all right good afternoon everyone and welcome we're going to get started in just a moment but um a few details before we get underway and we are recording today's event and the video will be posted on the basic science website in a couple of weeks so we will be able to share those with the alumni and friends who couldn't join us today or if you would like to view the talks again they'll be available you can also view the videos from past events from previous Seasons as well due to the large number of attendees we are going to keep the audience muted but we do want to hear from you so if you have questions for any of our panelists please post them in the chat and we will try to get to as many of your questions as we can and with that I am pleased to introduce the dean of mathematical and physical sciences Steve Khan uh thank you Susan good evening and welcome to basic science lights the way I'm Steve Khan as Susan mentioned I'm the dean of mathematical physical sciences and I'm delighted to be here this evening which is our first [Music] bsltw event for the spring semester of 2023. this series cuts to the core of who we are and what we believe at Berkeley life-changing discoveries depend on the open-ended pursuit of our researchers curiosity tonight we're going to focus on the new faculty experience it's been said that teaching is the greatest act of optimism and our new faculty members are the epitome of that hope they arrive at Berkeley with new ideas fresh approaches and a rejuvenating energy some of them actually aren't very far removed from their own Graduate Studies which allows them to better understand the needs of the students that we serve uh each of our our Stellar panelists tonight represents the future of their field we're going to hear from some of the college's newest faculty members about their experiences establishing new Labs teaching courses and conducting research here in the College of letters and Science and as you may guess settling into Berkeley is not the easiest thing particularly for experimentalists they have to establish residents set up a laboratory get equipment and start in on teaching big classes so it's a challenge in all of them have risen to the occasion once we're underway I hope you will post your questions for any of our speakers in the chat box we will answer as many of them as we can let me introduce our moderator for this evening she is Professor Rebecca Heald a professor of Cell Biology development and Physiology and co-chair of the Department of molecular and cell biology Rebecca studies extract from frog eggs to understand the intricate mechanics behind cell division and the factors that control control cell growth with important ramifications for public health including cancer research Rebecca is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and was elected last month to Fellowship in the American Association for the advancement of science aside from her research her overarching professional goal is to provide a productive and nurturing environment for young academics guiding them to the next phase of their careers healed lab alums have gone on to work for dozens of prestigious companies and universities so with that let me turn it over to you Rebecca take it away thank you Steve I'm excited to host tonight's event I think everyone will be really impressed by the dedication creativity and most importantly by the Curiosity that drives these scientists our Focus this evening is on the experience of some of our newest faculty members transitioning from being a postdoctoral research researcher to a faculty member is a major step for academics the challenges faced by new faculty can be multi-dimensional encompassing topics such as identity development institutional support student engagement mentoring and networking and of course tenure and promotion stress but new faculty members also have many opportunities to significantly significantly impact their students and their academic Fields it's quite a delicate balance to negotiate and I'm really interested to hear from our new faculty about their research and experiences so at the end of each talk um we'll have three talks we will try to address all the questions from the audience so please add your questions in the chat and our first speaker is Penny Weezer okay so Penny Weezer is a assistant professor in the department of Earth and planetary science at Berkeley Penny joined our faculty this past July and has since been working to establish the volcanology and igneous petrology Lab at Berkeley also known as the vibe lab she's an igneous igneous petrologist and volcanologist using erupted melts crystals gases and Volcanic aerosols to understand volcanic systems her research interests are very broad span spanning mantle melting storage and transport of magmas in the crust controls on eruption style and the release of volatile elements into the atmosphere over to you penny awesome okay so my group really researches the processes that occur in the ax cross in the lead-up to volcanic eruptions and our motivation is really to understand these systems well enough that we can help volcano observatories and government agencies make informed decisions during times of volcanic crisis We Can't Stop volcanoes erupting what we can do is make sure that people are evacuated and aircraft aren't in the sky when that eruption starts and also keep these people out the way as the eruption evolves over weeks months or even years so one of the key parameters to really understand eruptions and why they start is the depth at which the magma was stored so for example beneath Mountain Helens or beneath the 2018 eruption of Kilauea we we want to know was that magma at one kilometers depth or it erupted or was it at 5 10 or 50 kilometers depth why do we care about this parameter firstly if we want to build quantitative models of eruption triggering at a given volcano this is one of the most important parameters to build into that model the second reason is to interpret signals of unrest at these volcanoes so you have a given volcano say my group have worked on it and we've worked out that magma is stored at about 10 kilometers depth from looking at the erupted rocks now let's say earthquake started this volcano and obviously the community living around are going to be very concerned to know do these options is good to happen soon and comparing it to magma story steps really helps us answer these questions if the earthquakes are much shallower than where we think magma was stored in past eruptions it probably doesn't mean an eruption is going to happen it's probably the hydrothermal system so motion of fluids in the upper