Spotlight Series: Cosmos Professors
Explore the expertise of COSMOS professors through our interview series. Discover their groundbreaking research and insights into why they are dedicated to teaching at COSMOS, a leading summer program in science and engineering. Gain firsthand knowledge of their inspirations, discoveries, and commitment to mentoring future innovators.
Dr. Ali Mortazavi
Dr. Ali Mortazavi is the a Professor at UCI studying Developmental & Cell Biology within the School of Biological Sciences. He completed his PhD in Biology at California Institute of Technology. He is a professor at COSMOS for Cluster 6: Bioengineering and Characterizing Human Skin Organoids
Interview conducted by Divya Agarwal, Isabelle Nguyen, and Kelsie Victor
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Q. To start off, could you please tell us a little about yourself?
A. I went to Blair High School in Pasadena, California. I thought I wanted to be a physicist, but I got a degree in engineering and applied science at Caltech. Then I worked for many years, and I went back and did a master's in chemistry and biochemistry at Cal State L.A. Then I went back to do my Ph.D. in biology at Caltech, and I did my post-doctoral at Caltech, and then I came here to UCI as a professor.
Q. What got you interested in biology and research?
A. I went to Caltech wanting to study physics, but it turned out I don't like physics. My undergraduate advisor at the time said that there's these people doing stuff in genetics sp I went as an undergrad and started working in a genetics lab, and I got interested. They were working with worms and sea urchins, and I liked it. What I did as an undergrad is what caused me later on to really want to come back and go to graduate school.
Q: Why did you choose UCI over other schools?
A: Well, in my particular case, I was already married with a house. I wanted to stay in Southern California, so I mostly interviewed for faculty positions in Southern California. I interviewed elsewhere. I had some interviews elsewhere, but UCI was the place that made the most sense to me, and so I was happy, too.
Q: Why did you choose to be a professor and why focus on genomics?
A: Okay, so that has to do with when I was an undergrad. I was working in a lab where they were studying sea urchin development, and they were doing that by studying which transcription factors turned on which genes during the first few hours of the life of a sea urchin. The way they were talking about it, and the way they were describing it as these circuits, like these gene record networks, I didn't know it at the time, but the professor I was working with was like the expert in the field in all of this, and so that had a big influence on me. I kind of thought, huh, I'd love to learn the circuit diagram that's in our genomes. That's kind of what I thought about, but when I went to graduate school, I didn't want to really be working with sea urchins, you know, more interested in working with humans. It's a great organism, but it's just I wanted to work with humans and mice, and so I went to a lab where they were working on that, and so that's why. And then that's what I've been doing my whole life, scientific life has been genomics, so it's natural for me to teach what I know.
Q: Why did you choose to teach for COSMOS, and why Cluster 6?
A: So cluster six has existed in two forms. When I first started it, it was actually studying the genomes of these worms with nematodes, and that was because I had people in the lab who were working on that, and it turned out it's a lot of fun to play with these worms, these worms like to jump and do stuff, and so it's like easy to set up stuff in the lab for high school students to play with, and my TAs at the time were working on that for their PhD thesis anyhow, so it made sense. And that work is typically not funded by NIH, it's funded by NSF, and it turns out NSF likes programs like this, so that's why I started it. Many years later, I decided I didn't want to work on those worms anymore, I got tired of it, and so I thought, well, I like the work I do with Kyoko, and so we redesigned the cluster to be around the stuff that we do with Kyoko, so I think it was a muscle dystrophy. So that happened maybe right around the time of COVID, so it's connected probably to the fourth year that we're doing it this way, third or fourth year.
Q: What is your favorite part about COSMOS?
A: I have seen spectacular Cosmos presentations, and I have also seen really proud parents, right, so the poster session in particular is a highlight. So I would say that, well, I'll say last year's poster presentation was the most fun, because it was the first time again it was really in person.
Q. What is your teaching philosophy?
A. I teach undergraduate classes and graduate classes, so for the undergraduate classes, typically, I have taught this as a flipped class, where I've recorded lectures and the students are supposed to watch the lectures. For the graduate students, it's very different. First of all, I just lecture them and then the second thing is that I spend a lot of time with them working on writing research projects and then they're also supposed to present the papers.
Q: What is your most recent project/ what is your lab doing right now?
A: I think what you guys heard Liz (PhD graduate) present is very much what 60% of my lab is doing. I think you also saw Kyoko present on FSHD recently. And so that is also some substantial amounts of that depending on which of her papers she talks about. Some of those papers are joint papers between both of our labs. So the single cell work and things like that or like the edited cells and all of that stuff. Those things are like joint papers from our two groups. And so that's another aspect. I'd say that more than 10% of what's going on in my lab is related to muscle dystrophy. So maybe 60% is the kind of mouse work that you heard Liz (PhD graduate) talk about. 30% is related to the work of mouse models of Alzheimer's disease, which is something we don't really talk about. And then 10% is related to the muscle dystrophy stuff. But they're interesting, yeah.
