Taylor Gofstein and Martin Miller

00:04 My name is Taylor goffstein. I am 23 years old today is August 23rd 2017. I'm in Fairbanks Alaska here talking with my friend and mentor.

00:19 My name is Martin Miller. It is still 23 August 2017. I am also here in Fairbanks Alaska talking with my friend and mentee Taylor goffstein.

00:34 I guess I'll begin with introducing myself.

00:38 I am a graduate student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks working on my PhD. I study biodegradation of petroleum contaminants, which means looking at the microorganisms that naturally exist in soil sea water and other environments and their ability to break down petroleum contaminants such as crude oil and Diesel.

01:08 Taylor what got you interested in science

01:11 The first memory I have of being interested in science. I was about five years old and I was starting to learn to read and the first book that I read by myself along to one of my older brother's it was a children's Encyclopedia of the human body and how it works and I found it absolutely fascinating in particular there was it even went into the reproductive system and I effectively taught myself where babies came from at 5 years old from reading this book, although I insisted at the time that it was pronounced wom and was arguing with my mother who said no dear. It's pronounced womb.

02:02 I also this carried forward into other activities as I went through school when I reach the 6th grade, I

02:13 Was again reintroduced to human anatomy. We did a section about the human body and I was absolutely fascinated with it. And my teacher was very impressed with me. I managed to get 107 average in science because I was just so interested in it and I continue to do science fair projects throughout school by the time I reached the eighth grade. I was setting stuff on fire in the backyard studying flame propagation of different fuels such as gunpowder or lighter fluid which my parents encouraged very much.

03:02 I was also very

03:06 Interested in class room visits that's something I enjoyed a lot. I don't think being from an inner-city school that we got a ton of good Science Education. A lot of it was on reading and math. But sometimes we would have scientist come into the classroom to visit and they would bring very fun interactive and engaging experiments. That was one of the things that Drew me to science. Can you remember one of those experienced that really made an impression grade? It was something explosive. I think it was a volcano and it reached all the way up to the ceiling much to the teachers dismay at the time but the kids love it. We thought it was totally cool that it was about to knock out the lights.

03:54 I'm sensing a trend here. You were doing some experimentation with flame propagation. Your favorite experiment was a volcano with a massive burst of flame. How did you get from that into specializing in bioremediation? That's a good question has to have a theme. Although it does connect with petroleum contamination because that's also flammable. I think that ties into when I first started transitioning into a kid that's interested in science to someone that's actually doing science. I was privileged to go to a vocational school that specializes in science.

04:38 And

04:40 I started with Biology in my first semester and I did very well and my teacher saw that I was very passionate about what I was learning. So she said do you want to take chemistry next semester? I know it's a course normally reserved for juniors, but you seem to be very passionate about it. So I said sure I guess that class also involved a lot of explosions and and colors but my my second year of high school. I started getting into biotechnology. I took a biotechnology course, and that was actually I think my significant Mentor in The Sciences as I had a teacher that pushed me to

05:24 Do anything I wanted and in that class. We worked on a project that we were in a competition with in order to solve some kind of global problem for us. We picked oil spills interesting Lee enough at the time. We decided to work on biodegradation of oil spills, and then the spill in the Gulf of Mexico happened a couple months later.

05:52 And I could never have predicted that I'd end up actually working on oil biodegradation years later and graduate school. It just kind of happened with that project. We we took it on to compete our whole platform of our project was using this microorganism pseudomonas putida, which is able to biodegrade petroleum contaminants. It's probably the poster child for petroleum biodegradation and taking green fluorescent protein and tagging that into the genome so that perhaps when it's finished by remediating a flu is green. So, you know, it's done. This wasn't High School just used to whole lot of terms that a lot of high schoolers might not know if without your background. So could we pause for just a second and explain biodegrading bioremediation and

06:52 Couple of the other terms that you want people to understand who don't have your background in science. Sure biodegradation is a microorganism in the environment that naturally exist there. They're everywhere its ability to degrade some kind of contaminant. And the reason they were able to do that is because all of microorganism cares about is getting a carbon Source, they are not picky eaters like you were me they don't care about their carbs are there protein just a carbon source and it just so happens. That oil is very full of hydrocarbon compounds that they're able to degrade bioremediation is

07:36 A spin-off of that using different treatments applied to the environment to stimulate these microorganisms to biodegrade things.

07:47 Great. Thanks. Any other terms you think that people might need to know?