crust and you'll see all those Yellowstone things like we're all going to die yellow things erupting it's mostly these hydrothermal earthquakes so they are not really a concern but if we start seeing earthquakes clustering around the same depth where we think the magma is stored this is much more concerning this new means new magma is coming into that Reservoir and if you have a set volume and you add more liquid to it the pressure will keep increasing and eventually that will fracture and an eruption will happen so seeing these signals this is the point at which the volcano observatories would maybe start issuing evacuation orders but we we can't just issue an evacuation order every time earthquakes it and then an eruption doesn't happen you're basically crying wolf they will not Evacuate the second time around so we really need to make sure we can interpret these signals of unrest through knowing about the magma system before any activity even starts at that volcano so how do we do this we go to volcanoes and we collapse samples from many many past eruptions and from these Rock samples we crush them up and we extract crystals and inside these crystals these are a few millimeters in size are tiny pockets of bubbles these were trapped as the crystals were growing from the magma and these are about one to two microns inside so they're very very small bubbles and it turns out these bubbles in many volcanoes are mostly CO2 and that is great because if we can measure the density of CO2 then we can calculate a pressure at which that pocket of gas was trapped in the Crystal and we do this using an equation of State for CO2 gas and if we know the pressure and we know how dense the Earth's crust is we can work out how deep that Crystal had to be buried when it traps that little bubble and if we do this lots and lots of times we can basically work out where magma was being stored in the crust when those crystals were growing so what does this look like I can measure hundreds of these bubbles from a given volcano this was killer whale volcano and we see a cluster at about one to two kilometers depth and three to five kilometers depth so now what we know is that beneath this volcano we have two distinct magma reservoirs that are feeding those eruptions so now we know the depth of the crust at which if we see earthquakes we're probably going to be concerned that an eruption might be happening in the next few weeks or months how do we actually do this so I said we need to know the density of CO2 gas in these tiny bubbles and we use a technique called Raman spectroscopy and this is my Raman spectrometer so you have a green laser and you shine it down a high-powered microscope and you focus it on these tiny bubbles and a small amount of that light is scattered back by a process called Raman scattering and we can collect that on our spectrometer and you get these two very distinct Peaks this is the signature of CO2 gas what we know is that as CO2 gas gets denser the Peaks move apart so what this means is if we can measure the distance between the Peaks we can work out the CO2 density now we need to calibrate that relationship and we do this experimentally so my post-op during her PhD design this amazing startup that she is recreating here at Berkeley you take super pure CO2 gas in a gas tank and then you pressurize it by hand by winding this cylinder in and you're basically forcing CO2 gas into this little cell and this has a see-through Sapphire window on top of it if you can Shine the laser into the CO2 gas and we are measuring the temperature and the pressure in this cell and that means we can calculate the density of CO2 so we basically collect Spectra at lots of different densities and that means for our specific instrument we know how far apart the Peaks and what density that corresponds to this should be easy to set up Charlotte already designed this how does this work in reality so we tweaked the design from about July to September we were trying to get it to about twice the pressure that her previous cell could do so that we could look at even deeper Magna storage we then ordered the parts in September and they're all custom made so it takes about three months they were supposed to arrive on December 1st as many of you know we have a major strike at Berkeley so no deliveries came until mid-January the cell then arrives and we have to screw it all together all of the different components and it always wants to leak every single one of these joins will leak CO2 gas unless we get it perfectly tightened up if you think about your bike tire our apparatus is about 300 times more pressure than a bike tire so it's really high pressure it really wants to leak so we leaked acid in water and then we have to use various leak testing solutions to find all the really tiny leaks so we've assembled the cell we've managed to get rid of all the leaks and then the final thing we had to do was get the thermistor in so this actually measures the temperature inside the cell the cell was designed with an eighth of an inch entrance and we bought an eighth of an inch thermistor this should fit perfectly and the one Charlotte bought a Cornell we ordered exactly the same one it arrived and it wouldn't fit at all in the cell so we measured it and it turns out it was about 11 larger than it should have been 11 larger than the one at Cornell so we phoned up the manufacturer and said hey it doesn't fit and they were like oh you just got unlucky order another one so we ordered another one and it also didn't fail and then we ordered another one and it still didn't fit so at which point we searched the company what's going on like they're not an eighth of an inch and it turns out they had to swap their tip manufacturer because the first one went boss during the pandemic and they never checked that it was the right size so fortunately they managed to go through their warehouse and they found one that was three times the price that still had the old size tip so we got them to send that to us we were super excited we're ready to go we get the instrument under the ramen we're ready for our 24 hours of measurements we've got Trader Joe's ready meals we've got snacks and just as we are pressurizing our cell the pump generator breaks and that has now gone off for repair it's gonna be another month until they can fix that for us so overall I would say building the lab has been just hindered massively believe that it's pretty much everything that arrives is outside of the manufacturing tolerances and then prices just keep going up with inflation so it is a very challenging time to build a lap so with that I'll take any questions thank you