Episode 08 - Daniel Colón-Ramos and Giovanna Guerrero-Medina

Today I’m delighted to be joined by Daniel Colon-Ramos and Giovanna Guerrero-Medina. After completing his PhD at Duke and a successful postdoc at Stanford, Daniel started his lab here at Yale in 2008 where he is an Associate Professor of Cell Biology and of Neuroscience. Daniel’s lab studies neuronal synapse formation, regulation, and maintenance using the model organism, C. elegans. In addition to his scientific accomplishments, Daniel has been at the forefront of advocating for Latinx and minority students in biomedical research, publishing Op-Eds in the New York Times and founding Ciencia Puerto Rico, a non-profit organization that promotes scientific research, education, and community amongst students and researchers in Puerto Rico.

Also joining me is Giovanna Guerrero-Medina. Giovanna earned her PhD in Molecular and Cell Biology from UC Berkeley in 2004 and has since worked in varying capacities at the Department of Health and Human Services and the National Institutes of Health, among other positions. Currently, Giovanna serves as the Executive Director of Ciencia Puerto Rico where she has spearheaded numerous projects increase the recruitment and retention of underrepresented minorities in STEM.

Giovanna talks about her trajectory from the bench to science policy in DC and her current position at Ciencia PR, and Daniel describes how he wrestled with choosing biomedical science as a career while still supporting his community in Puerto Rico. Giovanna and Daniel consider how they advocate for young scientists through their everyday interactions, and together we come up with the “anti-paper” to highlight the “600 experiments behind every figure.”

Near the end of the episode, Daniel elegantly describes the holistic approach he adopts to mentoring students when they’re struggling:

“Sometimes these conversations are seen as kind of ‘unscientific’—either you have a scientific conversation or you have this type of conversation. And I’ve found that that’s a very binomial way of looking at a problem that is actually not binomial at all.

People do science. And how their ideas are respected—and how they develop their ideas, how they grow in the process of thinking about the science and thinking about themselves as scientists—is an important part of the training. If you try to separate them, then it doesn’t work; they are integrated.

Usually when students come to talk to me about a problem that they’re having in the lab, a lot of the subtext is how they feel as a scientist. If you’re just talking about the PCR tube, you’re not solving the problem because behind the PCR tube are a lot of feelings like, ‘Do I belong to this?’ So that’s the context in which I try to have these conversations with the students.”

- Daniel Colón-Ramos

Links

Colon-Ramos lab - http://medicine.yale.edu/lab/colon_ramos/

Giovanna’s profile @ Ciencia PR - https://www.cienciapr.org/en/user/gguerre

Christine Mirzayan STP Graduate Fellowship - http://sites.nationalacademies.org/pga/policyfellows/

Yale Ciencia Academy - https://www.cienciapr.org/en/yale-ciencia-academy-career-development