Focus In Sound

FOCUS In Sound #37: Jennifer Brophy   ERNIE: Welcome to FOCUS In Sound, the podcast series from the FOCUS newsletter published by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund.  I’m your host, science writer Ernie Hood.   In this edition of FOCUS In Sound, we welcome a young investigator who is pioneering in the field of plant tissue engineering—a remarkable emerging technology that just might eventually save the human race. Jennifer Brophy received one of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund’s Career Awards at the Scientific Interface, or CASI, in 2019. She is an Assistant Professor of Bioengineering at Stanford University, and is a Noyce Family Faculty Fellow and a Chan Zuckerburg Biohub Investigator.    Jenn received her BS in bioengineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 2009 and her PhD in biological engineering from MIT in 2016. She did her postdoc work at Stanford, where she started looking at plants. Today in her lab, she and her colleagues are developing technologies that enable the genetic engineering of plants and their associated microbes with the goal of enabling innovation in agriculture for a sustainable future.    Jenn Brophy, welcome to FOCUS In Sound!   JENN: Thank you, I’m happy to be here!    ERNIE: To get us started, Jenn, why don’t you give us a quick overview of your field, which is known as synthetic biology?   JENN: Certainly. Synthetic biology can mean a lot of different things to different people. In my lab, we think of it as advanced genetic engineering, which is essentially applying the principles of engineering to biology in order to reprogram living cells or organisms to do something new. In our lab, that means changing the shapes of plants as they grow, but for different people they engineer organisms to do different things.    ERNIE: I see. Building on what you just told us, I’d like to find out more about one of your major areas of research, which is called synthetic gene circuits. I know that it was the subject of one of your most important publications to date, which came out in Science last year. Please explain…   JENN: In that work, using synthetic genetic circuits to control gene expression patterns in multi-cellular organisms. This work is really borne out of the observation that gene expression patterns are important for development. In the 1980s—I’m going to do a little historical bit—in the 1980s, scientists discovered a gene in Drosophila called antennapedia that controls the formation of legs, and stunningly, if you express that gene in cells on the head of a fly, you can actually get it to produce legs where it would usually have antenna. Now that’s shocking, but it’s also really highly conserved across organisms. Where you express genes in the body affects the way it develops. And so we were interested in trying to control where in an organism we’re expressing genes in order to change its development. But it raised this question of how do you control gene expression across the body of a multi-cellular organism? So what people usually do when they want to pick out specific cells within a body to express a gene in is they look for a promoter, a region of DNA in that organism’s genome that usually drives expression in only those cells. And that’s great, it works well, but there are a limited of characterized promoters, characterized tissue-specific promoters, that have this capacity to control gene expression so precisely. And so we looked at that, and we were like, well, we can use synthetic genetic circuits to take a limited number of tissue-specific promoters and combine their activities in new ways in order to generate new patterns of gene expression. So the circuits that we built perform Boolean logic operations. They can take two different tissue-specific promoters, for example, and then say, okay, we only want to express our gene of interest where those promoters are both on, in cells where those promoters are both on. And using this type of Boolean logic, we’re able to generate new patterns of gene expression, which we then use to control development, and we demonstrate in this paper that a combination if tissue-specific control and control over gene expression levels allow us to tune a single aspect of a plant’s root system. We can change how many root branches the plant makes, and that changes that we made don’t affect any other aspect of the plant. So it’s kind of allowing us to do a little bit of design of the structure of the organism.    ERNIE: Jenn, it all sounds kind of mundane and esoteric until we get to the unbelievable implications of your work. Can you give us that incredibly exciting outlook?   JENN: Yeah, we’re excited about controlling development in plants, controlling the size and shape of plants, because of how important the structure and the shape of the plant is for survival in a challenging environment. So unlike animals, plants can’t run away when conditions get bad, right. If it’s hot, you or I can go find shade to stand in. But a plant just sits there in the sun and takes it. And the shape and angle of its leaves will affect its susceptibility to heat stress, its photosynthetic efficiency. The shape of its root system will affect its ability to acquire water when there is drought. And as climate change advances, these environmental stresses that a plant it expected to endure will increase. And what we want to do is have the capacity to introduce changes in the shapes and sizes of plants that should make them more resilient to environmental stress. But what we don’t want to do is change the aspects of the plants that we like, right? And so this control over gene expression, it’s important for being able to modify one part of a plant without modifying other parts. So we get the best of both worlds.    ERNIE: That’s very cool. Of course people have been bioengineering plants for a very long time…what is it about this work that represents a major leap forward?   JENN: It’s the specificity. Most of the bioengineered plants we have, in fact all of the ones that are on the market today, they express a single gene in every tissue within the plant throughout the plant’s entire life. And so that works well for getting things like pest resistance, where if an insect bites the plant, you want it to be resistant and producing something that wards off the insect all the time. But for changes in structure, you cannot express a gene throughout the entire plant throughout its whole life. Imagine if you had done the same thing in that fly example, you’d have antenna growing out of every cell in the fly. That’s not a functional organism, so to me, the type of changes that we want to make to improve resilience, you need this precise expression control.    ERNIE: I understand that you’re also working on genetically engineering soil bacteria in the plants’ ecospheres. Tell us about that aspect of your research…   JENN: Yeah, so the bacteria research actually predates plant research for me personally. I love microorganisms.  I think they are really fascinating, and the way that they can influence health of an ecosystem, health of a host, there is really fascinating. And when I was a graduate student I got interested in trying to make probiotics for plants, and trying to engineer them to support plant growth. But what I realized while I was doing it was that a lot of engineered soil bacteria especially don’t do that well, and when they are put out in the environment, because they are at a fitness disadvantage and the environmental conditions fluctuate so much, that they can easily get lost and not be able to help the plant much. So what we’re trying to do now is sort of engineer both sides, the plant and the microbes, so that the two of them kind of help each other along. The plant maybe provides some things that help the microbes survive, and the microbes then return the favor when conditions are less favorable for the plant. So most of that stuff in my lab is at a really early stage, so we don’t have a ton to share about it, I guess. But it’s an area that we’re interested in. I love kind of having all of these different organisms growing in the lab.    ERNIE: So it really becomes a very symbiotic relationship, then, right?   JENN: Yeah, it’s difficult, I mean we certainly don’t ever grow plants in the field without microbes, right, they’re non-sterile environments, and the interactions between the two can influence how fit either one are. There are some super-famous examples of plant-microbe interactions, like the bacteria that form nodules on the roots of some legumes, like some bean plants, to help fix atmospheric nitrogen. So they fix nitrogen and then gives the plant this essential element for growth, and the plant in return gives the bacteria sugars that it needs to survive. Those are interactions that people would love to better understand and to introduce into more of our food crop varieties. But it’s just one way in which the two play together. They’re important in a bunch of ways.    ERNIE: Jenn, I’d like to turn our conversation now to a dialogue that you and some of your colleagues addressed directly in your July 2023 publication in PLOS Biology, and that of course is the issue of genetically modified plants, which have become so controversial in recent years. In the PLOS publication, you make very compelling arguments for the place of synthetic biology and plant genetic modification to create climate-resilient plants and be vitally important and effective stalwarts in resisting the devastating impacts of climate change. Would you share some of your thoughts on that?   JENN: Yeah. Here I want to emphasize just how challenging it might be to make climate-resilient crops. We have seen a lot of differences across the globe in regulations on transgenic plants, some of which allow for no modifications to be made at all, and some of which are more amenable to small modifications to the plant’s genome being made by tools like CRISPR or TALENs, basically gene edi