Penny um okay so some follow-up questions for you is the depth of the earthquakes or the depth of the magma storage a more reliable indicator of eruption risk or do you have to assess both factors those are great questions so we've started testing this method at Kilauea where we have fantastic earthquake data already and we've shown that our method matches that perfectly but where we really want to apply this method is volcanoes where we don't have earthquake days vast majority of volcanoes around the world are not monitored or maybe they will have one size monitor that is not enough to get Magna storage depth so when they start to wake up those volcanoes people will go in and put temporary seismometers on them but we really need to understand where the magma is stored before that happens and we can do that by collecting Rock samples in a way that we can't put in seismic networks out so really we've tested this on volcanoes to show they match but we can apply this method in countries where they don't have the resources or even like Mount Shasta and Latin peak in California we don't have enough earthquakes to know the depth of magma storage from earthquakes there so even in California we don't have those constraints great so there's a question from Barbara Sweet what got you interested into in this subject of volcanoes honestly watching Dante's Peak it's a movie with Pierce Brosnan I would 100 recommend I wanted to be a family before that so go watch Dante's Peak folks it's the best great um and so besides Kilauea which volcanoes are you most interested in studying yeah so I did my PhD in Kilauea we've now started looking at Mauna Loa um which is should be as active as Kilauea over long amounts of time it's been anomalously quiet for the last 30 years but obviously it erupted this this winter so we're starting a project on that um I have a poster who's done some work on the Atlantic hot spots so we're going to look at some of those as well and then during my post-op I also worked on the Cascade volcano so all the way up through Oregon California Washington so they're my main research focus at the moment hey um great all right well um so I think it's time to move on so our next speaker is James Nunez so James is an assistant professor in the molecular and cell biology Department my department at UC Berkeley he's a Hannah Gray fellow of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and then and an investigator of the Chan Zuckerberg biohub previously he was a postdoctoral fellow with Jonathan Weissman at UCSF and he earned his PhD at UC Berkeley in Jennifer Dallas lab he joined our faculty in 2021. the core interests of James group is to understand the regulatory principles of the human genome specifically the Nunez lab investigates the molecular principles underlying epigenetic memory and inheritance in mammalian cells so basically how cells establish this at the genome to control gene expression programs and how this epigenome which controls gene expression is maintained and remodeled as cells divide and differentiate and how defects in these Pathways can lead to disease so James please tell us about your experiences as a new faculty member thank you Rebecca for that nice introduction and thank you all for joining so my let me just so my journey as Rebecca sort of alluded to actually started here at Berkeley so I did my PhD in the department that I'm in um and Jennifer davina's lab and I had no intention of doing any type of crispr related research when I started my PhD but at the time we were just studying how bacteria sort of fight the viruses and the phages that infect them very very fundamental question and I joined her lab about three months before her Landmark paper came out that eventually won her the Nobel Prize so it was really a wild ride to just see a really basic biology project or set of projects that have sort of transcended Beyond um Berkeley and into even areas outside of biomedical Sciences um and crispr really relies on this Simplicity where we can go into the genomes of mammals humans animals plants and we can make really precise changes to the human genome sequence in this example and this really relies on the ability to cut DNA where we want so if you have a genetic mutation where getting rid of that mutation is going to cure your disease we have ways to do that however many Studies have sort of shown that Justice Act of cutting DNA is quite toxic and in some of the more extreme cases as people have been finding out in recent years you can also get really large chunks of your genome or chromosomes being removed from your cells so that of course could lead to cancer and other types of genomic instability so sort of driven by these observations I moved to do a postdoc in Jonathan weissman's lab right across the bay where my motivation was really to create new technologies to allow us to manipulate the production of genes without having to cut DNA so really just making newer and safer ways to control how much of a gene is being produced and we'd love to be able to do this for any human gene so how do we do this so a central focus in my lab is epigenetics so this is a really complicated slide so let me just walk you to this so typically when we depict chromosomes in textbooks um you see this sort of chromosome but if you start unraveling this chromosome into the actual letters of the bases that make up DNA what we see is that we have these really small chemical marks uh sometimes put on DNA these are called epigenetic marks and really the presence or absence of these marks can regulate whether a gene is being turned on or not in a different day I could talk to you about different types of epigenetics uh Pathways how it's involved in aging but for the sake of this talk um what we really is uh what we're trying to do is really use the rules of epigenetics to be able to either turn off a gene or turn on a gene and here with our Technologies what we do is we don't break DNA but we have ways to really go into wherever we want in the human genome and change these really small chemical marks that allow us to control whether a gene is on or off and we do this by building a set of technology so these are called epigenetic editing Technologies the here we use crispr na as a way to cut DNA but we use it as a way to direct really proteins and enzymes that allow us to write all these different chemistry wherever we want in the genome and to sort of depict an example data set of typically what we get in the lab is here where our goal here was to turn off a gene in human cells that we can grow in addition the lab go into uh all of these cells turn up a gene using these epigenetic