07:53 Not yet. Okay, we'll get him as we come to.

07:58 Tell me about your independent study in high school. You said this is when you first considered yourself to become a scientist that competition that I participated in high school. One of the prizes was grant money to fund working towards that project. It didn't play out working and oil spills actually, but because I was the only person in the course that didn't end up graduating. I was able to use that money exclusively. The rest of the class was made up of Juniors and seniors and I was a sophomore so I was able to use that to pursue an independent study in my sophomore year of high school.

08:37 And we me and my mentor at the time contacted someone from University who?

08:48 Help me pursue a project. I was studying a Marsh Grass population. I started small because it's very ambitious to start off editing a genome as a sophomore in high school looking at this Marsh Grass population that was replanted and determining if the replanted portion was genetically different or distinct from the original population.

09:17 So I started working with my high school teacher who is very very dedicated to helping me reach the school. She used to drive me to the University where I did the research after school every day. I would be there from 3 to 9:10 at night working on this project. I learned to extract DNA

09:44 And do some pretty Advanced procedures for high school student gel electrophoresis, which is a procedure where you separate out fragments of DNA based on their size and charge and

10:00 Eventually, I submitted this project for the science fair.

10:07 What's interesting and is a very common thing and Sciences? I didn't actually get the results. I was hoping for I put all this work into this project hours after school every day of the week weekends holidays, and at the end when I looked at my gel electrophoresis product, I could see it you would normally expect to see bands of DNA on the gel and mine were very faded and pathetic looking and I was pretty discouraged and upset.

10:46 And I went home and thought about it. How can I make this work? I still wanted enter the science fair because I had put so much work into it at this point, and then I realized well.

11:00 I had a lot of trouble extracting the DNA and I tried five different ways of doing it and I did find out which one works best for this really fibrous tough Marsh Grass. So instead of looking at genetic diversity, it turned into a project of

11:18 Assassin methods of DNA extraction for this particular species of Marsh Grass

11:24 So I

11:27 I realize that as I was coming up against the deadline, it was very very closest things tend to be in science. So the night before and I'm changing everything on my poster board to make it match the snoo feed and competed starting at the Citywide level and I won first place with that.

11:49 And that was a particularly important year to be competing the Juniors the prize for first place at the city level was a college scholarship.

12:00 And once you surpass City level you went on to state-level.

12:05 When I competed at States, it was pretty overwhelming because you had kids from all different kinds of backgrounds at some of them more privileged than others where maybe if their parent is a scientist. So they're able to get them connections to do these really cool projects where they're curing cancer, but when I was interviewed for the different prizes, they had I later found out they were very surprised that I had done my own work.

12:38 Sometimes

12:41 You can only get as far as specially at that age. It's difficult to get lab experience.

12:47 You might just be able to observe or Shadow and they were very impressed that I did my own procedures and I won third place in the environmental Sciences at the state level as well and being that involve neck deep in all of this crazy sign stuff at 15 16 years old. That was when I realized I am a Scientist now I'm doing science and this is the path. I want to take for the rest of my life.

13:26 May your life hasn't been that long. You still young woman. That is true. How has being a young woman in the Sciences shaped your experience? How is it?

13:39 For the most part it has been a positive experience. Although I I have had some negative interactions not so much based on my gender as it has been about my h

13:55 I've had.

13:58 People ask me. I used to work in a hospital laboratory and I have been asked several times. Are you old enough to work here?

14:06 Which

14:09 On the surface is funny. But underneath why don't you ask me what you you really want to ask is are you qualified to be here? It's it can be insulting. I've also had that happen presently in my position as a graduate student as I work on a gas chromatograph, which is a scientific instrument used to separate a mixture of compounds and identify them. I learned how to work on a gas chromatograph when I was 16. I was trained by another very awesome Mentor when I was in high school and I have people question me and my ability to run it when I know it inside and out and of taking it apart so many times but at this point, I'm pretty sure I can do it blindfolded maybe with one hand tied behind my back and

15:01 There have been instances where people want to go over my head and ask someone else about a problem with the instruments having even though I've been the one intimately working on it for the past year-and-a-half.

15:16 In terms of

15:18 Sexist things there. I have herds and been around some people with sexist remarks in particular. There was a conversation where someone brought up that though. It's Barbara mcclintock's birthday. Barbara McClintock is one of two females to win a Nobel Prize for research was on these genetic elements that are able to be transposed to different places along the genome.

