The skills that brought me to this place had nothing to do with my academic credentials in some ways.
It was all about my lived experience. And those are the things that you shouldn't
just shut down when you enter this rarified, arguably white male space, in a lot of ways.
Bring the things that make you different and don't apologize for those.
I want to start actually with your Twitter profile. You describe yourself as
"a high school dropout". You're a chemistry professor at Reed College. So, can you just walk us through how
you went from being a high school dropout to being a tenured professor at one of the most prestigious
liberal arts colleges in the country?
Wow, that's... yeah, so I think one of the first things I should say is that I am a child of two parents who are very hard-working,
but one had a high school education and that was enough. "School of Hard Knocks" is what she called it, you know,
that was enough. And my dad is an immigrant from a very rural and poor area of Mexico - Nayarit.
I grew up moving a lot which I think is the thing when I talk about becoming a dropout, you know,
people don't realize how disruptive that is to children, particularly if you have parents who
are not necessarily home. So I was, you know, babysitters or "latchkey kid" kind-of-thing. So,
you know, the homework just didn't really get done. My parents didn't really you know how to
help with it, so I really quickly, early on in elementary school, just didn't think I was very
bright, because I was definitely - the teachers were kind of hard on me - "Why
isn't your homework done? Why do you look a little messy?" You know, these kinds of things,
and so that really persisted. Then we moved to a new school. In one very awful example, I went
to a new school, we had moved and the that new school had just covered fractions, for example.
I had never been taught fractions. So I never learned fractions as a result. That was just
part of the module that moved on. So this kind of just kept snowballing until we moved yet again,
in middle school, which is a really tough time. Settled a little bit and then we moved again right
before I started high school. So right around that time all I wanted was to belong. I wanted
to feel safe. Right around that time alcoholism and problems and my family were starting to really
compound, so it was just this perfect storm, where I was falling through the cracks in my
freshman year of high school. I barely passed anything and then in my sophomore year, I was 15
and I was just failing everything. I think I had a 1.8 GPA by the time that I just unceremoniously
sort of dropped out of high school. I ran away and was obviously struggling with my parents
splitting up ... I mean there's a lot of factors and I'm open and vulnerable about this because
I think that it's not a kid's fault necessarily, and yet it's not necessarily your parents fault,
either. These socioeconomic and ethnic issues. My dad was constantly being oppressed in many
different ways that really affected how he saw the world and so it just all came together. So,
ran away, and then ended up getting together with someone that was a lot older and I moved in with
him because it was a lot of security at 16. Yeah and I just kind of joined food service. I became a
dishwasher, worked my way up the ranks and I just figured that was going to be my career, just to be
in food service. But I was really embarrassed by not having a high school diploma and when I was
looking for other work I was kind of lying on my resume, you know, saying, "Oh yeah I got a degree,
you know, got my high school thing in Astoria and then I thought well maybe I should
think about getting my GED. So I was by then about 23 or 22 but I got my driver's license at 22. So
that was a big moment when everything kind of shifted, if I'm to think back to what happened.
You have to study for it, you have to read the manual, you have to take the test,
and for the first time I really studied for something and I got the license and
that was a huge amount of freedom, because I was in a very ... not a good relationship.
So that was this moment -
Is this the same one you were in at 16?
Exactly, yeah, and so at this moment I started to
feel this little spark of, like, maybe this is the way I can kind of get out of this situation,
you know? By studying, as a ways to get somewhere. Yeah it just felt like studying gives you this
independence that nobody can take from you. This idea of education being something that I could use
and that nobody - not my partner, not the world - they couldn't take from me. So I studied for a
couple of months and I was impatient. I just wanted to do it and so I took the GED test
and I was still working at my mother's restaurant as a waitress at the time and Mr. Snow (who was
the guy who oversaw the GED stuff) came into the restaurant - came to the counter - he said,
"No, I know you're working Kelly, I just had to share this with you. Here is your GED - you got
one of the highest scores in the state of Oregon this year." Wow! Yeah so I was like, "What!" and
so they gave you this little $500 voucher which for community college at the time in
what was it 2001 or something ... quite a bit. I just decided to
They gave you a voucher for the community college?