Technologies and we can see in this example we let these cells sort of divide for 50 days and the gene that we epigenetically repressed remains off during this whole process and what's cool about this technology again is we did not cut DNA at all in order to turn off this Gene we didn't change the DNA sequence it's all based on these little chemical marks um so what sort of summarized that this sort of uh area research in my lab it's really exciting because I like to think of them as sort of light switches so if you have a gene that's causing a disease we have these set of technologies that we can sort of go in and then just turn that light switch off and we've done an experiment here and I'd like to show this slide because it was a but intricate experiment that we did where here our goal was to just show proof of concept experiments that we can go into neurons and turn up a gene that causes neurodegeneration so this is a gene um that's encoded by map T the protein product of this gene is called Tau and what we did here was we applied our epigenetic editing Technologies in stem cells where there we went into these cells and turned off this tauji we then convert these cells into neurons we can do this in a dish it's really cool so this is an image here of the neurons where we edited this uh protein called Tau the neurons actually look very nice and look clean and we can what we can do is go into these neurons and really measure how much of this Gene that causes neurodegeneration is actually being lowered with the Technologies and you can see here it sells each of these dots is actually a Cell It's a neuron and each of these neurons in the Box suggest that we've successfully lowered the expression of this of this Gene um this was cool because one we can show sort of a concept that we can do this sort of intricate experiments but as you can see not all the cells are in this box so it actually gives my lab quite a wealth of um sort of a projects that allows us to improve on the technologies that we have and how are we doing this so I'll just highlight a couple projects in the lab instead of just building one or two um epigenetic editing Technologies what we're actually doing now is to embed hundreds of them all at the same time so this is a project that is quite a big undertaking in my lab it's um headed by a graduate student we're here we're taking any Protein that's involved in epigenetics from plants from humans from yeast and we're directly testing them in human cells for their ability to edit epigenetic marks and cells so this allows us to discover new epigenetic identity technologies that people haven't really tested before and also go back to our experimental sort of methods to see if we can improve on what we already have and another project that I'd like to highlight is what are we actually doing with this technology so a different graduate student in my lab who is jointly advised between me and um Jennifer doudna is we're taking our epigenetic editors and we're using really advances in mRNA Therapeutics thanks to the Copic vaccines and we're delivering these into immune cells that allow these immune cells to really combat cancer cells more efficiently and what we're doing here is we're turning off genes in these cells that prevent them from being exhausted so a lot of times when T cells see an infection they can fight those sort of infected cells but they have a shelf life they get tired and they're no longer effective we know sort of the genes that allow us to turn them off using our marks that allow them to sort of get less tired over time and allow these cells to really fight those tumor cells longer so that's sort of the science part I'm really excited about some of these projects that we have going on in the lab and I'll just sort of share a few things about my experience here at Berkeley so I started a little bit different from penny so I took over a lab space of a long time and very accomplished Professor here in my department um Dr Jeremy thorner and he's had his lab for many decades and my story was that I started the day after he retired so I actually took over a space that was still occupied heavily by equipment that's been there for many years which was great because I got to inherit a lot of equipment but at the same time our research is very different um so um Dr thorner's research was more on yeast mine is in human cells so I spent my first few months actually cleaning literally cleaning every day I had about 20 trash cans full of stuff and um I got to learn a lot about how a lab functions by getting rid of a lot of things I didn't need um but suffice it to say my lab doesn't look like this I wish I had a photo to show you what the post cleaning is but but I've done is really built a really wonderful team of people very diverse they come from very different scientific backgrounds educational backgrounds and it's a really really vibrant environment because we get ideas that I personally don't think of sometimes and my students really bring in some of these really cool and neat ideas and one of my favorite Parts about Berkeley is uh um and this is just photos of my lab is uh because it's a public university I'm able to go into different departments and really get expertise on things that I am not an expert in so for example we deal with a lot of genomics data because we work on epigenetics and DNA so I'm not a computational biologist but I've been really lucky to just knock on the door of someone here um Dr Sarah Jason's she's in a different um uh department but her expertise has really been um incredibly helpful to just get my students and postdocs thinking about how to analyze Big Data how to use computational and programming languages to really answer some of our really big heavy questions and within my department I'm extremely lucky to have great colleagues especially assistant professors that have been hired in the past few years and we have a really tight-knit group this is just an example of some of the picnics that we hold together um and that is sort of been the experience that I've had in the past year and a half since I've been here I've just really highly collaborative people and very warm and friendly and supportive and with that I will take questions okay thank you James so one question is what lesson lesson that inform your approach as a professor building a lab and recruiting students yeah so um Jennifer's lab was quite large I joined her lab you know long after she started it so I didn't get to learn how to start a lab from my time in her lab unfortunately um but what it did help me sort of uh during my process is I've seen sort of just from observing