A couple of weeks ago, I finished my PhD.
Okay, well good morning everyone, it's my real pleasure to welcome you to the thesis
defense of Alie Caldwell, one of the founding members of my lab.
I first met Alie a few years ago when she was interviewing for graduate school, and
I distinctly remember her from the interviews and kind of thinking afterwards "I really
hope she's interested in astrocytes and wants to join my lab."
It took six years of reading, thinking, researching, and experimenting to get here, along with
lots of sweat, tears, and sometimes literal blood.
It was a lot of hard work, but it was absolutely worth it.
So I'm not gonna tell you about Alie's project, because she's going to tell you about that
herself.
I just want to point out to you something that she won't tell you is how much work this
was.
We've often joked and talked how all of her findings are enough for multiple PhDs.
She's worked out a new cell culture system, she's worked out what astrocytes normally
do for neurons, and she's also worked out how things are changing in different neurodevelopmental
disorders - not just one change but multiple changes.
For the longest time, I couldn’t share my data with anyone.
But on August 21st, 2019, I had my dissertation defense, where I finally got to present my
findings to my mentors, peers, friends, family, and, most importantly, my committee.
Today, she's gonna tell you all about her work; moving forward, she's not really going
very far.
She's staying here at UCSD to do a science communication fellowship, which really fits
perfectly with her deep understanding of science and also commitment to educating the public
and getting the message out there.
So with that, I'm just gonna hand it over to Alie and she can tell you about her work.
Thank you Nicola for that wonderful introduction, I really appreciate it, and thank you to all
of you for being here today.
My talk today is titled Astrocytes: A New Hope; Identifying astrocyte secreted protein
factors linked to altered neuronal development in neurodevelopmental disorders.
If the champagne popping isn’t obvious enough...I passed!
So that’s /Doctor/ Astrocyte to you!
But I didn’t start here.
Oh no.
Once all the research was done and the results were in, I still had to write the dang dissertation.
This is that journey.
Let's go check in.
Hello.
Hi.
How's the writing going?
Good.
First day of really writing.
How far are you?
How far am I?
Not very.
I've written seven pages.
How long will it be when it's done?
Um, my labmate's was about a hundred and fifty pages.
A hundred fifty?
That's a lot of pages.
So do you think you'll hit a hundred fifty pages?
I mean, at the rate I'm going, yeah.
I'm still finishing up a couple of experiments so I'm gonna be doing that for the next couple
weeks while I start writing and then probably beginning at the beginning of July, which
is about a week and a half from now, I'll be writing basically full time, so.
So you're still doing some of these experiments that are gonna end up in your dissertation
in the end?
Yeah...there's actually so much to talk about, like SO much that I could include and discuss,
so I think the harder part will be like, how do I make sure my focus is narrow and how
do I get done what I need to get done?
So how many days do you have to finish this?
That's a good question.
My goal is to have a draft done by August second, so one, two...so forty days.
Forty days.
Like Jesus.
Yeah, hahaha.
I'm not like Jesus.
The Jesus of dissertations.
Nooo.
Well, better get working.
I will.
I'll leave you alone.
Thanks.
All right so why are we toasting today?
Because today, I finished analyzing my last experiment.
This was like the last...adding the last pair of samples to an analysis I've been doing
for the last few months and they supported the results that I wanted so that's exciting.
Yeah, so, having a beer, celebrating a little bit, and then tonight I'm gonna work on finishing
a draft of the introduction for my dissertation.
So you're feeling good.
Getting there - yeah, it's weird, I mean this week is probably gonna be my last week in
the lab full time, so it'll definitely be an adjustment, I mean both that I'll be working
at home alone a lot of the time for the next month and a half, um, but also that it'll
be the first time in my entire adult life that I will not be doing science as my job
anymore.
That'll be very weird.
Are you excited about that?
I am, to some degree.
I mean, like, my dream job would be if I could do like 20 hours a week of science and 20
hours a week of like science writing and media producing, but they don't really make jobs
like that.
Well congrats on finishing your experiments for your dissertation.
Thanks!
Cheers!
How's the dissertating going?
Going.
How long is your introduction?
Fifteen pages.
Wow, that's pretty long.
That's just the introduction to the whole dissertation, doesn't include introductions
to the individual chapters, each chapter will have its own introduction.
Oh yikes.