FOCUS In Sound #36: Leenoy Meshulam    Octopus during active sleep video: https://www.oist.jp/video/octopus-during-active-sleep Welcome to FOCUS In Sound, the podcast series from the FOCUS newsletter published by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund.  I’m your host, science writer Ernie Hood.   In this edition of FOCUS In Sound, we get to know a young researcher who in 2022 was the recipient of a Burroughs Wellcome Fund CASI award, the Career Awards at the Scientific Interface. Those awards recognize outstanding scientists who have made significant contributions at the interface of biology and quantitative sciences, bridging the gap between disciplines, and fostering innovation. It’s a five-year grant totaling $500,000. Leenoy Meshulam is a theoretical physicist who is also interested in biological phenomena, especially nervous systems and the brain. She explores the interface between physics and neuroscience. She received her PhD from Princeton University, after completing her master’s degree in physics and biology at Tel Aviv University. She is now a Swartz postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington in Seattle.  Leenoy’s research endeavors have already taken her in some fascinating directions, which we will hear all about, including a remarkable recent publication about the sleeping habits of octopuses. Leenoy Meshulam, welcome to FOCUS In Sound!   LEENOY: Hi Ernie. It’s very nice to be here.   ERNIE: Let’s start with your latest accomplishment as a co-author of a paper in the journal Nature called “Wake-like skin patterning and neural activity during octopus sleep.” Tell us about the overall findings…   LEENOY: So this paper concentrates on a main finding where we saw that the octopus, much like in other animals, actually has two stages of sleep. So we managed to prove that every about hour the octopus goes into a different kind of stage of sleep—an active sleep bout, where similarly to REM sleep for humans, for example, the type of brain waves and the neural activity changes, and this is accompanied by a lot of color and pattern changes on the skin of the octopus while the octopus is still asleep. And so the way the cycle looks is, we have about an hour of sleep that is not the active part, and then a few minutes bout kind of like REM, with lots of color changes on the skin, different kind of neural activity that accompanies it, and then back to the stage that is most of the sleep. Something to keep in mind is that this is the first time that neural activity was recorded in this way in the brain of an octopus. So this is a sleeping octopus we managed to put a Neuropixel in, which means that there is an electrode inside the brain of the octopus that’s, we’re able to filter brainwaves out of to see what the signals look like. Also to see spikes in the brain of the octopus. And we can really see the activity of the brain while this is happening. So it’s both the underlying activity of sleep and the behavioral aspect of the two stages of sleep, and very high-resolution filming of the pattern changes on the skin of the octopus. The skin of the octopus is normally a system that we’re looking at for things like the camouflage of the octopus, right. This is why it has the ability to change so much color to have these coordinated, beautiful patterns that look like the coral reef that it is trying to match behind it. It also has texture changes there. And we just didn’t know before that this happens during the sleep of the octopus. So there are just these bouts of color changes that happen during sleep.    ERNIE: So you were really able to correlate the visual and the brain phenomena?   LEENOY: Exactly. So this is the underlying neural activity to this active sleep bout that makes it so interesting, because we can actually look at what is happening in the brain and show that this is really sleep. You can really see when you’re looking, if you look at the plotting in the paper, you can see the immediate, sharp transition into active sleep that is change in the neural activity, and if you’re looking at the brightness of the color of the body of the octopus, you can immediately see a drop, because it starts having color instead of being transparent. So the transition is immediate and is completely synchronized.    ERNIE: Just so everyone is aware, we will post a link to video of the sleeping octopus along with this podcast. It’s well worth seeing! Leenoy, I understand that these findings point to the idea of convergent evolution. Would you elaborate?   LEENOY: There are multiple elements of the system of the octopus that are similar to what we see in other animals. And because the cephalopods, which is the family the octopus is part of, so that’s cuttlefish, octopus, and squid—these are the cephalopods—the convergence in the evolutionary tree from us, for example, we’re talking 600 million years ago. That is around the time that on earth we moved from single cellular organisms to multi-cellular ones. It’s a very, very long time ago. And yet, there are a lot of parallels. So for example, the visual system, the eye. The octopus has a camera-like eye, much like ours. It has some things that are different, and some things that are very much the same, the basic structure of camera-like. And with the sleep, we didn’t know if this is a system that is similar to ours or not. We didn’t know that they have two stages. Humans definitely have two-stage sleep that is very well researched. We know that there is offline learning that without which we can’t actually make progress in learning. It is incredibly important to have rest periods, like any person who tried to play an instrument or tried to juggle or tried to learn anything, motor or not, knows, right, without rest, without sleep, both of these things, there are no leaps in the learning. You can only get so far. And so that two-stage sleep is something that is incredibly important, and we know from human performance and from other animals. The fact that the octopus has two-stage sleep as well definitely points to thinking about this as, oh, we have two types of stages of neural activity, two types of the behavior during the sleep, and maybe this is also a system that is a parallel to our system, and the mechanism behind it might be the same. And because we are able to penetrate the system and measure the system in a very different way than what we do in humans, for example, the fact that we can actually see the output of the motor system on the skin, basically record the entire output, because we can film the entire octopus (definitely can’t record the entire brain of a sleeping human, right?) suggests that if there are parallels we might be able to get to them by researching this animal, where we have a different kind of access to a system that might be functioning in a similar way.    ERNIE: So what was your role in the project?   LEENOY: Right, so maybe the most important thing to say is that I’m only the theorist on this project. The main thing that was happening here is that the incredibly talented and incredibly hard-working group of Sam Reiter in Okinawa, the Okinawa Institute of Technology, that’s a university that is in Japan, the Okinawa island, has amazing facilities of marine biology and marine neuroscience to be able to research things like this. This group concentrates on cephalopods, and fortunately for me, they have agreed to collaborate with me. So there are multiple people who are driving this project, who did all of the filming, all the looking inside the brain, all the imaging, all the recordings of the surgeries, and have lifted this incredible, incredible project with Sam, the PI of this group, who designed this all and looked into everything, and that’s just an amazing, amazing feat that they achieved. The collaboration with a theorist like me comes in with looking at both the short-term and the long-term goals of this project, designing the ideas to begin with, such that we have experiments and computational work and theory work, because you need all of these elements in order to create understanding of the system. Recording is not enough, computational models is not enough, you need to think through all the elements of the scientific endeavor. It is a very interdisciplinary science. We have physics inside it, and coding inside it, computer science and biology inside, and molecular things and imaging things, and that’s a lot of types of skills that had to come together in order to create this paper. So I am the part that is more methodical, that is more looking at computational things and thinking how to design those things to begin with, because we have a lot of thinking through the long-term goals of this project, and what is the kind of resolution we would like to measure something in. And it’s the collaboration, the multiple viewpoints, I think, that is the important part that is underlying this research.    ERNIE: Leenoy, how did this collaboration with the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology come to be?   LEENOY: Maybe something to mention is that I am coming from a background of physics. I am a physicist who’s interested in biological systems, and specifically in the nervous system and in the brain more than anything.  Like we said, the system of the octopus is a very special one, where you are able to actually record all of these pigment cells on the body, we call them chromatophores. These are specific pigment cells that change for the camouflage and also during sleep. There are about a 100,000 of them on even those small octopuses, that cover them. And you can measure their color and their size for a long time very well in very high resolution. That means that this is a system that for a person like me who is in interested in systems where we have a lot of small elements that are pretty similar to each other and interact to create a global pattern, something that is emerging for a global pattern, needs to be coordinated from a lot of

