all right so we have a special video for everybody today this is in celebration of
mother's day which was this past weekend so in this video, a couple of us interviewed our
moms and asked a whole bunch of questions about our careers and science in general
so four of us interviewed our moms I interviewed my mom in person she was fully vaccinated and I
was one dose in so that's why I'm wearing my mask and we maintain social distance as best
possible you'll see mike and his mom Janan and her mom and her grandma and kelly and her mom
there's a lot of really awesome footage and I had to cut a ton we had hours and hours of video so
hope you enjoy and I hope I captured all the good moments and yeah
okay we should start okay okay the first question is describe what I do for a living and what I
study um well you study eelgrass in waterways and um well right now you're not doing that you're
working for the state and all their projects um well you study coral reefs and fish and the uh
uh communication between them that your main thing and you go uh all around the world
doing a different kind of uh uh experiments that you have come up with yourself what else you got
well it's the relationship that they have in communities that you're studying and um
how they're very much like us in ways the social network of the fish okay
here's what I think this is how this is what I think you do I think that you've combined
zoology and parasitology in some kind of cool way and we should be looking more at parasites
and not just their hosts and so I think the way you do this is you go out into a kind of
jungly areas or under bridges or like you hang out with the trolls and you're under a bridge,
okay and you go inside caves at night you work at night that's one thing you do have the night shift
and you set up a thing called a mist net
and you catch bats in it and other stuff sometimes and then you pick those bats out and you hold them
and you blow on their first so you can pick off the parasites and stick them in little vials
I don't know you whirr them around in a centrifuge and see what comes out of them
and then you decide whether they're carriers of something we don't want
um you have the career in life that i should have had so in a way because i didn't go into any
scientific field i i keep up as a as an interest you know i read science news and i made i made
all you kids read science news yeah and discover magazine right yeah i think there was discover
magazine and all those different things so i made sure to to voice that on all three of you and it
paid off yeah what was my first experiment didn't i do an experiment with um some tomato plants
where we added water it might have been beans where we where yeah because since i like to garden
i made you guys do experiments where you tried out you know different fertilizer no fertilizer
different light i think i made sammy do one too with garlic or something
yeah we just it was like meal and miracle grow and something else i can't remember but that was the
first that's the first experiment i remember doing and uh the first we had like controls
even where we didn't add anything but when i remember that the miracle grow one
the plants grew the best with the non-organic fertilizer we didn't have access i don't think to
the the wonderful fish emulsion that i i use now no i'm kind of grateful for that because it smells
real bad yeah you use that indoors yeah okay that's perfect mom okay now i'm supposed to say
what you do so my mom is an interior designer and she's an artist well you're not going to tell me
so my mom is an interior designer and an artist and she paints she makes jewelry
she does interior design she's a creative person and she used to design homes and yeah it makes
beautiful things like this yeah ordinary things like that okay.uh so in your last job you were
an office manager for united airlines and um you were like an administrative like a central
administrative person and a lot of the stuff you did was organize trainings um for um agents
that do all of the booking and all the organizing for travel itineraries but you were primarily
centrally organizing trainings and and all that and like booking hotels and travel and all the
things that come with that that's that's my answer um you are an adapted adapted P.E teacher you are
trying to build skills with students who couldn't build those skills in a typical P.E setting because
um typical P.E settings aren't made for students with certain disabilities how wrong was i
no it's that was a that was a good answer it's a very good answer
yeah and we're both creative i'm not as creative and you are very creative but i'm not as i'm not
a good kind of artist but i am sort of artistic with my drawings but just not as not like in a
professional way like you are we both were bit by the travel bug yeah you're very good at having fun
um and like keeping and keeping your friends close and that's actually a huge part of what makes me
do what i do right because i get to i mean i get to meet people that are
kindred spirits about the stuff that i care most about so it's sort of like you make fast friends
you know and so i think that's so important in life i really do it's probably one of the most
important things is i mean family and friends that's it um i was interested in science as like
like just playing with frogs and things like that but um and collecting like little um tadpoles ted
we collected pollywogs before the 605 freeway was there we would get them and then we would
have frogs and we loved frogs and then we had thousands of frogs and they were jumping all
over the place and we just like kids we loved that and then they put the 605 freeway in and then bam
it was they were gone but um yeah perfect why didn't you have time to be interested in science
well growing up in the 30s and 40s and so on and so forth
I would say that all I knew is I wanted to get off the farm so
anything off the farm was science to me
i think i was when i when i knew there was such a thing as science i the first time i remember
being interested was in fifth grade when our teacher dissected cow's eyes which we thought was
just incredibly gross um but it was also really interesting so i guess i dated from there before
that it was more like being interested in bugs and butterflies and plants and animals and you know
looking at grandpa's uh bug collections that he had to do when he was in college that was a form