Most of the background work I did was focused on astrocytes and synapse formation because
that's most of what my lab does, but actually all of my experiments have been on astrocyte
influence on neuronal outgrowth, not synapse formation, so I'm just brushing up on the
background there.
Making sure that my dissertation makes it clear that this is a good reason to ask this
question.
It's actually really really important to contextualize the questions I'm asking.
It's really important to justify why my approach and the methods I've developed are not only
like, valid for the experiments but also actually better models for the experiments I'm conducting
versus other protocols that are out there.
So on a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, how are you
feeling about your dissertation right now?
A ten is the best?
Yeah.
Probably like an...eight and a half.
Like I feel pretty good about it but I also know that there's a lot of work to be done,
so we'll see...check in in a week and see how I feel.
I have a month.
A month to figure out how it goes.
Okay, cool.
Bye.
So, how's it going?
Um, pretty good.
How far along are you now?
Uh, I have written drafts of everything.
My dissertation is a total of four data chapters, an introduction, a conclusion, and a methods
chapter.
So seven chapters.
So the last couple days I did edits on the first through fourth chapters and I"m trying
to finish the fifth chapter today.
Tomorrow morning I will do the sixth chapter which is the conclusions, which is the easy
one, cause that's the one where I...postulate, bloviate for awhile on all the cool things
that could be done with this work.
And how many pages have you written?
Two hundred and thirty seven.
Whoaaa.
That's a lot of pages.
That's a whole book.
A lot of those pages are references.
So like I've written like 200 pages.
That's still a lot.
I'm guessing this is the longest paper you've ever written in school?
Yeah.
So how are you feeling about where you're at?
Pretty good.
I mean it's a lot to be doing all at once because in addition to doing this we're also
getting ready to move next week.
The walls are so bare.
It'll be nice to have it done and to not be worrying about it anymore.
I also have to start putting together my presentation for my defense, that's a pretty big part of
this whole thing.
So that's like a Powerpoint right?
Yeah, it's a slide deck.
So it's basically gonna be like, all the data that's in here but built into slides and then
I'll publicly present it.
Yeah, and then packing!
Well good work so far.
Keep it up.
All right, so, today is August 9th, and I'm getting ready to send my dissertation to my
committee.
I've felt really good about the process, I've felt really good about my writing.
I think that it actually makes me feel better about my work to have written everything up
just because it made me realize how much I've done.
I'm just really excited to get to share it with everybody and to present for my committee
and my family in just a couple weeks.
But I'm just gonna get this sent this morning, and then um, gonna go to lab, do some work,
and then tomorrow we move!
So I'll show you what I have and then I'll get it sent.
I've been using Dropbox to store all my dissertation files, just to make sure that nothing would
ever be lost if anything were to happen to my computer either here or in lab.
It also has let me work on stuff in lab and at home.
Here's my folder of what I am sending to my committee today.
So I have my full dissertation text, my preliminary pages, title and copyright, as well as supplemental
tables of my data.
And the full dissertation...is pretty long.
So, uh, here we go.
There's a lot of pages here, a lot of figures.
Two hundred and twenty four was the final number.
Send one, send two, send three, and send four.
And there we go.
All sent to my committee, so.
Guess we will see how they feel about it, but now I'm gonna do some packing and go to
lab and do some labwork.
Guess we'll see what they say.
But unfortunately, my time here is done, I've been here for six years and I need to go,
so that will be someone else's dissertation project.
And now I would just like to thank all of you for being here and taking the time today.
I need to thank my lab, particularly Nicola for helping me develop a project that I have
really loved working on.
I also want to thank my biological family as well as my husband's wonderful family for
their support during this time and before, you have always supported all of my aspirations
and really helped me get here today.
I especially want to thank my grandfather, who no longer with us but who is the reason
I became a scientist.
And I'd like to thank my husband, for being an amazing person and an amazing partner,
for always going on adventures with me, and not batting an eye when I told him I wanted
to move to San Diego two weeks after our wedding.
And with that, I will take any questions.
So there you have it.
I made it through.
I’m proud of my dissertation and graduate school experience, and I loved the research
I’ve worked on these last five years.
I’m thankful to my friends and family for supporting me and I’m thankful to all of
you for being along for the journey as I grew as a scientist, as a communicator, and most
importantly, as a person.
Cheers!