FOCUS In Sound #35: Michael Ferdig   Welcome to FOCUS In Sound, the podcast series from the FOCUS newsletter published by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund.  I’m your host, science writer Ernie Hood.   In this edition of FOCUS In Sound, we welcome a biomedical scientist who in 2022 was the Burroughs Wellcome Fund’s first Resident Faculty Scholar. Michael Ferdig is a Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Notre Dame, where he has been on the faculty since 2001. He specializes in the genetics and genomics of drug resistance and virulence in the malaria parasite. Malaria is a parasitic infection transmitted by the Anopheles mosquito. Malaria drug resistance is an ongoing topic of major importance in global public health, where the disease is still a significant worldwide contributor to mortality, with nearly a half-million deaths annually.   Mike received his BS and MS degrees from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, his PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also served a postdoctoral fellowship. He also did a postdoc at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1997 to 2001.   Michael Ferdig, welcome to FOCUS In Sound!   MIKE: Oh it’s a pleasure to be here, nice to meet you, Ernie.   ERNIE: Mike, there is so much for us to talk about, but I’d like to start with what brought you to the Burroughs Wellcome Fund to be its first Resident Faculty Scholar…   MIKE: Well, I love the question, because it makes me smile. I was sitting up there in South Bend, Indiana with the fall season approaching, and going into another teaching semester, and putting in another load of grants, trying to get them renewed. And I was in this mental place of, you know, getting to this place in my career where I’ve had plenty of success and things are going well, and I just felt like I was turning the crank and perpetuating myself, and looking around and realizing, in my business, in the business of academic research science, it tends to be what we do. We get to a career place where we almost are content to settle into this safe bubble of self-perpetuation. And I had almost a little bit of a panic about, oh no, is this it? And it happened to be at the same time I was noticing that—I was familiar with the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, just like we are out there as scientists—had just announced this Resident Faculty Scholar. And I thought, this is what I need to do. I need to step away. I had been 20 years at Notre Dame with no request for leave or what they call sabbatical sometimes, and I thought, I need a place where I’m not just going to go make more versions of me, I’m going to go try to find the next version of me, and sort of move into this later phase of my career, and hopefully do things a little more useful and interesting. So it was just kind of magic how it all fell together, I reached out. I had known Victoria McGovern at the Fund for years. She had long been an advocate for infectious disease research, and she said, “Oh yeah, by the way, we do have this fellowship, why don’t you look into it and see if it might fit?” So I applied, and a summertime later, there I was.   ERNIE: I know Mike it’s been quite a formative experience for you. Can you tell us a little bit more about some of your activities during the scholarship? Did you have a specific project that you worked on during the sabbatical?   MIKE: I did. As imagined in the first place, I do need to strengthen my program, basically I wanted to expand and extend my lab science. We’ve always been what they call bench scientists, experimentalists in the lab. But I work on malaria, which is an organism that infects people around the world and has caused devastating disease for millennia, and I really feel the need to move my work towards the field. So that kind of relevance and extending. But I’d also really noticed, I do a lot of teaching, a lot of moving toward more administrative roles, and I just noticed that this problem of needing to bust out of our bubble, out of our cocoon, was really pervasive across all the things I was working on. So I set up some aims. Aim One of my project was just very literally to take what we do in the lab and move it into a more field and clinical relevant place. Which is a pretty big, it’s a very different way of doing our workaday. And I knew down here in the Triangle, there are some really good researchers who do more clinical work in the malaria world, so I thought, a-ha, this would be a great chance to pull some of those people together, bring in some outside experts, the people I admire and respect, and sort of bring everybody together, and it just has been amazing how things fell into place. And then I had a little more aspirational goals, and one was getting more out of my immediate research focus into where is the field going, what is malaria, [what does] the future of malaria research look like? And these are more community oriented, open science, data sharing, resource sharing, beginning to anticipate how climate and the ecology of the disease. Mosquitoes transmit malaria, and they are super sensitive to whatever is happening in the environment. And to bring in that piece, so that was kind of the second part. And then finally, I’ve become fairly dismayed at how science through the last five to ten years is kind of getting a, its name isn’t as gold as it used to be, right? There’s a lot of science skepticism and a lot of missed opportunity for science to be a really positive and exciting voice. I think we’ve lost our way a little bit. We kind of have done this to ourselves, and I want to understand those factors. How can we do a better job? All the way that science in general at communicating ourselves and being effective.   Those were my three aims, and to different degrees, I was very successful on the first part, and some of the later ones I feel are still work in progress, but things I’ve become basically more excited about.   ERNIE: So what was it about the Burroughs Wellcome Fund atmosphere that you found to be inspiring? Did the location and the experience exceed your expectations?   MIKE: Literally when I was sitting there writing this proposal, it was, I have to get out of town and find the next version of me, and it really wasn’t, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund is, they’re smart enough to have these kinds of programs and appreciate there are people like me out there, even when I don’t realize it. But I had no idea what I was getting into, in terms of how wonderful the synergy or the magic that can happen when you literally for me moving south, moving and experiencing Durham is a great town for me, but the physical setting, the building of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund is, it’s peaceful and inspiring. It’s the lighting and the layout. So you go to work every day and this physical space just makes you feel like, hey, I can do some good things here! And then add to that the people. Brent is there to let you in the front door, and he’s proud of the building and knows all the nooks and crannies, and then you’ve got everybody lending their support. “Hey, are you getting what you need here? Are you comfortable here?” And then more on the inspirational level. I had a couple of colleagues there. You throw ideas around in the hallway, and you start to learn, I start to learn things and start to realize there’s just a really good flow of energy and information. And you know, then maybe the philosophy. Like I said, I knew about the Burroughs Wellcome Fund long ago. When I was a graduate student my advisor back in the day had gotten a grant from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. And I knew that they were always kind of out of the box a little, pushing the envelope, finding that edge of science that’s not standard, the regular NIH-funded things, but pushing the boundaries. So I knew about generally the philosophy, but I think there’s been a freshening, even. So that’s always been true. Burroughs Wellcome is viewed in an honored role around across the science community. But then when I got there and started to hear some of Lou’s ideas as he’s taken over fairly recently and there’s a good energy post-COVID of a lot of bodies and bustle around the place. But they just really stand for I think the forward-looking. They appreciate certainly the power of ideas, where ideas tend to get hung up in the system of traditional funding and traditional models at academic institutions, and I think are just really finding ways to support up and coming careers, and yeah, that got me really excited to hear just a lot of the priorities and initiatives that really have been happening under Lou’s leadership. And so, right, to just walk into that in an unsuspecting way and have that filling my sail every day was really spectacular.   ERNIE: So Mike, how has the fellowship affected your thinking about science in general and your role in it?   MIKE: What I do has really been strengthened, like the workaday things related to my lab and malaria and how we want to make a big difference in the world. But it was just the freeing, the ability to be sitting there and not have the rat-a-tat-tat of the regular workday all around me, and all of the obligations you have as a regular faculty at Notre Dame. And then just sort of confidence that starts to develop. So you get a chance to be with your ideas, to share them with others and start to pull together people and have this sounding board situation, and you really start to think, “Hey, I’ve got some good ideas here that people are interested in, and maybe we can start implement some fresh ideas that would really help me do my job better.” But I think of it as, I’m a token, privileged, aging, white professor in the Midwest at an elite institution where you get the spotlight shined on you and say, “Oh great professor,” and you come to that realization that you could do a lot better. And that’s really what I feel. The fellowship is spilling into me being a better role model, not just for student

