trained to do. It’s very different than what I started doing. It’s different from what I started doing when I began my independent career, in my case. And I don’t think this is true for all scientists. I think it’s perhaps part of the advantage of being at a smaller liberal arts college, which has always enabled me to run a research group that I would describe as nimble or flexible, where I can change directions pretty easily for a variety of structural reasons that we could talk about. But I’ve been inspired a lot by what my students are interested in and also by collaboration. So I start on something. Some students begin working and I see what interests them, and so we might, you know, pursue a line of work that wasn’t what I was most thinking about. And then I have really enjoyed collaborating really internationally with other scientists. Partly that those sorts of collaborations bring expertise to a project that I can’t bring myself. And again, I think also partly being at a liberal arts college my whole career, it provides some energy so that when undergraduate students are really busy and they’ve got an organic exam to study for, and there are all these things that might cause research to not be their priority for that week. [00:05:38] If there’s a graduate student or a postdoc someplace who’s counting on them to help move the project forward, I think it just it creates a little momentum that I think our projects might not otherwise have. So I’ve just followed those interests and they’ve led me to where I am now. Didn’t mention it when you first asked me, because I’m not working on this at the moment. But [00:06:00] for more than a decade I worked on Metallo Neurochemistry, and it is still something I’m interested in. It’s just not one of the balls I feel like I can juggle right now, and that whole line of research in my lab really began from teaching in organic chemistry and talking about the molecular mechanisms of lead poisoning and seeing how interested students were in that topic in class. And that then led me to create a whole research program around that, which is a project and a program that I’ve really enjoyed.
Eliana Weinsaft: [00:06:33] Wow. I mean, I didn’t know it could be that collaborative between a, you know, within a lab and with other labs. I think that’s really interesting. So, yeah. So, so regarding your students, a lot of the time when you when you start out in research, you’re just shadowing and getting to understand how to work in a lab. So I was wondering, you know, what does it look like to grow in that setting? And at what point in your career did you start doing your own research rather than, you know, participating in more of a collaborative thing?
Professor Rachel Austin: [00:07:13] So in most sciences there is, as you suggest, sort of an apprenticeship model where you begin. In my lab, it’s not so much shadowing. I think I almost I give first year students their own project, although very often I put a group of students together. So students are really right away working on their own project, but it’s always a project that I’ve thought that I’ve defined for them. They’re not building their own project, and I myself began that way. I started, so after I dropped out of Swarthmore, I went and started college over at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and my first year of starting over, I joined a research lab, and I worked there [00:08:00] my whole time as an undergraduate. So for most undergraduates that I’ve worked with the entire four years is an apprenticeship in the sense that I’m always the person. Defining the problems. When we talk about things a lot. Listen to what they’re saying. But undergraduate students just rarely get to the point of really taking something in their own direction. And I think that that’s just, I think the pace at which the kind of training works, like if you’re a professional musician, you didn’t start playing professional concerts when you were young. [00:08:41] You just it takes a certain level of skill, both of sort of the technical mastery, the conceptual understanding of the techniques we use. And then also just a pretty deep understanding of what’s been done before us, before you’re really able to intelligently pose new questions. So, you know, many people might have done a high school science project or a junior high school science project, and you practice that act of, of, of defining a problem. But to really do that well, especially, you know, in the face of so much scientific knowledge, you really have to take time to understand the landscape. And I think it’s it can be exciting but arrogant to just start on something and say, oh, this is what I want to study without looking to see whether it’s been done before. So, as my father would always say, measure twice and cut once, like they’re really, it makes sense to spend the time to understand things. And in the fields that I’ve worked in, I have. So I think I do my students the best service by training them well in that way. That said, I have occasionally had a student who, you know, brings an article to my attention that I was not familiar with, and that takes the work in a direction that [00:10:00] they really set forth.
Professor Rachel Austin: [00:10:02] So it does happen. I would say even in graduate school in chemistry, the training is still largely it still has that kind of apprenticeship model in the sense, and this is partly just the mechanisms of funding that when you go to graduate school, you work in a research lab. And in the vast majority of the United States, the ability of a PhD mentor to pay you is dependent on their ability to raise money from grants. So when you join a lab, very often you’re joining a federally funded project that has the goals and the aims already laid out. So you do, as a graduate student, continue to make more and more independent choices about how to work within that framework. But the framework is usually, at least in chemistry, defined. So for me, it wasn’t until I began my own career and a big part of applying for faculty jobs is you write proposals of what you think you’re going to do. And it wasn’t until I got my own faculty job that I really started doing my own things.