Q: What was your favorite project you worked on in grad school versus your own lab?
A. So you know, I was very fortunate as a graduate student that I was the first person to do ChIP-seq and RNA-seq. There was no software. There was nothing. And so I had to figure out how to do all of that. So it was a lot of fun because these were new things that we were doing. We kept wondering- Is it going to work? Is it not going to work? It worked. Then you put it out and then all of a sudden other people are excited. They also want to do it. And that's kind of nice.
Q. What are your future plans for your research?
A. Well, long term, I still want to have that dream of being able to look at the circuit diagram that's in our genome and try to understand what it all means. For example, why do I get up at this time in the morning or how much of it is the environment versus how much of it is my genes. So I think being able to actually read off the genome and see what it means and how it influences our traits, that’s really what I would love to be able to do.
Q: Most inspirational quote/advice, book, or person in your life?
A. Most inspirational code is a pretty well-known one.What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. That's probably Nietzsche. It's also been, I think, when I told Elnaz (one of our TAs) about this, she said that's a song by Kelly Clarkson. So that's where you heard it first. But I think the message is the same. Most inspirational book, for me, as a kid, was maybe a book by Carl Sagan called Cosmos. Yeah, but that was, you know, when I was saying I wanted to be an astrophysicist. That's the kind of stuff I was reading as a kid. So I think that still made a huge impact on me, what he had written there. Okay, who's the most inspirational person I can think of? That's an interesting question. I would say that for a famous person, maybe it would be someone like, do you guys know who Richard Feynman is? Feynman was a famous physicist that was famous for coming up with his elegant ideas, but also having a lot of fun. He really enjoyed what he did. There's several books that were written about his stuff. He was a world-class physicist, but he ended up teaching freshman physics at Caltech. And when he did that, essentially for generations of students after that, they would read his lectures in order to understand physics. Turns out his fellow professors would also go listen to him talk freshman physics, because the way he would explain it would make, you know, it was very compelling to know. I think he would have been a very well-known person when I was a high school student growing up.
Q: Most valuable lesson you learned?
A. That you should be open to changing your plans. It's not from experience. For example, I went to graduate school thinking that I was going to get my PhD very quickly and then go work in industry.I never had any plans to become a professor. Yeah, so it was one of those situations where I thought I was not good enough to be one, so I wasn't even thinking about it. And then when the opportunity showed up, I realized, okay, maybe I do need to change my plans to do something that makes me happy.
Q: What’s your favorite gene?
A. Easy, an RSF rest. That transcription factor I was telling you about. That was the first transcription factor. We did gypsy cons. I like that gene because I was studying it even before we had gypsy working. So it was always going to be one of the core things. Transcription factors at the time were hard to study because they had small binding sites. This one had a big one, 21 base pairs.
Q: What’s your favorite biological agent?
A: I'm a big fan of C2, C12 cells, which you guys worked with. Those are the cells that I would work with when I was a graduate student. Yeah, so when I want to tell my students that it's easy to do, I say, hey, look, even I did it when I was a graduate student, right? So growing C2, C12 cells and working with them and extracting the RNA and all that, those are the kind of things I was doing as a graduate student, too.
Q. What advice do you have for high schoolers who want to go into STEM?
A. I think you should take different classes in your freshman and sophomore years, and if you realize that you don't like the classes that you plan to go in as a major, consider changing your major. Because in high school, you guys have been exposed to some things and you've seen some things, but there's a lot of fields that are not even touched upon in high school. So I would say be open to that because nothing I took in my high school prepared me for the stuff I saw once I was an undergrad in terms of what the state of the art was.
Interview with Dr. Elizabeth Bess
Elizabeth Bess is a professor at the Department of Chemistry at the University of California, Irvine. Her lab is fusing chemistry and microbiology to interrogate the chemical mechanisms by which the human gut microbiome impacts human health and disease. Professor Bess is the Cluster 9: Stressed Out Bugs: How Bacteria Respond to Changing Environments professor for the second half of the COSMOS program.
​Interview conducted by Shefali Prasad, Mika Kohno, and Benjamin Woo
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Q: You discussed how the path of your career was a combination of twists and turns, which you went through in order to reach the job that allowed you to explore a multitude of your passions. What do you think is the most important lesson that you would like to share with COSMOS students?
A: “I think it is the importance of being curious. If you follow what you're curious about, then you'll go into areas and create jobs and opportunities for yourself that you could never have predicted otherwise and it will be something that is unique to you and that you'll be uniquely good at and like to make a positive contribution.”
Q: What made you interested in microbiology or science in general?