FOCUS In Sound #34: Lisa Hara Levin   Welcome to FOCUS In Sound, the podcast series from the FOCUS newsletter published by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund.  I’m your host, science writer Ernie Hood.   In this edition of FOCUS In Sound, we meet a veterinarian who has become one of the leading voices in the movement to reduce, refine, or replace the use of animals in research and product development testing, also known as the 3Rs. As we will hear, she recently teamed up with Burroughs Wellcome Fund president Dr. Lou Muglia to publish a highly influential paper called Alternative Thinking about Animals in Research.   Lisa Hara Levin is a graduate of Cornell University, received her veterinary degree from the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University, and completed her postdoctoral research training at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Her professional career has been spent in the animal protection and research environments, notably occupying positions as the Medical Director for New York City’s Animal Care Centers, and now as the Alternatives Director for Coridea, LLC, a premier biotechnology incubator based in New York.   Lisa Hara Levin, welcome to FOCUS In Sound!   LISA: Thanks, Ernie, I’m happy to be speaking with you.   ERNIE: Lisa, to get us started, tell us how you got interested in the cause of promoting alternatives to animal use in testing…   LISA: Oh that was a long time ago. I was a veterinary student working summers in a research lab at Johns Hopkins, and I was very fortunate to be mentored by a laboratory animal veterinarian having a great interest in animal welfare, so I started making my baby steps in the 3Rs, that’s the refinement, the reduction, the replacement of animals in research, and that’s a style that I carried with me through into my fellowship at Hopkins and later professional roles, where I was in the animal shelter setting, or I was doing research consultancy, and it’s served me very well. But your question did ask specifically about testing, and I want to make it clear that mentally, I place testing, research, and drug development all in the same what I call philosophical basket, so while maybe I started my career in research my field of vision has enlarged to include the other two areas.   ERNIE: Tell us how you and Dr. Muglia connected, and how did the paper come about?   LISA: I wanted to launch a project from a university, and I met him during that funding search. He thought the work I proposed was out of the box, and very happily for me, Burroughs Wellcome funded it. It did launch, set off from a different location, but the content remained the same. It was to have two roundtables with what I call the A-plus team from different groups having interest in the development, the regulatory approval, and the implementation of new approach methods. We also call them non-animal methods, or by the acronym NAMs in research, safety testing, and drug development. In terms of the paper, I’d been thinking a while about writing an article examining the NAMs and animal research question, and after the second roundtable was finished, I was scratching my head and said, you know, these conversations should have some place in the piece. So I spoke with Dr. Muglia, and he agreed to be my co-author.   ERNIE: Tell us a little bit more about the two roundtables that you mentioned…   LISA: I wanted to have the roundtables because to me there has been this needless argument between folks on one side who are endorsing animal use, and folks on another side, and it really is that polarizing at times—folks on the other side, who are in favor of NAMS. And in my view, I think this is entirely due to misunderstandings about each of their roles, in the past, the present, and what the predicted future may be for them in advancing science. So I invited members from the eight stakeholder groups that in my view are most closely associated with these areas, the development, again, the regulatory acceptance and the implementation of NAMs, and I wanted to seat them in one place and have some very relevant conversation. So they came, and who I mean by “they” are academics and industry who are working with NAMs, government regulators, government funders, venture capital, philanthropy, venture or otherwise, animal research advocacy, and animal protection. I won’t give you the names of those attending because that’s a confidentiality issue, but I can tell you and will tell you—there was a lot of magic that happened at these roundtables, and it was a beautiful thing to hear and to watch. I was really entirely my privilege to be part of those conversations. Everybody was so smart, so honest, so collegial.   ERNIE: What were your objectives for the roundtables?   LISA: If I look at several years back, and probably more than that, cause I’m an old lady, let’s say decades back, of observations about how stakeholders have problem-solved, they take these very siloed approaches. That’s not helpful, and my work recommends putting ideas and concerns out into the ether so that everyone has a chance to study that, and the roundtables let us do that. It was a nice beginning. We all went agreeably into a deep dive to explore the major pain points that each group had about NAMs, and we also started developing action items that we’ll use to create a very well-reasoned and evidence-based path towards integrating NAMs, whether as partial or full replacements. I want to comment about how brilliant these people were who came. One of, I’d really like to mention his name and he knows who he is if he’s listening to this, and everybody else does, but it was such genius, he said such a smart thing, and he said it more than once to remind us: “Let’s focus on best science, not on the question of using animals or using NAMs.” So it was a great kick start for roundtable purposes, and actually does reflect my efforts, which are focused on harnessing these intellectual giants to collaborations that are beneficial to them and to science and to healthcare and certainly animal welfare. And believe it or not, the environment, because animal husbandry and animal use does have a fair amount of pollution so to speak attached to it, and in fairness, in fairness, there’s a good amount of plastic waste associated with NAMs as well. But the folks I’m speaking with about that are working on it, and I think that’s going to come to a good end. So to get us going, I set four objectives for the roundtables. First was that we would identify support structures, optimal support structures for the development of NAMs, and what were the roadblocks that could prevent that? Second, how do figure out how to push forward these support structures and remove the obstacles? Third, we needed to estimate a realistic timeline, and wow, “timeline” surfaced as a very dirty word, but to estimate a timeline, a realistic one, for the regulatory approval and the implementation of NAMs, either as partial or full replacements. And last, we needed to think about developing a metric system to evaluate progress on what I call an approximated continuum, and I say approximated because it does not necessarily follow that the more knowledge you acquire will let you move forward. Sometimes, and I have embarrassingly experienced this in my life, I learn something more, and oh, well, I guess I was mistaken about that something, and now I need to backtrack. And I think other folks do this as well in their work, and need to rethink that something a bit before moving forward again.   ERNIE: One thing we haven’t mentioned, Lisa, is when did these meetings take place?   LISA: We had the first roundtable in the middle of March, 2022, and the second one was the beginning of June, 2022, and I am really grateful that everybody found time. These are folks with extraordinarily busy schedules, and to give their time and attention, there has to be a new descriptor for that, they were terrific.   ERNIE: Well Lisa, what would you say were the main takeaways from the roundtables?   LISA: Well, you need more time than the podcast to review all of them, but I will showcase the highlights for you. Both roundtables were historic meetings for seating all of the relevant stakeholders in one place, and also, for the level of engaged and respectful conversation. And that, in my opinion, was the first and most important outcome from these meetings, was that diplomacy works. Rather than these silly siloed efforts that I spoke about before toward problem solving, you really have a good way forward now. This benefits the stakeholders, it benefits science, it benefits healthcare outcomes, it benefits animals, and it benefits the environment. If I had to give you another takeaway, it’s that there is an interest, and I think a commitment from the stakeholder groups, to responsibly, and I underscore that responsibly, get to a place of best science with all that’s going to bring to us.   ERNIE: It sounds like it was a wonderful set of meetings and I’m sure it moved the field forward. Tell us more about the paper that you and Dr. Muglia recently published in the National Academy of Medicine Perspectives…   LISA: It’s a good time to be talking about questions, animal research, NAMs, there’s certainly been a lot of dialogue about animal research, because it’s existed since at least the fourth century BCE. On the other hand, NAMs are infants, and it’s important to know where they fit in now and how they might fit in in the future. So our article poses a question in the context of history and the future. The piece also calls for an entity that would focus full-time analysis on the policy issues and let’s say catalytic investments in NAMS.   ERNIE: Lisa, please fill our listeners in on some of the technical aspects of the conversation.      You’ve already talked about NAMs, but what are MPSs, HOOCs, PDTs, and PBTs?   LISA: We’re going to get to some of my favorite NAMs. Alright. MPS is the abbreviation for micr