Eliana Weinsaft: [00:11:10] Yeah, I think that pathway is so complex and being able to explore other people’s labs and build off of that to figure out what you really want to study is really important. So sort of on the opposite end of that, when you’re in charge of a lab rather than working in it, how do you balance the teaching and your research as a professor, especially when you’re conducting multiple projects?
Professor Rachel Austin: [00:11:38] Well, correction, I do still work in my lab. Yeah. So that is one of the again, something that I love about being at a small liberal arts school is that I have not had to step out of the lab. I think most of my friends at bigger research universities don’t work anymore. Like you can’t manage X number of graduate students and write all those grants and still get [00:12:00] in and reflects your own reactions, but I actually still can do my own stuff. And so I like that. I think career management is always a challenge. I personally love the fact I’m not a super patient person, and I love the fact that there are so many different things in my job. So if one thing’s not going well, I can do something else. And that kind of re-energizes me to return back to the thing that’s not going so well. So like if I have a couple of different projects and one’s being a little frustrating, hopefully the other one is being less frustrating. And there’s certainly a synergy between teaching and research, and that I like to bring some of my research into the lab. And that means in the classroom. And some, like when I’m at a at seminars listening to people talk, I think, oh, yeah, that’s a useful way of bringing of describing that or that. That’s something that would help me explain that principle in general chemistry more clearly than the way I currently do it. And certainly I learn things that I teach that then I, you know, help me be a better scientist. So, I mean, I am someone who spends a lot of time on life management. I have multiple calendars and multiple notebooks. Um, so I do put a lot of energy into that aspect of my job. But for me, the rewards of doing all these different things and getting pleasure from them makes it well worth it.
Eliana Weinsaft: [00:13:35] That’s definitely. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think it’s really cool that at a small liberal arts school like Barnard that you get to, you know, keep being a part of the lab and working alongside. Yeah, I’ve heard that from I think it’s like really lucky that we get to do that. But yeah. So I guess [00:14:00] what I’m getting the sense of from this conversation is that like in comparison with the labs that are, you know, you take alongside the courses where projects are more like week by week divided, you know, how does that compare to labs in real life when you’re when you’re studying big projects?
Professor Rachel Austin: [00:14:23] Well, you know, you and I have kind of talked about this a little bit. I think there is no perfect solution to how to, to merge these things. The laboratory work does require technical skills. And so I think at least in chemistry, we tend to start in a very skill-based way. So yes, and I have taught I have taught general chemistry labs that were different, that were project based from the very beginning. So I haven’t done that since I’ve been at Barnard, but I did that at my previous institution, and we could talk about. The merits of that. But in general, I think in the first couple of years, we are trying to teach techniques so that you have skills that you can use in lab, but it need it need not be. You have to. And in fact, the way we run our department, it need not be that you have to do three years of skills and then you get to do the fun thing. I do think there is a way in which the first year of chemistry at Barnard, you know, we do the one semester jenkem and the one semester of organic one with the accompanying labs, that that is a lot of skill and technique-based training that I don’t think there’s. You know, there’s not a lot of ways to say that it’s exciting to do a strong acid, weak base titration. It’s mean. It’s if you get pleasure from doing something well with your hands. [00:16:00] Then there’s that. Then a nice clean end point is delightful. Calibration curve with a great R-squared coefficient. There’s a certain pleasure to be taken in just a craftsperson ship of that kind of work. But don’t think you’re going to, you know, call your family at home and say, guess what? I just did a. It doesn’t have that kind of, gee whiz, you know, excitement. Um. But.
Professor Rachel Austin: [00:16:29] It’s useful to [00:16:31] Begin working in lab in a research lab with some degree of manual competence. And I think that’s what we give you. And then I think in our curriculum, we build more and more independence into the work that we ask of you. It’s still difficult for us to have you do something that takes an unknown amount of time in what we both need from each other to be a known amount of time. So you can’t sign up for a lab that could end in four days. You know, you can’t call your teachers. Oh, I’m still in chem lab. I’ll just be missing class. So that, of course, constrains us in our current schedule. But for example, in Quantitative Analysis Lab, which is a course that I’ve taught here at Barnard, we begin with, you know, real technical stuff that builds on general chemistry, more titrations, more calibration curves, using more sophisticated measurement tools. And then while the students are doing that, they’re researching and writing a proposal for how they’re going to do an analytical test that we’ve asked of them. So we might say your task is to measure the amount of caffeine in chocolate. Figure out how to do it.