how she runs a team um that really helped me so how to give people Independence letting them sort of think of their own ideas rather than me giving them ideas and that's been really helpful in sort of building my team of just allowing my people to think creatively independent of me okay there's a question in the chat from Barbara Sweet um so when you were speaking about fighting cancer was there any specific type of cancer that you could concentrate on yeah I didn't sort of focus on this so um what the sort of therapies that we're working on are called car T so this is um third Technologies where you can engineer your own T cells that allow it to be put back into your cells to fight off your own tumors so these are typically used currently for lymphomas and leukemias but tons of work is being done on this to also go after solid tumors the nice thing about these sort of engineer T cells is we can extract them out of patients do a sort of editing experiments here in my lab and then potentially put them back into those patients once we can sort of show concept experiments that we've engineered them to fight these cancer cells better okay and you think that epigenetic editing is really the key to making crispr therapy safer and and yeah yeah so another technique to do this too yeah absolutely I definitely am supportive of other techniques so I think what we're learning now in the field of crispor is uh there isn't going to be one technology that's going to rule them all it really will just depend on what sorts of things you want to edit but what is sort of true is that cutting DNA has been pretty toxic and I think many of us are thinking even Beyond epigenetics you know thinking of creative ways to sort of go after these problems without having to manipulate your DNA sequence great um and personally I'm interested um also in as I age in this sort of dementia issue and so you've shown how you can edit these stem cells how could you actually apply your technology to treat people with Alzheimer's or other diseases yeah the key there is delivery so you know we can build all these tools however we want but a huge issue in sort of gene therapy is just delivery and um getting into the brain is probably one of the hardest places in the body to get into but um we have the Innovative genomics Institute here that sort of do these sort of brain specific types of delivery and unfortunately I didn't have time to talk about that but we're working on some of those projects as well yeah there's one more question in the chat from Julie Birch asking um how is this medicine happening now or is this future work for future implementation yeah so um a company actually spun off of the work that I did as a postdoc it's based in Boston and that plus two or three other companies have sort of spun off in the past year to really use epigenetic editing as a way to sort of go after genetic diseases again without having to edit your DNA sequence great okay well um thank you very much uh James I think we'll now move on to our final speaker who is Eric Ma so Eric is an assistant professor in the department of physics and electrical engineering and computer science um he joined our faculty in July of 2021 and currently holds the Georgia Lee chair in physics the ma lab studies wave matter interaction in uncommon regimes in the intersection between condensed matter physics and artificial intelligence Eric was recently recognized for his work with the prestigious Amazon physical science Fellowship which honors those working to bridge the gap between fundamental scientific results and the physical sciences and the development of important Technologies Tonight Eric will be sharing his experience as a new member of the physics faculty Eric what would you like to share cool thanks for the introduction Rebecca and uh hello everybody I'm Eric ma assistant professor in physics and eeks I joined Berkeley in 2021 after getting my PhD in postdoc Stanford and short tenu and Apple um so I'm a condensed matter for this is so what is condensed matter physics well can this matter physics studies the physics of liquids and solids um so it centers around this idea of emergence or more is different that is a fundamentally new phenomena would emerge if you put a lot of simple constituents together and this can actually manifest it across different uh lens and time scales from crystals to multi-silver organisms flocking Birds human society and the large scale structure of the universe and we are mostly interested in the uh the emergence in the the micro and mesoscopic scale using mostly you know relatively simple inorganic constituents like atoms or nanostructures we study the emerging electronic magnetic and Optical properties Quantum phenomena such as superconductivity and as well as the effects of topology and reduce dimensionalities um so I actually consider myself a new member of you know a member of new uh group of Falcon isometer physicists who are not just focused on the holy Grails like room temperature super connectivity but would take a broader view of societal needs and are not afraid of getting out of our comfort zone and think out of the box to come up with new ideas often at the interface between fundamental and apply science um and that is reflected in the breasts of the research topics in my group um so my group currently pursues uh two topics two directions one is wave matter interaction in uncommon regimes and the other is the interface between physics and artificial intelligence I'll just tell you three examples so on the wave matter interaction side which also is more experimental we're trying to answer the question of can vibrational modes and solids emit light so um there are electronic and vibrational modes that are both extended and localized so you're probably very familiar with light emitted by the electronic transitions that are extended uh for example in semiconductors these would be the basis of LEDs semiconductor lasers for example you're probably also heard of light emitted by the electronic transitions that are localized in atoms or molecules such as these biomarkers and and the atoms so localize the vibrational modes can also emit light for example That's the basis of the carbon dioxide laser that is used in many industrial and medical procedures so now the questions what about the extended vibrational States in solids I.E the optical phonons um So based on some recent progress that we made we think the answer is yes as long as we use the right materials under the right excitation conditions so on the physics and AI side so this is more theoretical we're trying to answer the question of how can we make large language