FOCUS In Sound #33: Tammy Collins, Innovation in Regulatory Science Awards (IRSA) Program Welcome to FOCUS In Sound, the podcast series from the FOCUS newsletter published by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund.  I’m your host, science writer Ernie Hood. In this edition of FOCUS In Sound, we meet one of the newest members of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund family, Program Officer Dr. Tammy Collins, who joined the Fund in October 2022. Tammy leads the Fund’s efforts in interdisciplinary science, including the Career Awards at the Scientific Interface and the Innovation in Regulatory Science Awards, which we will focus on for this edition of Focus in Sound. Tammy spent the past decade at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences as its director of the NIEHS Office of Fellows’ Career Development. She received her B.S. in Chemistry from Appalachian State University and her Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Duke University. After a brief postdoc at Duke, she joined NIEHS in 2009, where she developed her passion for working in the scientific career development field. Tammy Collins, welcome to the Fund, and to FOCUS In Sound … TAMMY: Thanks, I’m glad to be here. ERNIE: After so many years in government service mentoring fellows in their career development, what led you to shift your own career development path to the philanthropic sector by joining the Fund? TAMMY: Well, I’m glad that you asked that. So actually, part of my previous role included mentoring fellows on how to apply for grants, including the K99-R00. So I was really excited when I learned about this opportunity at Burroughs Wellcome Fund, where I was still going to get the chance to mentor individuals through the grant process. Specifically, postdocs, with one of the other programs that I oversee, and then faculty. So I’ll be able to learn new skills in mentoring faculty with the Innovations in Regulatory Science program. And in terms of moving from government service to the philanthropic sector, I still see that I am working in the service sector and still providing a service, just in a different avenue. And I’m really excited about being able to have a broad impact in science as it relates to a wide variety of areas, both with the Career Awards at the Scientific Interface as well as the Innovations in Regulatory Science. So I’m excited about those aspects of my work at Burroughs Wellcome Fund. ERNIE: So you didn’t even have to relocate, did you? TAMMY: I didn’t, and actually NIEHS is less than four miles down the road from Burroughs Wellcome Fund, on the same road. So I’m still here in Research Triangle Park. ERNIE: Well Tammy, to get us started on our discussion about regulatory science, would you give us a definition of the field, and tell us why the Fund invests in the sector? TAMMY: Yeah. That’s a question I have gotten a lot of times. People asking, “What is regulatory science?” So regulatory science has actually been defined as the science of developing new tools, standards, and approaches to assess the safety, efficacy, quality, and performance of FDA-regulated products. And Burroughs Wellcome Fund recognizes that regulatory science is a very important field, and it’s often an underserved area of research in the biomedical enterprise. And oftentimes what’s seen is that in translating or moving scientific discoveries into actual interventions that are going to help patients or therapeutic interventions, the regulatory science aspect is often what results in a bottleneck. And so what we want to do is actually help to close the innovation gap in creating new evaluative tools for new emerging technologies, and to do that in a wide variety of areas. We call out some of them in the RFP, but some of the things we’re looking at are specifically in gene therapy, artificial intelligence and machine learning, digital health, model-informed product development, and new technologies that might help to reduce animal testing. So these are just calling out a few areas, but really the field is wide open in terms of any individual that’s going to be helping to advance the field of regulatory science. ERNIE: Let’s look at the Innovation in Regulatory Science Awards, or IRSA.  The awards program is going into its tenth year in 2023. Would you give us a brief overview of the IRSA program? TAMMY: The IRSA program, or the Innovation in Regulatory Science Awards, it supports faculty over a period of five years, and the total award amount is for $500,000. And one of the key things is that we want to support researchers who are developing innovative solutions to solve regulatory questions. And another thing that’s key is we want these solutions to actually be implementable. So when individuals are applying for the IRSA program, we would like for them to address how they expect their solutions are going to expedite the regulatory decision-making process. ERNIE: What types of researchers has it attracted in its existence? TAMMY: IRSA has attracted a wide variety of researchers from many different fields and backgrounds. When I was looking back on this, I see we’ve supported toxicologists, biostatisticians, public health scientists, even organic polymer chemists and engineers. And we really anticipate that interdisciplinary work that’s being conducted at the interface of even fields such as physics, computer science, and engineering are going to go a long way towards helping to develop those new tools and approaches that are going to be aiding regulatory decisions. And we’re actually now in the process of systematically evaluating the fields of study of all of our past awardees over the past ten years, which is how long the program has been in existence, and we aim to include this in a publication as part of the overall program evaluation. ERNIE: So what kind of impact do you think the IRSA program has had on the regulatory science field? TAMMY: That’s a great question, and that is actually precisely one of the questions I had when I came here to Burroughs Wellcome Fund, and I’m actually working now with a team to set out on a project that I just alluded to before where we’re evaluating IRSA ten years later. And one of the things we want to look at are what actual new tools and methods were created with IRSA support. We’re curious about what are some of the FDA-focused areas of regulatory science that individuals have been addressing. We would like to see also if they were addressing an aspect of clinical trial development — what phase of the clinical trials process? And can we actually point to specific cases where regulatory decisions are expedited, and if so, by how much? So these are the types of questions that we want to be answering in this in-depth analysis that we’re going to be conducting over the coming year. We also have a lot of questions about to what extent the Burroughs Wellcome Fund IRSA program has helped to foster interdisciplinary collaborations and helped build a network of scientists, because that was one of the goals at the outset. Another goal at the outset was to move the needle on scientists choosing regulatory science as an actual career path. So these are some of the types of things that we are going to be looking at when we evaluate its impact. ERNIE: So why would it be advantageous for a scientist to apply for this award? TAMMY: Well beyond the most obvious reason for obtaining $500,000 over five years, really at Burroughs Wellcome Fund we seek to foster a network of our awardees, and not just IRSA awardees, but a network of awardees across all of the different programs. Each year we have a new awardee networking meeting, and we think that’s really important for helping to build connections and leading to additional collaborations and research that we have seen come out of that over the years. Also, Burroughs Wellcome Fund funding is flexible, as the funding is coming from the philanthropic sector. So I think those are some of the additional advantages of applying and receiving an IRSA award. ERNIE: So Tammy, what should an interested researcher do to start the application process, and how can potential applicants find out about all of the details? TAMMY: So I would suggest to review bwfund.org, our website, and look at the program on Regulatory Science, and we give lots of details. You can find our request for proposals there, as well as all of the deadline information. We have a section on Frequently Asked Questions, and I highly encourage individuals to reach out to myself as well, at tcollins@bwfund.org if you have questions about what your project is and whether it fits in line with the scope of the IRSA program. So really, that’s what we’re here for, so feel free to reach out anytime with any questions. ERNIE: That’s great to hear, thank you. Well Tammy, I know we want to point out at this point that interested folks should also be sure to watch the video we’ve posted accompanying this podcast, where you engage with three current IRSA awardees to get an in-depth look at their experiences with the program… TAMMY: Yeah, I know, I’m really excited about the opportunity that we had to engage with some of our past IRSA awardees, and learn more about *** [what] the work that they’ve done and where it has taken them and how this has advanced their career, so please make sure to check that out, because it was a great conversation. ERNIE: Well Tammy, this has been a great conversation too! Thank you so much for joining us on FOCUS In Sound. TAMMY: Thanks for having me. It was really great speaking with you today. ERNIE: We hope you’ve enjoyed the program, and will join us again next time. This is Ernie Hood. Thanks for listening!