Professor Rachel Austin: [00:17:49] And then in the last third of the class, the students are out buying chocolate. And so they’re still using the literature at that point, because there is literature that describes [00:18:00] the best way to measure caffeine in chocolate, but it’s still a very, very different skill and a skill that you need as a scientist to be able to read, you know, five papers in the literature and extract from that the lab protocol that you are going to follow with the chemicals that you can buy with the instruments you have. So that’s like another skill that you need that we build in. And then by the end of our curriculum, our labs have, you know, much more sophistication and much more open-ended projects. And then we do also require research as part of our major. And then we offer research opportunities be well beyond what’s required. So we hope that that mix of experiences will really prepare students to be creative scientists, if that’s what they choose to do. And our students who go on to PhDs do prove that, but also that a lot of those skills are useful and transferable to other things you might do.
Eliana Weinsaft: [00:19:08] Yeah. And I guess one of the, the big differences are that like lab in a class is it’s just a class at the end of the day. And, you know, in in real research, you’re seeing those things take effect. And so just a follow up question, have you ever or I mean, yeah, have you gotten to see your research take effect after publishing. And like what did this look like in terms of like inspiring other projects or developing technology and sort of like what was that experience like?
Professor Rachel Austin: [00:19:39] So on the sort of the most basic level, everything I’ve published has always led me to another set of questions, for sure. And, you know, certainly I can see my work as cited. So I know other people, other scientists are using it. And, you know, I think I think about science, you know, many people do. It’s an edifice where we build [00:20:00] upon the work before us. So there, you know, pretty much everything I’ve done, I can see, um, building what I do next and building what other scientists do next. I have not had many experiences of seeing my work. My research translated really outside of science yet. You know, I haven’t made a drug or, you know, I haven’t patented anything. There have been a few sort of singular things, though, that that sort of fit what I think part of what you’re getting at in this question, um, when I was at my prior institution and we were doing this research in my lab on the molecular mechanisms of lead toxicity, I also sort of encountered, along with that, I taught a short term a course in the summer for students, for matriculated students was a special course, and we it was called urban led pollution. And so we measured we learned about lead pollution and lead poisoning in the class. And then we actually went into the community and measured the soil in in the community we were in. We made a map of where there were high levels of lead in the soil, and we were also able to overlay that with data from the state CDC about where they had found cases of lead poisoning, because we were just interrogating the question of whether there were things in the environment that were contributing to relatively high levels of lead poisoning in the community, which was a problem.
Professor Rachel Austin: [00:21:32] And so we finished the project. We certainly didn’t have any answers, but we had an open discussion for the community about what we were working on. And one of the people who came was a local representative, and she did talk to me afterwards. And it that that experience helped her to understand the importance of lead poisoning. And it was it just was something she hadn’t understood before. So it wasn’t that I directly wrote [00:22:00] a law that changed things, but it did help her to appreciate that this is something that one should care about. And in that case in particular, the, you know, we understand quite a fair amount about why lead is a neurotoxin, although there’s still more to learn, there’s a lot more to learn. But some of the effects are not seen in people until much later than they’ve been exposed. And so I think as a policy maker, um, once you start to realize that I think it. It helps to appreciate why it might be good to put policies in place that mitigate exposure to lead materials, because you don’t really know the effects can be sort of long lasting. So I thought that was that was fun. It was a very local level, but it still it still had some of that sense of translating beyond just the bench.
Eliana Weinsaft: [00:22:54] That’s such a wonderful experience that you got to see that on an individual level with, with someone else. I think that’s cool. [00:23:06] Um, okay, so shifting gears a little bit. Um, as a first-year student, I’m beginning to explore the chemistry department at Barnard, and I’m learning more about what it means to study chemistry. Uh, yeah, like in the lab rather than in the classroom. And so being able to listen in on these research discussions in the chem department has been so amazing, but also a really big challenge as someone who’s just taking gen-chem. So what are the most helpful courses in understanding research, and is it possible to take one of those courses, like does that course exist? Yeah.
Professor Rachel Austin: [00:23:49] We don’t offer anything right now that I think really fits that description. We have at times offered sort of courses that are an introduction to research but that are theoretical. [00:24:00] And so you learn, you sit in a classroom and people talk about research and maybe you go around and visit different people’s labs. Some of them had a small amount of shadowing, and the biology department had something like this too, where you might come in and shadow someone for an hour or two a week for three weeks. So they were designed to do what you said and to provide an introduction to research. Um, I never had much. I never had much of a sense, one way or another, how valuable students found them. But for staffing reasons, we just don’t have that many people. It hasn’t ended up being something that we’ve continued. So I think at the moment we have a somewhat binary system where in our department, you know, in the early spring, we will have an open meeting where we’ll talk about our summer research institute. And every faculty member who’s taking students will talk for five minutes about their research. The person who directs it in our department will talk about the process. We then usually follow up with open meetings where lab meetings where I’ll have like three lab drop-in hours or two, and interested students can come and learn more about what we do.
