"My name is Desmond Oathes, and we are at the Veteran's Hospital in Palo Alto, California.
I work here as well as at Stanford University down the road.
I grew up in the San Francisco Bay area, I've moved around quite a bit since then, but I'm
back here again.
My parents, my mother was a stay-at-home mom, and my dad is a machinist, so he works at
a machine shop in the area.
I like to hang out with my friends, go to the beach, have big parties and bonfires and
things like that at the beach, that was a big one for me.
Hiking and being outdoors was something that I've enjoyed from early on, and continue to
enjoy.
I think that we're hoping that with brain stimulation methods we can help people recover
from traumatic memories faster, so we're gonna try that out in a variety of ways, on healthy
individuals who learn some new contextual information that they could be, that their
body could be kind of responsive to, and see if we can nudge that down with brain stimulation.
And if that works, that's an awesome model for applying to say posttraumatic stress disorder,
when people are learning to be afraid of something they didn't grow up being afraid of.
And seeing if we can nudge that circuit kind of back towards health.
So I have a bunch of studies that are in a big MRI at Stanford and a number of them here
at the Veteran's Hospital, where we attach a bunch of physiological sensors related to
emotion and have people do kind of crazy experiments where they are challenging their memory and
seeing if it can benefit people ultimately through behavior training, through brain stem
relation and characterizing the illness better within imaging.
It's a really collaborative.
We have people that are from a variety of training disciplines, which is fun.
We have engineers, MDs, psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, and having those people interact
I think is really fun and challenges us as a whole in new ways when we get together at
least.
[Speaker 2] I can deal with the kind of like classroom aspect of the whole UCS thing to
the research part, so should I touch on like, all three of those studies that I work that
you guys are talking about in those letters too?
[Speaker 1] I'm kind of a late bloomer with a lot of things, so I didn't figure out the
importance of kind of doing well in school until I was basically an adult and looking
to move out of my parent's house.
And I realized, oh boy, I really need to do something here.
When I was in college I was bitten by the science bug, and I, I really got into applying
methods that help us quantify things about human behavior that I hadn't really considered
before.
I'm starting to get some of my own grants where I'm the head investigator and making
more of my own decisions with the projects and some of the people that were in training
before have become more like part of things.
[Speaker 3] We got this really cool result the other day where we were looking at the
cartilage, can you think of any more ways to try to bring in vasculature?
[Speaker 4] Oh.
I have no idea.
Failing is something I think if you choose a scientific career, you have to really get
used to.
You fail a lot more than you succeed.
And even the most accomplished scientists can tell you many terrible failure stories
where they felt like this is the end.
This is the biggest deal, and this is the thing I needed to make my career.
You find other ways.
You have to really believe in yourself, no matter what kind of criticisms and failures
you have.
There are a number of hurdles at every step of the career.
But if you are passionate about science, I think that there's a way for everybody to
kind of connect to that, and make that a career.
And that happened for me.
A lot of my friends are, you know, in the tech industry, as you can imagine in this
area, and they're doing very well financially.
They work a lot less hours than I do, but I love, I am so passionate about science that
I, that no matter what the hurdles are, I'm just going for it.
I've put all my chips in, and you know, that I'm going for this career.
And so, if you're exposed to a few different labs, and you get passionate about the scientific
question so much that you don't care about the details of the rest of the lifestyle,
I think you should go for it.
And I think there's a place for you."