FOCUS In Sound #32: Alfred Mays, Dr. Dudley Flood, Dr. Deanna Townsend-Smith Welcome to FOCUS In Sound, the podcast series from the FOCUS newsletter published by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund.  I’m your host, science writer Ernie Hood. In this edition of FOCUS In Sound, we meet a civil rights and education pioneer, Dr. Dudley Flood, and learn about the center named in his honor that is working to advance educational opportunities in North Carolina. To get us started, we will first hear from Burroughs Wellcome Fund Chief Diversity Officer and Strategist, Alfred Mays. Alfred also serves as a Senior Program Officer for the Fund and oversees a variety of significant programs addressing education and diversity. He is going to provide us with some background information about the Dudley Flood Center for Educational Equity and Opportunity, which is within the Public School Forum of North Carolina. Alfred, take it away… ALFRED: Thanks, Ernie. I am actually a board member of the Public School Forum. In 2015, the Forum kicked off its sixteenth biennial study group, a yearlong process that involved the work of three committees focused on topics related to expanding educational opportunity in North Carolina: racial equity, low-performing schools, and trauma and resiliency in learning. I had the honor of serving as a co-chair of the racial equity committee. In 2016, Study Group XVI, as it was known, released its final report called “Expanding Educational Opportunity in North Carolina.” It was the product of the collective efforts of more than 175 committee members, and included a detailed Action Plan and Recommendations. The report set the course for the Public School Forum and its partners to continue addressing educational opportunity in North Carolina in the years ahead. One of the important developments was the establishment of the annual Color of Education event, which every year brings together the many stakeholders to address the ongoing issues. Now fast forward to 2019. At the Color of Education event, we announced a catalytic grant of $150,000 from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund to stand up the Dudley Flood Center for Educational Equity and Opportunity. The Conway Family Foundation joined Burroughs Wellcome Fund in making a $30,000 gift to support establishment of the center. Dr. Flood was brought on stage for the announcement that we were naming the new center in his honor. It was designed to be a surprise for him, and he was truly delighted. Since then, the Flood Center has become fully staffed, including Senior Director Dr. Deanna Townsend-Smith, from whom we will hear shortly. They are working on a variety of programs, including the Color of Education event, which is coming up for 2022 on Saturday, October 22nd. The theme for this year is “A Walk Through History: How the Past Informs the Present.” The hybrid event will feature keynote speaker Jelani Cobb. To further the Center’s work over the next year, it’s a pleasure to share with you that the Burroughs Wellcome Fund has just made an additional $300,000 grant award to the Center.  The Conway Family Foundation has and continues to support fellowships and Color of Education within the Flood Center.  Additionally, the Flood Center has received key additional support from Amgen, Kellogg, MDC, Anonymous Trust, Goodnight Foundation, along with additional funding specifically for Color of Education from Corning, Lenovo, the North Carolina Department of Natural Resources, and EPIC. That is where we stand today, and now let’s enjoy hearing from Dr. Flood and Dr. Townsend-Smith. To introduce Dr. Flood, I’m going to pass the microphone back to Ernie… ERNIE: Thanks, Alfred, for that terrific summary of how we got to where we find ourselves today. That history will provide a great context for our conversations with Dr. Flood and Dr. Townsend-Smith. Dr. Dudley Flood was born in 1932 in Winton, North Carolina, a tiny town in Hertford County in the northeastern part of the state. He received his bachelor’s degree from North Carolina Central University in 1954, his master’s degree from East Carolina University in 1970, and his doctorate from Duke University in 1980. He has had a long and distinguished career as a teacher and school principal – a lifelong educator. He worked for many years at the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he and his Department of Public Instruction colleague, the late Dr. Gene Causby, traveled the state to unite communities that were divided, sometimes bitterly, over integrating public schools. They are largely credited today with pioneering the process of integration in North Carolina public schools. In 2020, Dr. Flood’s achievements were recognized as he was awarded the Friday Medal from the College of Education at North Carolina State University. In 2021, he received the prestigious North Carolina Award, the state’s highest civilian honor, and most recently, the NC Justice Center Lifetime Champions of Justice Award. Dr. Flood, thank you so much for joining us on Focus in Sound… FLOOD: It’s my pleasure. ERNIE: I mentioned that you are a lifelong educator – teaching runs in your family, doesn’t it? FLOOD: It does. I’m from a family of nine, six of whom were teachers, including myself. Of course, being the eighth child in that family, and having observed the others, I didn’t know there was an alternative. I just thought that was why you were put on earth, was to teach. Once having gotten into the field, I got hooked on it, and I teach now because I can’t help it. I really can’t help it. I have no choice but to teach. If I were to have my life start all over again, I would make the same decision. I do believe teaching is the best way in which I could render service. So I made that choice, and I have no regret about it. ERNIE: That’s wonderful, thank you. You were brought up well before the height of the civil rights era…what was your schooling like in your early days? FLOOD: My high school days were in the little town of Winton, population 698, give or take. It was a tri-racial town. And my background is that I was born into what is a tri-racial family, although at that time it was not particularly highlighted. My father was the son of a Native American woman. His father, whom he never knew, was a White man, and my mother was a Black woman. So I didn’t have anybody to hate, so I didn’t get into the cadre of, we’ve got to hate this race or that race or the other race. And that was never a discussion in my household. And I was born right on the edge of the Depression, coming out of it, but I don’t think we had come out of it at all. And the one thing I remember the most about having been brought up in that time was, strangely enough, I never heard any reference made in our house about our [status], I never heard we didn’t have this or we didn’t have that, I could only observe that some people appeared to have things I didn’t. But I always thought I had some things they didn’t, as well, and so I never got in the discussion of, poor me. It was always the discussion that you are born to serve. You have to render service. And any conversation that I brought up that would lean toward needing more, I would be told very quickly, you need to take what you have and dispense it among those people that don’t have it. And so obviously the avenue through which to do that was teaching. Not necessarily being a teacher with the job to do so, but whatever you were able to share that you might have had more of than anybody else. And that included experience. I became hooked on reading. As I sit in the subway, I read the stuff up overhead at the top, I just can’t, I have no choice but to read. So I was aware of a few things that were not in my general experience. So in the high school which I attended, which was a very old high school, preceding the state having taken it over, but its ethos was that of learning. We were an average athletic team, we were an average anything other than learning. So in that setting, I never thought beyond making a contribution. And I didn’t have any way that I thought I could make a contribution except through sharing with people whatever had been my exposure, experience, knowledge, accumulation of knowledge through reading…And I liked to be around old folk, I would always sit around the older people and listen to them wax philosophical. Because they had some genuine, not all were particularly literate necessarily, but they had some genuine perspective on life that I found to be very functional, very useful. In that little town, as I mentioned, our ethos was, you were white or you were colored. These other dimensions hadn’t even entered the discussion in an informative way. I always wondered, because the intermingling of the youth. I lived right on the riverbank, and everybody who wanted to swim, we had no pool, so they came by my house because the only passage to the riverbank was by my house. And I’d take them to the river without asking, what is your race, what is your creed, or any of that. But it’s my river, this is my river. That was the ethos. You knew whose river that was. My brother was like, and I mean that superficially, because I understood, they knew it wasn’t my river, but they also knew that it was tantamount to coming in my yard, as it were, to play. And so this notion of separation of races never dawned on me, except in school and church. Those were the only two places I ever saw that manifest itself. And it was puzzling. I didn’t understand then and I don’t understand now why the body which we thought would be most segregated, which was church, was the most segregated institution I was aware of. It still is, by the way. And we were adamant churchgoers. Not necessarily by our own proclivity, but our mother was a devout churchgoer, and after a while I got used to it and began to like it. So much so that I’m still a Sunday school teacher right now. But then in growing up outside of