15:52 And somehow the conversation escalated where this person said. Well Barbara McClintock never had children, that was really an altruistic Act of science on her behalf. And I I was very taken aback her.

16:14 Not having children was an altruistic act for science.

16:19 Maybe she just chose not to have children. Maybe she never wanted to but what why does that have to be her sacrificing for Science and the conversations?

16:32 Started to get very uncomfortable where this person said that.

16:38 You can't have both you can either have a successful career in The Sciences or you can have a family but you're never going to be able to give 100% to both of them and be a productive scientist with a good career and also raise a family and I was very very disturbed by that because up until then I don't think I really had any.

17:04 Negative interactions regarding my gender and being a woman in science. I've always been met with a lot of encouragement of people seeing young people engaged in science because I am quite young and being a woman had never been an issue until then. It was very shocking that said my lab is very supportive of women and seems to be primarily composed of women. Actually. I have a female advisor and she has been very supportive of

17:43 Women in our lab having kids. There's been three women who have had kids with in our lab to graduate students when was a master student and when she had her baby she was also working on a degradation experiment and unfortunately, a lot of these projects involve really nasty solvents that you don't want to be around when you're pregnant or nursing so she was unable to process some of her samples when she was nursing her newborn.

18:17 So another person from our lab took over processing her samples, and she just took the data once I was handed off.

18:25 The same thing happened with a PhD student when she had her, baby.

18:32 By that point she was pretty much done with her data now sister, she didn't have to worry about that. But it was a lot of working from home and processing data and and she finished she just recently graduated and is moving her family to her new job. Most recently. There's a research scientist who had her second child and she is my hero. She is awesome. She's in charge of another buyer decoration experiment looking at this oil spill product and how it could possibly enhance biodegradation and

19:10 When we found out she was pregnant. She said well, do you want to go off and do the fieldwork instead? I said, yeah sure. So I've been kind of stepping up and taking on some parts that she's not necessarily able to do such as when she was 16 weeks pregnant going out on the boat into the subarctic in Prince. William sound collect sea water is not necessarily a good idea.

19:35 So I went out and collected samples, which I was glad to do and she just had the baby. The baby is about 2 months old and she's

19:47 Overseeing everything she comes in and she checks in it was maybe a month after she had given birth and she's in the office checking on things and and talking to people and peeking in the lab and making sure everything's fine. And her husband's very supportive. Is she the other day she was processing samples with us as she handed off the baby to him for a couple of hours baby was fed happy and sleeping and she was filtering seawater with us working on her samples and that to me that is the face of women in science. Just doing it all having a family and getting your work done.

20:28 You mentioned a couple of things like going out on the boat and collecting seawater. There are a lot of trips a lot of travels that you have to make to get your samples. Is there one that stands out in your mind either a really good one or a really bad one that you'd like to talk about. Yes there is. At a really bad one in particular. The first time I ever went out and collected sea water for our incubations was the very bad experience. I went up to the most northern point in Alaska and the US Sparrow, which is the native name for is Avec.

21:09 And I had not done a lot of field work up until that point. I've done a lot of lab work. I wasn't really sure what to expect. I'd been on a boat before so I thought well, I don't get seasick. It'll be fine, but we went out and the waves were as tall as I am which is about 5 ft.

21:31 I still thought it'll be okay. I don't get seasick and you can probably guess how that ended so that the scene is we're in the middle of the Arctic Ocean. You can't see any land around you because we were about a kilometer offshore.

21:49 It's so cloudy can't really find the Horizon the but the boat is rocking like crazy and I'm trying to hold this little meter to measure things like dissolved oxygen and the pH of the sea water in between breaks of leaning over the side of the boat to get sick.

22:10 But I made it and I collected the samples and I've adopted an attitude of whatever it takes. Even if it's the most painful experience of my life. The samples in contrast when we collected samples from Prince William sound and Valdez, which is all the way on the other side of the state.

22:32 It was absolutely beautiful. We could not ask for better sampling conditions. The water was like glass. It was calm. Nobody got seasick.

22:47 Motion detectors

22:52 But I think having a horrible sampling experience as my first field work experience was good because that's set the bar of worst case scenario expectation. So now I expect the absolute worst. And if it happens to be perfectly calm glassy Waters, I won't complain.

23:12 I can see that you mentioned mentoring and mentors several times from high school on through your current position. Can you expand a little bit on how mental and mentorship has played a role in your success has been pivotal to my experience in the sciences. And I think if I had not had strong support of Mentos that my story may have turned out differently beginning in high school. I had a mentor who was my teacher the time who encouraged me to reach for the stars, basically.