They did, they did! That's smart. Yeah, thanks for clarifying.
Yeah, so they were like, "You can use this". I thought, "What the heck" you know? I'm gonna do this. So I took
Philosophy 101 and College Survival and Success, which is one of the biggest things I tell all
of my students who are first gen, or that are not traditional - that course taught me how to study,
taught me how to read - skimming, scanning, highlighting - chunking your tasks into half an
hour, you know, and then stopping and switching. All of those things. Little did I know
gave me the cultural capital that I needed to at least get to the next step. So I went to Mount
Hood Community College for a year and that was when I saw the biology lecture that really opened
my eyes. At the time, my family was not supportive of me continuing college. I remember I came to my
work shift and my mom really, you know... she's very proud now of course, and she regrets this,
but she's like, "Well is this going to get in the way of your work schedule? You know, like,
I don't think you're really going to stick with this" and frankly, given my track record,
I don't really blame her for thinking that, but I just kept going. Like, nobody's gonna tell me.
It just felt really bigger than myself and I think that a lot of students who are entering
college - community college, too, it's like - this is something bigger. And I thought I'd be a nurse.
I thought that was reasonable. It would pay well, it's respectable, and I could get a
pretty cool little education at the same time and so that was really what I was going for. I
thought that was the top. Yeah but I was actually being told that I wasn't good enough for that,
that I wouldn't get into a nursing school. Who did I think - you know -
Who is telling you that? I mean your family, but who else?
Actually at a community college that someone had said that.
I think also just as a woman you get disregarded. A lot of people want to be nurses
and a lot of people want to do these things and they're like, "Well, maybe think about something
like Apollo College or, you know, something like a trade thing." And I was like, "No. I think
I can do this. I've got straight A's, so far." I was taking - I was up to calculus at that point.
That was some - I thought math was great all of a sudden. When I couldn't do fractions in the past.
So, anyway, essentially that was when I sat in on the lecture in biology which was a pre-requisite.
It doesn't count for a four-year degree or anything like that, it was just like,
"Let me just see what biology is and see if that's something cool" and that opened up the Miller Urey experiment,
of the origins of life, the chemical origins of life.
They talked about that experiment and how the, something like 14 out of the 20 amino acids
were present in the TLC - and you know at the time I didn't know all these details but I thought,
"What is this? I have to know. You mean you can study the chemical origins of life?" And I was
like, "chemical" you know, what is this? Somebody said, "Oh, well, it's chemistry."
I decided instead of getting my Associate's to transfer at that moment because Mount Hood
was wonderful but it's very far away. I said, "You know, maybe I could go to a university"
and I talked to a couple of people informally and they said, "Well, yeah, you can, it's
probably going to be hard, you know, and you're probably not" - I didn't know that I could go
and apply to colleges as a transfer student, you see, so the only option I thought I had was
Portland State University which I'm actually in retrospect very grateful that I had access to. But
I didn't know at the time with my 4.0 that I could have probably applied a lot of different places
and I'm really glad I didn't know, but at the same time, I want students to realize that they
are good enough, coming from a community college. I think that that's really important. So then I
went to Portland State and I attended my very first day. My very first lecture was Chemistry
Chemistry 221 which is like the four year equivalent if you know something you can do and it was an amazing
woman chemist named Gwendolyn Schusterman who I still know now. She was strong. Her
hair was short. She knew everything and it was intoxicating. Chemistry just blew my mind and that
was really it. I started to pay attention to the department a little bit even though it was a very
big school and I saw the professors and I thought, "This is a dream job - I could never get to this,
but it's a dream job." So I just kept going.
So, I want to hear a little bit about your research.
Can you explain it to my grandma?
Of course, I explained it to my grandma all the time.