  FOCUS In Sound #31: Florence Bourgeois    Welcome to FOCUS In Sound, the podcast series from the FOCUS newsletter published by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund.  I’m your host, science writer Ernie Hood.   In this edition of FOCUS In Sound, we meet a Burroughs Wellcome Fund grantee who is researching issues related to the inclusion of children and adolescents in clinical trials. She has also recently published an important international study of pediatric COVID-19 patients.   Dr. Florence Bourgeois is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and a faculty member in the Division of Emergency Medicine and the Computational Health Informatics Program, or CHIP, at Boston Children’s Hospital. She is a graduate of Yale University and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. She was an NRSA research fellow and earned her Master in Public Health degree from the Harvard School of Public Health.   In 2017, Florence received an Innovation in Regulatory Science grant from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund titled “Pediatric regulatory policy: advancing timely and rigorous evaluation of medicines for children.” The award was for up to $500,000 over five years. She has published several studies in the regulatory policy area, and this year she and her colleagues put out their work using electronic health records to track and analyze international trends in hospitalizations for children and youth with COVID-19.   Florence Bourgeois, welcome to Focus in Sound…   Thank you, thank you for having me. I’m delighted to be able to speak with you today.   Would you sketch the broad outlines of the pediatric COVID-19 study for us?   Absolutely. This study was a product of a large consortium that came together fairly rapidly at the beginning of the pandemic, so last March and April, leveraging existing infrastructure to be able to aggregate electronic health records across institutions. And not just institutions within the U.S., but internationally. And this presented a terrific platform to be able to look at pediatric patients in particular, since COVID-19 fortunately has had much lower morbidity and mortality in children. But this also means that the patient population that is accessible to us for study is much smaller. So we were able to take an international perspective to characterize the clinical presentation of COVID-19 across hospitals in a number of countries, and also demonstrate this type of large-scale, informatics approach to aggregating data in a rapid fashion, which is particularly important during the evolution of a pandemic like COVID-19.   What conclusions did you reach?   So we were able to find certain clinical features that were specific to patients with COVID-19, in terms of complications, as well as certain laboratory abnormalities, and we were also able to find that the data quality that we were able to produce using this approach was quite robust. So we are continuing additional studies now leveraging the same resource to dig into other aspects of COVID-19 specifically for kids.   How did the study advance our understanding of epidemiological and clinical features associated with COVID-19 in children and youth?   One of the findings was that there were abnormalities in coagulation in children. So that is a specific feature that has also been corroborated in other studies. So that would be one specific result. And another one is the complications we saw around cardiac rhythms, disturbances in cardiac rhythms, and also around seizure activity, as an example. So identifying those specific clinical features is another data point to guide further research.   During the pandemic, many of the skeptics have been spreading the misinformation that COVID did not affect young people and children. Although rates and severity of infections have been lower, they are far from immune, aren’t they?   That’s right. And in addition, not only can kids certainly be infected with SARS-CoV-2, so COVID-19, but they also have very specific and unique phenotypes. So for example, multi-system inflammatory syndrome is a phenotype or a disease presentation that we’ve uncovered that is very specific to children and not seen in adults. So understanding those disease presentations and being able to study them is certainly important. And beyond that, we’re concerned not just about kids being infected with COVID-19, but also their role in transmission and as vectors in the population and in the communities. So that’s another important factor to keep in mind, even if fewer kids are actually affected.   So Florence, what are the wider implications of your findings?   From this specific study, I think that one major takeaway is not even the actual clinical results, but really the methods themselves; this informatics approach to creating a network across institutions, across health care systems, and countries even, in order to characterize COVID-19. This could be extended beyond just our research question that we were addressing around COVID-19 to other conditions and diseases. So it really represents a platform of sorts on which we can build future investigations.   Have you been able to use these methods to address vaccination rates?   That’s a great question. That is not something we’ve tackled, and we’re still understanding exactly how we might be able to incorporate vaccination rates, but certainly it’s critical that we understand the importance of vaccination in kids, since there has been quite a delay in terms of vaccinating kids versus adults. So it’s only since March 10 that the FDA approved vaccination for kids down to 12 years of age, so there is a large portion of our children in the U.S. right now who are obviously unvaccinated.   You also assessed laboratory results as part of the EHR work, as you mentioned. What kinds of trends did you see in that data?   The biggest one was around coagulopathies. Those are the laboratory measures we use to measure something like blood clots. And we found abnormalities in those in particular. And again, this has been seen in other reports as well. So it’s a nice confirmation of other studies and provides a basis for future investigation to understand the pathophysiology behind those abnormalities.   Will the methodologies your group used in this study serve as a model for future research efforts?   Part of the underlying informatics infrastructure was already in place, which is what allowed the team to very rapidly repurpose it towards COVID-19. In April already, they had tens of thousands of hospital records already on patients across a network of institutions, which is quite remarkable. So the innovation wasn’t so much maybe in the basic features of the infrastructure, but certainly in the rapid repurposing and then further development specific to COVID-19.   Did the hospitalization rates for children and youth in the 6 countries mirror population-level infection rates?   That is a terrific question, and actually one of the findings that we highlight in our paper is that indeed, with this network we were able to mirror some of the national or population-level disease rates. So what this indicates for us is that using these computational methods we can do some level of surveillance that can in fact complement other types of surveillance that are done, for example through the CDC or other government agencies. So this can be another approach or another tool to monitor population-level infection rates.   What about clinical treatments? Were the approaches used in the pediatric population similar to those in the adults?   They were not, which wasn’t actually a surprise to me. Beginning in the first weeks and months of the pandemic, there was a lot of exploratory use of a number of therapeutics that we saw in adults. And parallel to that, there were a number of therapeutics such as remdesivir that were entering clinical trials and being developed for use in adults. For kids, all of the repurposing of existing drugs and exploratory use would be very much off-label. And so as clinicians we tend to be more hesitant to use drugs in ways that have not been established in terms of safety or efficacy already in adults. So it wasn’t surprising to me that there wasn’t widespread use of a number of those types of exploratory therapeutic approaches. What I think was more remarkable, though, is that there were very few children who for example received remdesivir, which is a drug that was quite promising, or there was a lot of hope that this would be an effective treatment early on. And the reason that kids were not receiving remdesivir was primarily due to the fact that they were not eligible for enrollment in clinical trials. So, many adults had access to remdesivir through clinical trials, but for children, they needed special types of permission in order to be eligible to receive remdesivir.   Florence, that brings us to your long-term work in regulatory issues regarding pediatric populations. I know that was the topic for which you received the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Innovation in Regulatory Science Award in 2017. How has that funding impacted your research?   The Burroughs Wellcome Fund award was really instrumental in allowing me to establish this discipline, or pediatric regulatory science specifically. And it’s allowed me to really dive into this and create a community in empiric research studies around this topic. At Boston Children’s Hospital, I established the Pediatric Therapeutics and Regulatory Science Initiative as a focal point to create a community and to spur research around this specific topic, and then I subsequently also took on a role as co-director of the Harvard/MIT Center for Regulatory Science, where I also work on a focused group of pediatric studies, again around regulatory science.   So are you seeing any movement toward more inclusion of children and young people in clinical trials by pharma?   Absolutely, and I think in large part this is due to two legislat