23:52 They did not see a ceiling or a limit to what I can do. They encourage me to go out and do anything. So when I said can I do an independent study and just do research they said yeah, absolutely. Let's let's do that. Let's start contacting people in and get you in a lab so you can get research and that continued on throughout the rest of my experience when I reach College. My advisor was also an awesome mentor.

24:22 I like a lot of students. We're still trying to figure out when I graduate what's going to be my path. My undergraduate major doesn't exactly line up with my current studies.

24:35 But I asked my boss or is it stupid to go into a PhD program straight out of an undergraduate degree? And she said what no absolutely not do it go for it. And because of that I applied to where I am now and even though I have yet another awesome Mentor who is very supportive of me and understands the importance of

25:07 Taking breaks for mental and physical health and encouraging my progress and it's just overall been a good positive relationships have people believe in you and your ability to do things especially when everything is going wrong as it feels like in the lab right now that mentor and how did you connect my current Mentor my current Mentor is Mary Beth Lee and

25:40 When I was looking for graduate schools, I was specifically looking for research and by remediation particularly the use of plants to stimulate by a declaration, which is called phytoremediation and I started just looking at scientific papers who's Big in this field who's the leading researchers? There's actually quite a bit of Industry involved in it, but she was one of the few academics involved in this area research, so

26:14 Looking at the papers brought me to her and then I wanted to visit Alaska and the university before I made this huge commitment to move across the country for research and in meeting our we clicked right away. We have very similar personalities and approaches and I think that is worth well for us.

26:45 Are you meant touring anybody? Yes thing with mentoring is it's not just a one-way relationship is I've also measured students to pay for what I have received from the benefits of mentoring. So I currently mentor to undergraduate students on their own research projects that are related to buy whatever Nation.

27:10 And by doing so the hope is that I'm paying for word what my mentors have given to me of encouraging them and seeking different career paths and different options of what's available to you. One of them is very set on going for his Ph.D. Which is awesome. And I'm encouraging him and helping him get there and we are looking to hopefully get him published before he finishes. Where's the the other student is interested in medical school, which I am supportive of and

27:47 I am trying to do anything. I can to help him reach those goals. And one of the requirements for graduation is to do a research project and he happen to be interested in microbiology. So

28:03 Essentially, what I'm doing is helping him reach his goals for both graduation and his ultimate career goals and the bonuses he gets to explore potential different career option. And if he decides he doesn't want to go to medical school or doesn't pan out for whatever reason he knows. There's other options out there in this is another Avenue that you can explore and be ideas to be able to expose undergraduates to these different types of experiences that they wouldn't get just inside of the classroom.

28:45 You've talked about your current Mentor being a leader in academic research. Are you looking to become a leader in the Sciences? Also? Yes. I am and one of the components of that I think is taking on community outreach because you can sit in your laboratory in your white Ivory Tower working on science all you want but if you don't disseminate that the other people, what does it mean?

29:20 So a lot of my efforts have been to take my science on the road and I started that with classroom visits to local classrooms to explain my research and what I do and I've I've also taken up back to Barrow because that's where it all started in. Those are the communities that are going to be most impacted by my research to Barrow this summer. I had the opportunity to teach a science camp for high school students. The course is called Methods in molecular biology with a particular focus on microbiology and we taught them a lot of methods that are used by microbiologist everyday such as using a microscope making slides to look at organisms under the microscope growing them and culturing them.

30:17 And this was a really cool experience for me the class consisted of 10 students and nine of them were girls, which was very cool because women are under-represented and science, but even more so all of them were Alaska natives,

30:40 Which was so incredible to see they were from all over the state from the big cities like Anchorage to the tiniest Villages that you've never heard of before.