models like gbt and palm more useful for physics researchers so these um these large language models or llms can already do amazing things but somehow there are a few key pain points for example they don't process complex equations or figure plots or even references very well so we're trying to figure out how we can solve these key points and then make them tremendously seem more useful for the physics researchers and can extend to other quantitative fields and then somewhere in between uh we're trying to answer the question of can we have one framework to inverse design devices for all kinds of wave matter interactions including photonics Acoustics and even quantum so inverse design is this a computer algorithm that uses numerical simulations and optimization algorithms designed to design unintuitive devices uh with a much better uh performance and robustness than these intuition design uh and then designs based on intuition uh and then we think the answer is yes so you know as long as we use a physics agnostic engine like transfer Matrix so for example uh this is pretty much you know the first uh adjoin based inverse design of Acoustics so here we're trying to design a new kind of concrete blocks for Highway sound barriers so this thing is about 0.5 meter thick and then just you know the inverse of that gave us these uh unintuitive places where we we would Place air gaps if you look at the transmission this structure is many ores of magnitude better than this uh than a solid block for these particular you know Highway Noise awaited by the human hearing or sensitivity okay so so that's the science we're doing in our lab so why Berkeley right so that's a simple one because Berkeley is the number one Public University in the world especially research-wise it also has one of the world's strongest matter physics program uh the eecs also happens to be you know one of the world's best uh and then you Berkeley physics also has a unique advantage that is its proximity to the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab the lbnl which is one of the largest and most productive National Labs in the country um so my lab is literally a 10 minute shuttle drive away from uh from lbnl and as a faculty scientist I can tap into the facility level uh resources there to carry on projects that are not possible elsewhere and finally uh it's the Bay Area you know I really like the weather here it's really hard to move after you're staying here for 12 years uh and I also really like the the tech startup culture here um so I think it'll be really beneficial when it comes to transforming the scientific brace room in my lab into technology that can impact society and to that end Berkeley is one of the the best universities for startup Founders and I really look forward to seeing some of my students and postdocs joining the uh the founder crop okay so my experience as a new faculty so first of all I just want to say that um all my colleagues and staff in the department of college have been super supportive and friendly uh you know when I first came here I thought you know well okay as a tenure track assistant professor I probably here uh to be judged and potentially weeded out but that's couldn't be further away from truth you know everybody really wanted me to succeed uh but you know as as Steve mentioned the starting experimental lab in the middle of a pandemic is is not easy for example my lab renovation has been quite a journey so the design actually started almost one year before my startup date and after lots of iterations we generated more than 50 pages of complex design like that so we went to bid and into our surprise even the lowest bit was more than 30 percent more expensive than our estimate so it's a bit of a sticker shock so after a lot of scrambling change orders and then the construction started uh you know the the physical construction part went really relatively smoothly but it was pretty obvious from early on that we're gonna miss the original plan completion day that's September 2021 and then turns out there are a lot of issues with cabinets countertops hvacs uh and then the the main lab was finally finally commissioned in January of of this year um you know while waiting for the lab to uh to to be finished uh you know I couldn't do state-of-the-art experiments so I started to do some Theory and modeling and we actually had to publish two decent papers on that and it's good to know that I can still do Theory um so especially at the early stages of starting up I've I felt like you know I was working as a one-man startup uh so I was doing anything from you know fixing the blinds and putting together Ikea furniture for a student office and then making tons and tons of purchases with a price tag that ranges from one dollar to a hundred thousand dollars and then have to make the group website all by myself so that's a lot of hard work but I I really like the um the final results so um and last but not least I found teaching to be very fun you know I really enjoyed interaction with the undergrad students uh the Tas and my fellow co-instructors in the classroom set okay so what's my new daily routine well I these days I spend most of my time writing grants with a hundred Chrome tabs open uh just to have enough resources to sustain a group of critical mass especially in light of the recent increases in the GSR and postdoc salaries um I I hope I can succeed in that front and then I really look forward to getting more signs down with the team at Cal for many years to come yeah so that's that's all thank you Eric and so one question is what project do you have that you think is closest to being commercialized if it's successful like the barriers along highways to reduce Highway noise or what do you think is is closest yeah so so I think the Phoenix agnostic Image Design has a lot of potentials uh you know that barrier for highways it's really many orders of magnitude uh better than just a concrete block but it is more uh costly and more complex to manufacture so I think it's one of the closest commercialization but in this market we still need to weigh like okay is the is this really worth it uh and then it can actually lead to many other things like I didn't mention as well we're working on using inverse design like multi-philics inverts the design uh to uh to develop a new way to do thermal imaging using optical up conversion so you know that's another that's a way another project I think is pretty close to commercialization if the initial prototypes are successful great so there's a question in the chat from Edwin munzey asking what did the lab renovation cost oh wow I don't know if I'm