A: “For science in general, I’m excited to be able to ask questions about the world and then be able to figure it out. For microbiology specifically, I was trained in chemistry before learning about microbiology and learned sort of just about the fundamentals of how the world works in atoms. And microbiology is really exciting about how to apply that knowledge in an area that impacts our lives on a day to day basis, and I was fascinated by the microbiome and its connection to both health and disease. And then I was excited about being able to apply chemistry knowledge to the microbiome to better understand how it functions and how we can improve how people live.”
Q: I know that following your curiosity is what led to your dream job. What's your favorite part about your job?
A: “One favorite part I think is exciting to be able to work with students and like see all of the positive impacts they go on to make as well and that's always really exciting to like, be part of that journey. And then it's also exciting to have my own team of researchers making discoveries and being able to just learn new things about the world and hope that it's making a contribution to people being healthier in the world and being able to like have less pain and disease”
Q: Would you say helping the students is one of the main reasons why you signed up to be a professor at COSMOS?
A: “Yes, definitely. That is the–yeah, definitely. I've heard of COSMOS because it's exciting to see high school students that are so excited about science, and helping you to learn more about science and hopefully, you know, continue in this direction as undergrads and maybe beyond.”
Q: I know you’re doing some research with the COSMOS students, cluster 9 specifically. Can you tell us more about it?
A: “Yeah, so my lab's research is about understanding how chemical reactions in the gut microbiome impact health and disease and we work in three main areas. One is understanding the role of gut bacteria in Parkinson's disease. So that's a disease where when the neurons in the brain die, it causes a person to not be able to control their body movements in the way that they'd like to. And so, we've been finding that there are bacteria that live in the gut that can do particular chemical reactions that control whether or not a protein called Alpha synuclein turns pathogenic, or disease causing, and so we've been figuring out what are the bacteria that are causing this bad protein that can go on to cause Parkinson's disease. And then also because we're learning about how this works, we're also learning about ways to stop it. So we're finding new molecules that we can use to help prevent this pathogenic protein from forming, and there's exciting implications for that for thinking about disease prevention, that we're excited to pursue as well.
And then we also look at how gut bacteria metabolize some of the medicines that we take. So particularly in the context of breast cancer. We study a drug that people take once they've had breast cancer. They keep taking this drug for 5 to 10 years to help them not have breast cancer return. And so we study how depending on which bacteria you have in your gut, it determines how effective that drug may or may not be. And so we're trying to develop a platform that could be predictive so that if somebody needs to take this drug, we could look at their microbiome and then be able to predict whether it would actually be a useful drug for them or if there's something else that would be more beneficial.
And then the last area is looking at how gut bacteria digests fiber. The foods that we eat that our body can't digest, but only our bacteria can. And so we learn about how those bacteria digest fiber and what the outcomes are, like what happens when bacteria digested and how that can be beneficial for human health with human errors.
And then for COSMOS. I'm really curious about how having students being involved in learning about science and doing science can increase what we call STEM self efficacy, or your belief in your ability to do science. And so the study that is running as part of COSMOS is a five year study. And there's sort of different things that happen every year. So next year, students will be collecting fecal samples from themselves and will submit them for sequencing so that students can actually learn about their own microbiomes. And then in years three, four and five they'll have students take a sample of their microbiome at home, before coming to COSMOS and then once at COSMOS. Next year that's how it will be: you take it at home and send it to us before COSMOS starts. And then the next year you take the sample at home when you get to cosmos. You eat a cup of wheat bran every day for breakfast, because it's high fiber, and then we'll measure your microbiome at the end. And you're doing kind of a little experiment on yourself right like seeing how fiber changes your microbiome and most Americans don't eat enough fiber and so we’d like to ask, especially folks of your age. What we're proposing is an amount of fiber that would be like the recommended daily intake. And then the question is like, how does that, which is an environmental factor, change your microbiome so we can compare before and after? So the study that we're running is to understand how participating in these different kinds of experiments, or evaluations like learning about yourself, like we don't even know which data is associated with any person who participates in this study. It's just about you, learning about you, and does that help you like it when you're learning about yourself through science, help you be more excited about science, more interested, feel like you have more competence, to do science and to be successful? So that's what this study is about is trying to figure out ways to help students be most confident to be successful in
what you're doing.”
Q: What part of COSMOS were you looking forward to the most?
A: “I think just meeting all of you! It’s exciting to see all of you have creative ideas. Every one of your groups proposes different experiments, comes up with different things, and they’re also different across the years. You’re not just unique in the class, like across the years. And it’s exciting to see how excited you guys are about doing science and being curious and thoughtful. And even like these little computer creatures, that bacteria we’re making, like you all come up with such clever and creative things and that's always fun for me to see. So, getting to meet you all, hoping you know, hopefully helping you on your science journey and keeping you motivated and excited about science are all the reasons that it's fun for me to be a part of this.”
Mika, Ben, and Shefali: Thank you so much for your time!