Okay so, like I said, so I kind of tried to preface it a little bit I am really into the role that
metals - and particularly transition metals, which are in a certain spot of the periodic table.
Just means that they're a little bit more flexible with their electrons
and can take on multiple states where they're missing some electrons and are still stable.
Nature and evolution has used this difference in how many electrons it can have to do work.
So, every time that Grandma takes a breath, she is using copper to basically split oxygen
and produce H2O and CO2. That goes on every single time you breathe in a process called respiration.
So I was really obsessed with copper proteins in my PhD and in particular I was working on a
protein called copper A which is at complex four of the electron transport chain. This little
electron moving respiring thing. We actually don't understand a lot about how the metals
are - you eat some meat - how does that iron get to where it needs to go to a baby protein that
needs that iron to be installed, and then how is it being installed? What proteins travel along -
Metals do not travel loose in your body. They are always being held captive because anything that
has electrons can be a free radical and that's very dangerous. Through popular culture we know
that. So this very tight control and sort of docking and leaving the metal at one spot the
protein with the metal moves to another spot and then it finally makes it to its destination to say
copper A, this protein that I was studying. There are birth defects in babies who cannot
actually assemble that protein and install the copper, for example. So there was a protein that
is missing that's not doing its job of bringing that copper to the final destination and those
babies pass away. So this was a question that we had about how does this copper center
actually get matured?
So, you're studying things that have been interesting to people for a long time,
but we have techniques that are available now.
Yes, we basically can ping the metal,
make it ring like a bell, and then look at how that reverberates through the protein.
What a great analogy.
Yeah and it tells us when it reverberates back, we can deconvolute that and figure out what's bound to it.
So, one of the ways that my work corners to other work is that I'm interested in bacteria
like E. coli, like nasty E. coli. The kind when people say, "Don't eat this romaine lettuce."
Well, that bad E. coli knows how to get through your bloodstream through your stomach.
It gets into your bloodstream and then the reason why you don't get better and people
get very sick and millions and thousands of millions of people get very sick and some die
in a lot of different countries, is because our body's efforts to kill those bacteria
is unsuccessful because those bacteria have invented ways to resist what happens
- and this is really interesting - so if you have that bad E. coli,
gets in your bloodstream, something called a macrophage comes along. This big - it's a
big eating machine. It'll come along and engulf that E. coli. It takes it to a killing chamber
of the macrophage - like I'm going to bring you into this
really protected little chamber and I'm going to start barraging you with electrons by recruiting copper.
So, literally your macrophages will recruit copper ions through a lengthy process
of having proteins that can handle and export it into that little killing chamber
and the E. coli begins to be barraged by copper. That produces free radicals - electrons that happen
that react with the bacteria in a lot of different ways but also, copper will bind to their proteins
in the E. coli and gum up the works. Copper doesn't do the right job that iron would but
it got in there and it bound and now the E. coli cannot live. Well, that's what would
happen with a normal E. coli. The bad E. coli have e-flux pumps that will immediately be turned on
and literally get sucked out - all of that copper - like a straw, out back into the killing chamber,
and it survives. So those export systems - those pumps that pump out these metals that we're using
to try to kill them - if we can target those and understand the physical amino acids responsible
for recognizing and effluxing that copper, that's right, yeah, shut it down, and so if I can use my
skills of that structural, like, ringing that bell and seeing where the copper, the silver
is in that pump, well, we could possibly figure out a way to shut it down permanently by perhaps
using a metal or a copper compound that would bind irreversibly. That won't hurt the human
but it will hurt the bacteria.
I've got one more thing to show you.
Oh show me, show me!
a dog
[laughs]
His name is Devo - D - E - V - O - after the band.
Hi, Devo. You look so tired.
He looks like, "Why did you wake me up?"
He doesn't know what he's doing.
Zinnia, my cat, she just wants to she wants to suckle my neck is what she wants to do right now
which, I let her do, but not on camera.
Yeah, not on camera, that's fine.
Okay.