supposed to say that uh but it's uh millions of dollars wow and he has another question can you comment on the quality of the students both undergraduate and graduate yeah so I really liked interacting with the undergraduate students um so you know there's they're they're very diverse they're from many different backgrounds and they're all really motivated to get into research you know no matter how small of our research projects or idea I give them you know I heard these horror stories from my colleagues uh that are in these elite private universities where the undergrads would treat undergrad research as sort of a given thing that's a service to them I I couldn't feel any of that in at Berkeley great um okay so yeah and what do you you know after this difficult renovation um what is the most important thing that you've learned Okay so triple check everything because change orders are extremely expensive okay um and then one more question uh what is the potential practical application of studying light emission from vibrations and solids yeah so this could just be another an alternative source for medium for red light we can possibly make a more compact mid infrared lasers for you know medical procedurals or range finding uh or uh you know long distance chemical analysis so yes that's just one one way to do that and of course if we have this additional light source in the mid infrared we can also do uh mid-infrared Quantum Optics you know that's related to Quantum networking and Quantum Communications okay one more question came into the chat do you make use of the physics Department's um lab equipment manufacturing capability so do you manufacture things in this oh yes yeah instrumentation yeah so to do these state-of-the-art experiments on the webmatter interaction side we we pretty much make the make all of most of our our instruments yeah instrumentation is really big lots of Machining designing pcbs and Optics wonderful okay um so I think that's all the questions specifically for you Eric I want to thank you James and Penny for sharing your experiences and as new faculty members with us and I'm going to invite the three of you back to answer some questions from the audience so please feel free to add any more questions that you have to the chat um and I see one here whoops um so so this was actually for James and actually maybe you could talk to Eric about this but do you use any forms of artificial intelligence to analyze the data that you generate this is from Doug Smith yeah that's a great question um we are just launching that project now so I'm not an AI person but there's a lot of push in genomics to use deep learning and neural networks and because my data we generate a lot of these um data sets we're working with a professor Sarah Jason's to share the PHD student working on this actively so I wish I could tell you more about the details but um you know we're just about to launch that okay [Music] um yeah so we've heard from from Eric about his teaching but um do Penny or James want to comment on your experiences with teaching undergraduates or involving them in research yeah I can go quickly so I took um an environmental science class uh this semester so it's an intro class for non-geologists and it was they were so engaged like we learned a lot about like environmental justice and like how it affects Oakland and the Central Valley and so many students I was just yeah Blown Away how much they cared about the planet and the kind of challenges that that generation are going to face it was really really rewarding teaching that class and a lot of people would always come up after lectures and want to talk about what you know happened in their communities back home so yeah that was super fun and I've got two wonderful undergraduates working in the lab this semester who is super Keen so yeah it's been great to work with them yeah a similar story um so I taught a small class at Berkeley last semester that was 130 students um it was a molecular biology course and I was pleasantly surprised just how engaged they were especially coming from you know covet Zoom days and then going into in person um the number of questions I was getting during my lectures was just incredible and I have four undergraduates in my lab I wish I could take more because they're also good but it's maxed out by physical space yeah okay um Penny there's one more specific question for you what are the odds of Mauna Loa having a major eruption like hitting Hilo for example and there's a Richard reader asked his question and he has a personal interest to be pretty careful with answers like this on average Manolo has erupted every five years so some of those eruptions are confined to the summit where they don't cause much damage or like the one this winter where it almost made it to the Saddle road but didn't but yeah if you look at a geological map of Mount lower over 100 200 years a lot do you go down there so I wouldn't say I wouldn't buy a house there but it's it's it is scary that it could happen and kona's the scarier one with Hilo you have a shallow slope so you'll have like days before the lava flow gets to you Kona the Kona Coast lava flows could reach the coast within three hours of the eruption starting so if that happened in the middle of the night that would be evacuating everyone in the dark within three hours of the lava appearing at the summit so that is I would be more scared on the coronation Hilo you'll have some warning to get out wow all right um so now another question for all three of you what has been the most challenging and the most rewarding aspect of your first years as a Berkeley faculty member and I'm curious I'm really curious to hear what you have to say as a department co-chair we really want to try to facilitate your success so it's good to know what your challenges are and also to know what's working I can probably start um I think the most challenging is learning what to prioritize on at any given time you know I at the start of my life I sort of spend with my time just try to get the lab in order just order stuff negotiating with vendors for the lowest price but later I was told well you shouldn't be you know wasting all that time you should spend more time writing grants and now I'm sort of switching back okay writing the grants and I don't have time for research like you know how do we how do we balance this uh it's I think it's still something I'm still learning so yeah I think that's that's very challenging if if there's you know more Mentor or hand-holding in that process that'll be super helpful Penny um money my field is chronically underfunded and as I haven't increased their