Professor Rachel Austin: [00:25:23] And then students apply to work in our department, where they prioritize who they want to work with. And then among all the faculty are taking students. We sort them and are able to offer positions to, you know, some percentage of the students who want to work in our labs. So that provides a framework that if you think you might be interested in research, then you might get the opportunity as soon as your first summer to work in a lab. And I think that usually is the most helpful thing in terms of figuring out what research is like, because it’s not it’s like many [00:26:00] things that many of us have done, it’s so physical. It’s so demanding in terms of the time it takes that it’s hard to just like describe it from the outside. I mean, we can, but it’s really one of those things that you have to get in and try. And I think some students get into lab and they hate it. They, you know, they really don’t like spending that much time at a bench. They are very uncomfortable with not knowing something. They’re not happy when something doesn’t go right. And other students just really enjoy it and enjoy the sense of being part of a community. So that’s usually the first step. And then it’s like, oh yeah, I kind of think I like that. And then, maybe [00:26:43] you try again the next summer, or you do some research during the school year, or even that one research experience helps you to look at your coursework differently, and to start to relate it back to this area that you’re interested in, and you start to be able to pull the threads together into a more coherent whole, because each person’s interests in science will be uniquely theirs. So what interests you about what you see in the world? It will always be different than what interests me. So the path and the web of knowledge that you want to create for yourself is your own. And so part of what you do is you start to craft your own pathway. We have students who are very interested in environmental chemistry, which isn’t what we offer. So now they’re going to Lamont or to Columbia to pull that in, or, you know, students who are interested in neurochemistry. So there’s a chemistry of the brain course at Columbia. So, you know, you start to then piece together what you want. And there are always opportunities for students to go and spend summers at other institutions doing research. There are a number of mechanisms for that. So maybe you applied to work some summer in a very different in a materials lab in North [00:28:00] Dakota, and by the time you finish your four years, you’ve kind of created a whole thing. And I’m not sure that there are that many ways to short circuit that.
Eliana Weinsaft: [00:28:11] I think that’s the best advice. I think that’s really important just to take your time and learn about yourself and what you want to do.
Professor Rachel Austin: [00:28:24] Probably heard that before, haven’t you, as a first-year student.
Eliana Weinsaft: [00:28:28] Yeah, that’s the advice for the most part. That is just like sort of figure out what you’re interested in and go from there. But I think that’s it’s really important to explore that. So last but not least, to sort of finish up the podcast, this is something that I sometimes find myself thinking about in class, but can it ever drive you crazy to think about how such small particles are affecting everything we do, especially when you’re working so closely with them the way you do in your lab?
Professor Rachel Austin: [00:29:01] No, I love it. I think it is. It is one of the coolest things about my job that I feel. And maybe now that you think about it, maybe I’ll go home and have nightmares. But I. I just love that idea that everything is. But everything is small and that it’s guess. To me, it feels like there’s really a way of understanding the world when I think about it through chemistry in a way that there’s so much of the world that makes no sense to me at all. You know, like the bigger world that’s filled with pain and suffering that I just cannot, I can’t understand. I can’t ever bring my heart or my mind to figure out, to just really have any sense for why the world is the way it is on in so many ways that I might ask. And so then the world of molecules, like thinking about things on that level just really makes sense and feels orderly. And even when it’s chaotic, it still feels like there’s a logic there. [00:30:00] So I guess you can tell why I didn’t become a philosopher or religion major, but for me, that’s like a deeply grounding, satisfying way of living that I just take great comfort from.
Eliana Weinsaft: [00:30:12] Yeah, I think I’ve, I think I might be the same way. I think it’s easier when you can understand how things work on such a micro level. Um, it’s just a different way of thinking. So thank you so much for joining us and answering these questions. I’m sure our viewers will find this super helpful in developing what they want to do in terms of careers and undergraduate things like that. So thank you so much for being here.
Professor Rachel Austin: [00:30:44] Well, thank you for asking me. And good luck to you and to anyone else who’s making this journey with you.
Eliana Weinsaft: [00:30:51] Thanks for tuning in to this installment of What is Global Health. We hope you enjoyed and as always, be on the lookout for new episodes every other week. Also, be sure to check out our online blog posts on our Columbia Journal of Global Health website, and we’ll see you soon.