30:52 Such as Nixon

30:56 So we have a variety of students from different backgrounds all coming together to learn science, and it was incredibly rewarding and

31:08 Awesome, just to see if they were so excited to learn science for some of them. It was their first interaction with science because

31:18 Sometimes especially in The Villages you don't get a very good exposure to that because science does require some equipment that they might not be able to get their hands on her one girl was her first time ever using a microscope and she was enamored with it. She it was hard to pull her away from it because she just wanted to sit there and look at everything that underneath your fingernails the swabs from your cheek bacteria that you grew from soil. It was very cool to see that captivation in young people and in a way I kind of saw myself how I was at that age 15 16 years old just being absolutely fascinated with the world around me and wanting understand that

32:10 Did you design that curriculum or was it something put out by somebody like National Science Foundation and you just delivered it. It was something that had been previously run by two people that I work with that it was of their own design and it gets modified every year to improve its it was based on their previous deployments of that course, but we modified it and added in some different things and I wanted to bring in besides just basic science of this is how you do a Gram stain or this is how you use a microscope of how do you apply all this? So I did to applied microbiology lessons one was on oil spills and the use of biodiversity action to show them it goes beyond just studying them and looking at them has how can you take this further to solve real-world problems? And I also do lecture on medical laboratory science, which

33:10 What happens when you get your blood drawn and it gets sent off there's scientist in a lab to analyze it and are able to diagnose and monitor disease. So I expose them to another possible area of science that they can pursue a career in.

33:34 You've talked about doing some Outreach doing a lot of class room visits doing this trip to Barrow. The stereotypical view of the scientist is the awkward geeky stuck in the lab not able to interact socially.

33:49 That obviously doesn't apply to you.

33:52 Okay, Kiki does but in a good way.

33:56 What are you doing to develop your skills to overcome that stereotype. I think one of the most important things as me being there and interacting with the students as a scientist because when they hear a scientist is going to come visit they expect some middle-aged man with crazy hair to come in and they they seem surprised that it's someone it's a young woman the students were surprised. They thought I was one of the students. Wow, you're our age and in a way that helps shift that Paradigm to see out loud. She's only a couple years older than me and she's doing her PhD I can do that, too.

34:40 Seeing themselves and someone helps them to be able to realize this isn't something unattainable that I am unable to do. I I can be one of these scientists shoe.

34:55 When I did that the camp that's what we did on the first day. We ask them. What do you think of when you think of the scientists and they all had the stereotypical picture in their mind that we told them well science isn't really like that and we showed pictures of myself and the other two instructors which were also both female of we're just normal everyday people and our day job just happens to be signs at the end of the camp. We asked the students.

35:28 Do you see yourselves as scientists and all of them overwhelmingly did and at the end of the camp during the final presentations? We had pictures of all of the students working on their various projects and we said these are scientists because we want them to be able to identify as scientist as well.

35:57 That was also supposed to be a cheap shot to give you a chance to talk about Toastmasters.

36:04 Well, the reason I'm speaking to you today is because I have met you through Toastmasters and

36:11 I join Toastmasters because

36:14 I was not able to public speak about a year ago. I went to my first committee meeting and stuttered and sputtered in front of four people that I already knew and I decided that's not the face of a professional. I can't go to conferences like this. So I joined Toastmasters where I met you and that's allowed me to be able to find my voice so that I am able to stand up in front of a whole classroom full of kids or a room full of Elders and talk about my work confidently and communicate it to a non-science audience.

36:59 And you have progressed very well because you've got people like these Kitchen Vero out and listening to you and saying

37:10 I am a Scientist at the end of your session. So I think you're meeting that goal.

37:18 We've talked about how you

37:21 Decided to become a scientist how you got interested what you've done what steps you took?

37:27 And some of your experiences along the way to get there.

37:34 The question of course is what's next. Where are you going from here? That's a good question.

37:41 And as I've come to realize I don't necessarily need an answer for that right now you go to the immediate goal was of course to finish my degree and get my Ph.D where that will lead me is anyone's guess I of course want to stay in research and I want to continue working with contaminants. But whether I end up being a professor at a university or working at a government lab, I'm I'm open to whatever the future will bring to me and a lot of students think that they they need to have everything figured out and they need to know it all but as I realized from

38:22 Buy work and my mentors is nobody knows what they're doing. We're all just making it up as we go along and we learn from the people who have already surpassed the point that we're currently at now. So me not knowing is perfectly fine. And I will go wherever there's opportunities.

38:46 So you've settled on your career you become successful you're in demand as a public speaker and you're talking to a group of kids at a commencement ceremony as they're about to enter the science field. What is the one piece of advice you would give them to be successful as a scientist?

39:07 Question everything never stop asking why?

39:13 Never lose your curiosity because that is what keeps you going at the end of the day when your experiments are failing and it seems like nothing is going right remember why you came to this in the first place and that will keep you going.

39:33 Thanks for sharing Taylor. You've given us a lot of information. You've given me a lot of information. I didn't have before the really appreciated talking with you as well. Thank you Marty.