of science all on little pins um when they did did zoology so then he showed me how to how to kill
butterflies with carbon tetrachloride that was what they did in college so i became a collector
of butterflies no when i was young i always was very into like bird watching which i've kind
of gone back to um you know really into nature and uh and uh yeah mainly that kind of stuff uh
but like in high school i hated science hated it thought it was boring and you know i just i really
because i didn't realize what it all was and plus our teachers really sucked so you know it was very
uh it wasn't it didn't keep me uh interested they didn't keep me interested
um growing up i always thought it was important it wasn't in it was important it was always
talked about that with respect and um and your grandfather was a scientist basically
and a pathologist and devoted his life to that and so i always respected science and
i think you know unfortunately it goes in waves but now there is no now there is no way to go with
a wave going down it has to go up because we don't have a chance to redo this so it has to it it has
to be taken seriously well i think like just technology alone is pretty insane you know like
it blows my mind that so much stuff can fit on one little chip so i mean i've seen so many changes
um that you know it's crazy when i think back to how it was and i can't imagine what it's
going to be like in the future probably when i was little or younger way younger it was just more um
kind of just describing things you know when you're younger and
um like you mean in class like when you were learning science in class sure but i think you
know the bigger kind of when you throw in the pop culture kind of component of that question
i'm thinking that you know of course um technology has made information so accessible and it has made
the planet an even little smaller marble so that we can you know interact with one another but i
also think we have to be really careful to help students or you know just coming through school
learn to be more critic uh to think more critically about the information they're getting
it's information is at your fingertips but you have to be discerning about whether or not it's
valid and reliable information and that they have to be really good critical thinkers and be able
to extrapolate whether the information is true or not. only thing that i think is sad is mis misinformation
and that has made me very sad to think that people would not trust scientists that
they've devoted their whole entire lives well i i have learned that science is everything really
every part of our life is really science um i mean and that i guess you made me realize that but it's
true i mean uh everything is science like this lip gloss i have right here that so that was you know
uh a formula that was made through science so um science is a very very very big part of our i mean
it's our life it's so important and people don't seem to get that and you certainly don't get paid
for it like you should for for certain yeah okay yeah we can agree on that uh underrated science is
underrated there's no doubt people just don't realize that how science is everything really
yeah fully agreed mom, well said good no go ahead no i think the pill was the most likely
the birth control pill yeah birth control i also think penicillin changed the world thing that's
changed the most to me seems to be the discovery of dna and how and how it works because when i was
in high school um was just when they were we were just learning that there was this thing called dna
i was going to say when i was at the u in in med tech and we were working in the labs and of course
you know using the microscope the big thing was the coming thing was the electron might oh yeah
that was a big thing coming i think science is one of the most important things that we
have in our world and it should be respected and it should be high on everyone's list well
i'm just so happy that you are doing what you love i think that's very important did you think i was
going to be a scientist i did not what did you think i was going to be what's the story
you'd like to tell no i thought you would well later on i thought you would be an md doctor
but then at first i thought you were going to be a las vegas dancer but because you like not
that there's anything wrong with vegas dancing there's anything wrong with that
because it's certainly you know people more power to you yeah absolutely and we do need those
those strong legs and men and women doing that yes absolutely um because i like sparkly stuff right
like you love sparkly things and literally you had a little bathing suit a little purple bathing
suit that had sparkles on it and you literally would not take it off and yeah so i thought you
were you're going to be a sparkly girl and and actually when i see you now in the mud it's just
it is just so adorable it just you know makes me laugh it looks like calamity jane dorstein
calamity jane so to see you in sea grass and in mud you know full on mud and know it is very
very cute and completely opposite from what you were as an infant and but you were always very
um philosophical and so even when you were a child you would say well that's that's not right you
you just always knew the right answer that was very strange a gifted child some might say yeah
you were a very gifted perfect mama that was great I love you but can I say that
you didn't sleep for nine months that was a little bit oh sure all right thank you
I love you a too perfect, great scientist and cut of course I'm so proud of you like it's just you know
I'm always beaming about you because uh it's amazing all that you've done it's just amazing
to me thanks mom keep it up and move closer to me
I'll do my best on both fronts and if you think about it there's four of us here
right now so yeah um that's four generations uh I don't know if
she's going to want to be a scientist but oh for sure I love you, sweetie,
I love you too. I'm proud of you you should be so proud of yourself and I'm so proud of you love you
I love you too okay I'll talk to you later on all right have fun at the brewery okay we'll do it
bye-bye all right go eat dinner all right I love you mom bye all right hope you guys enjoyed that
video um you know the drill like share subscribe do all that good stuff um in the meantime uh give
them a call and tell them how much you love them and appreciate them whoever they are and that's it