budgets in 10 years for petrology and volcanology and honestly don't know how I'm going to afford more than one student inflation with my startup which was negotiated in 2020 is a huge struggle so yeah if anyone wants to give millions of dollars to volcanology that would be wonderful that's what we need yeah I would sort of echo of some of the tidbits from the other talks um I think the beginning is just hard because you're a one-person startup and you know dealing with the vendors having to set up the lab physically and transitioning from you know a fully functioning scientist from a postdoc to now thinking about money and grants and mentoring and teaching and then getting your science up and running that you know should be your main priority but your sort of spread very thin it's gotten easier I would say but you know just learning how to put out little fires is probably going to be a constant uh challenge and what were the unexpected rewards of starting a new lab foreign you already mentioned James that you know the interaction with your lab members and seeing them grow as scientists is I for me that was a really huge thing um what else um comes to mind yeah I I can just go off of that so I think it's things that cannot be put on a CV or can't be Quantified it's you know when your students and postdocs get a really great result you know so just the sort of daily Joys the ups and downs and for example one of my students won a prestigious NSF graduate Fellowship today and that's a huge one for my lab because of money issues but also you know it's a direct result of our work on him so it's those things that I think really what makes it all worth it no one's mentioned food any Bay Area food is great close to campus well it's not too surprising but you know the housing prices yeah yeah that's another big challenge so there's a question in the chat is there any institution or organization you wish to move it to besides Berkeley so are you satisfied here do you feel like you have a good future here or is this just a temporary place I always say it is hard to compile yourself to institutions where they get two or three graduate students a year funded like Stanford for example that definitely feels like how am I supposed to do that with the resources I have uh you know I love I love the politics in California it'll be much cheaper if I went somewhere else in the US I'm going to be able to be more graduate students but that's not a balance I'm willing to make so the high cost of living here is because it's nice here so that's the toss-up yeah I think um I have friends at different institutions the harvards and the stanfords of the world and I think they complain about different things so what I've learned is sort of whichever institution you are you have your own set of challenges so it's hard for me to say that this is temporary because I'm pretty happy here so I had many options to go elsewhere but you know I'm pretty satisfied with my decision um so there are some suggestions in the chat to Penny to create a donation page for your lab and um a mailing list and you know there is the big give once a year and really you know this is a um one of the questions is you know can philanthropy or other funding sources help close this Gap because we know you're under we're all under pressure to get funding it'd be amazing if we could have like a GoFundMe competition between oh um so there's a question from Catherine Shu my son who's 10 wants to know if Eric ma or anyone else is a fan of um kurtzkazakt yes I'm a fan that poster is from them I have their posters all over my student office big fan okay and do you do any of you have comments and Edwin Ching is wondering if you had any comments for the alumni in the audience the Berkeley alumni go Bears okay um great well it's been such a pleasure to hear about your research um and now to close I'm going to hand the floor over to the dean of biological sciences Mike botchen Mike the floor is yours well thank you Rebecca and uh thanks everybody for the hard work they put into this presentation and it's it's really exciting to to see new projects and just echoing something Steve said at the beginning teaching uh is is such a an optimistic thing and I think it's it it it it it's points out how uh how recruiting assistant professors to Cal and having them interact with each other is so important to our culture here and I I want to thank uh uh Penny and and James and and Eric for the work they put into this and I I think it's important for us to focus on the fact that so many of our assistant professors who are actually in different parts of our campus ecosystem share similar problems and it's important for for me and I think people like Steve and Rebecca who have administrative responsibilities to realize that we're not alone in dealing with uh helping assistant professors sort of manage a difficult difficult uh part of their careers that in fact generally turn out spectacularly well and that's why in fact I think the answer to the question of is are there any other places that would be better in the end I don't think there are I think that Berkeley is the place to be okay with that having said all that I want to uh and tell our audience that that we're having another one of these events coming soon uh the next installment of this basic science lights the way I'm just going to read this this is a week from today okay I wanted to get that correct and it'll cover Applied Mathematics uh something that I think many of us are interested in as Hobbies but we're going to have professionals three faculty members from the Department of Mathematics about how com how to combine mathematical science with specialized knowledge to further advances in a variety of fields okay so uh in closing let me remind the audience that we're we're doing this for you and I'm sure that many of you will have questions or in the future and you shouldn't hesitate to uh uh to get in touch with us and write to uh and any of us who are on this on this line and the the event itself will be uh uh in a video that you can always watch and the other videos for the other events that we've done many of these so far they're all I think they're all spectacular uh so uh just keep in touch and uh you know I think just I Penny said you know it'd be great to have a lot more money if if any of you are interested in helping Penny uh or or any of any of the our assistant professors here you're more than welcome to do that okay so uh thank you again for kicking off this semester with us uh and uh as Rebecca said go Bears and of course Fiat Lux which is really close to our heart let there be light bye
2023-04-26