This edition of FOCUS In Sound is a family affair, as we connect with two members of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, gentlemen who are primary practitioners of the Fund’s profound commitment to supporting science education. I will mercilessly pick their brains to gather their thoughts about the Fund’s activities and the larger importance of science education in our society. Alfred Mays is a senior program officer at the Fund, and serves as the Director and Chief Strategist for Diversity and STEM Education. He began his tenure at the Fund in 2015, and is responsible for strategic program development and diversity in science. He directs a portfolio of competitive and strategic grants and serves on a number of nonprofit educational and civic boards. And Dr. Samuel Houston, Jr., is President and Chief Executive Officer of the North Carolina Science, Mathematics, and Technology Education Center, better known as the SMT Center. He has held that position since 2003. The Center is housed at the Burroughs Wellcome Fund facility in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, and is largely supported by the Fund. It is dedicated to the advancement of science, mathematics, and technology in the schools of North Carolina and around the nation. Sam has had a long and distinguished career in science education. Transcription of “Science Education in North Carolina and Beyond” 00;00;02;10 – 00;00;31;04 Ernie Hood Welcome to Focus In Sound, the podcast series from the Focus newsletter published by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. I’m your host, science writer Ernie Hood. This edition of Focus In Sound is a Family Affair. As we connect with two of the most prominent members of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund family. Gentlemen who are primary practitioners of the Fund’s profound commitment to supporting science education. 00;00;31;18 – 00;01;02;06 Ernie Hood I will mercilessly pick their brains to gather their thoughts about the Fund’s activities and the larger importance of science education in our society. Alfred Mays is a senior program officer at the Fund and serves as the director and chief strategist for diversity and STEM Education. He began his tenure at the Fund in 2015 and is responsible for strategic program, development and diversity in science. 00;01;02;22 – 00;01;15;04 Ernie Hood He directs a portfolio of competitive and strategic grants and serves on a number of nonprofit, educational and civic boards. Alfred, thanks for joining us on Focus In Sound. 00;01;15;16 – 00;01;16;04 Alfred Mays Thank you, Ernie. 00;01;17;10 – 00;01;51;06 Ernie Hood Dr. Samuel Houston JR is president and chief executive officer of the North Carolina Science, Mathematics and Technology Education Center. Better known as the S.A. Center. He has held that position since 2003. The center is housed at the Burroughs Wellcome Fund facility in research Triangle Park, North Carolina, and is largely supported by the fund. It is dedicated to the advancement of science, mathematics and technology in the schools of North Carolina and around the nation. 00;01;51;22 – 00;02;03;13 Ernie Hood Sam has had a long and distinguished career in science education beyond his many awards. He now has an award named after him. Sam, welcome to Focus In Sound. 00;02;04;03 – 00;02;07;07 Samuel Houston, Jr It’s always a privilege to work with. 00;02;07;07 – 00;02;14;29 Ernie Hood Alfred, let me start with you. Would you give us a broad overview of the Fund’s science education programs? 00;02;15;17 – 00;02;46;05 Alfred Mays So, Ernie, I’ll begin by perhaps going down two separate paths. Within science education, we have formal competitive grants, and we also have strategic and ad hoc initiatives. And down the first part of our competitive awards, we have three key awards that I’d like to note. One would be our student stem enrichment program, and that’s our long standing out-of-school time afterschool support programing for nonprofit organizations across the state of North Carolina to provide student STEM enrichment. 00;02;46;10 – 00;03;11;13 Alfred Mays We refer to it as CPE. The second of the three competitive awards would be our Academy Award, our career award for science, mathematics and teaching. And we’re actually going to update that award to reflect the reference to STEM. So we’ll become the career award for STEM teachers, and we’ve been running that award for quite some time now and have about 30 awards have been made in total, five awards every other year. 00;03;12;13 – 00;03;39;12 Alfred Mays The third award would be our PRISM Award, and that’s our promoting innovation in science and math. And that particular award is dedicated to providing teachers with equipment, supplies and materials related to STEM instruction. And there’s also a stipend available for professional development for the teachers as it relates to the equipment, materials and supplies. So those are three key awards within the competitive space, within the strategic and Ad-hoc space. 00;03;39;18 – 00;04;16;07 Alfred Mays We have academy and a broad number of awards. Some are pretty significant and our proof of concepts or pilots. Some are building capacity. Some are actually starting new initiatives, being innovative and creative around new initiatives, and some are just based on partnerships and leveraging existing resources or investments that we’ve made in STEM across the state. And some are in partnership with organizations such as You’ll hear more from Sam in working with the Asante Center and how they serve as an aggregator and a central resource for STEM programing or initiatives. 00;04;16;13 – 00;04;37;29 Alfred Mays And then there’s a broad range of other organizations we work with across K-12. Undergrad, grad, post-doc, early career, which is truly across K 20 and beyond. So those are the primary areas within science that we do branch out beyond that depend on the initiatives. And we do have certain priorities that we might introduce depending on strategic planning and remapping. 00;04;38;29 – 00;04;45;21 Ernie Hood Well, thank you for that summary. What would you say has been the impact of the fund’s programs through the years? 00;04;46;05 – 00;05;12;09 Alfred Mays I think the biggest impact has been where we’ve been able to sustain efforts that have been successful and have had broad impact, particularly with particular populations, underserved underrepresented areas that we’ve targeted in our formal programing, but also in terms of being creative and innovative, as I mentioned prior, and to the extent that we might adopt, implement and perhaps look for opportunities of scale of those successful models. 00;05;12;23 – 00;05;18;20 Ernie Hood Do you think science education in North Carolina is improving and expanding? 00;05;19;05 – 00;05;46;13 Alfred Mays I think it is improving and it is expanding. I think the level of access and opportunity is growing through the broader outreach and engagement. We have an inventory of investments that have been made and determining how we could actually go back into those investments and determine how we might redistribute or provide greater access to those resources. Certainly provides opportunities for expanding in Alford. 00;05;46;13 – 00;05;50;27 Ernie Hood How would you say the funds programs have affected the situation? 00;05;51;22 – 00;06;18;18 Alfred Mays So we know that there are high resource organizations and we know there are low resource organizations. We know that many organizations do not have the capacity to stand up and implement and actually evaluate or assess. So I know the funding has had a tremendous impact in being able to provide resources to organizations that have low capacity. And we’re actually piloting and experimenting with different designs that might leverage our prior investments on a more formal models. 00;06;18;24 – 00;06;50;29 Alfred Mays I would say also that partnerships and collaboration are key. So for organizations that we not only invest in, but which organizations are actually willing to make investments along with the Burroughs Wellcome Fund and joint opportunities has been key. So I think Burroughs Wellcome does a great job of that. We have significant formal networks in place. We have lesser formal networks in place where we seek to bring those communities into the more formal structures whereby we can leverage and balance where there might be strengths in one area. 00;06;50;29 – 00;07;02;29 Alfred Mays We can leverage that and where there may be weaknesses in one area, we might be able to create opportunities for other organizations to provide assistance and support and guidance to some of our lower resource organizations. 00;07;03;15 – 00;07;14;05 Ernie Hood Alfred, thank you for that great information. Sam, your turn. Tell us a bit about the city centers, programs and activities related to science education. 00;07;14;21 – 00;07;59;07 Samuel Houston, Jr Well, it was Ernie was back in 2002, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund started looking carefully at what was happening in science and mathematics, originally in North Carolina, and found that a lot of things were happening. But there didn’t seem to be a point of synergy. So the initial vision for creating the center was to play that role, to possibly be a convener, one that connected dots, created collaboration and even sometimes could even be a bit disruptive in that our mission in a simple fashion is to give young people the skills and knowledge that they need to function in a very technical environment and to become leaders in a very ever changing, rapidly changing future. 00;08;00;07 – 00;08;22;25 Samuel Houston, Jr We are a, what should I say, an outgrowth of the OR as well from fund and somewhat an outreach on. We are not into as much of the grantmaking side is as Alfred is. We do make grants but they’re usually grants that help us carry out a selection of some time. We work in in leadership. We work with. 00;08;22;25 – 00;08;54;07 Samuel Houston, Jr The North Carolin

In this edition of FOCUS In Sound, we meet Dr. Laura Ensign who is making important strides in nanomedicine for drug delivery, in a variety of therapeutic areas.  Her wide-ranging interests and research pursuits focuses on the characterization of biological barriers in health and disease in order to design more effective formulations for prophylactic and therapeutic drug delivery. Transcription of “Interview with Dr. Laura Ensign” 00;00;02;25 – 00;00;41;06 Ernie Hood Welcome to Focus In Sound, the podcast series from the Focus newsletter published by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. I’m your host, science writer Ernie Hood. In this edition of Focus In Sound, we meet a remarkably accomplished young researcher who is making important strides in nanomedicine for drug delivery in a variety of therapeutic areas. Dr. Laura Ensign is the vice chair for Research and the Marcela e Wall Professor of Ophthalmology at the Wilmer Eye Institute Nanomedicine Division, which is part of Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore. 00;00;41;26 – 00;01;16;26 Ernie Hood She is an associate professor in Ophthalmology, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Biomedical engineering, Pharmacology and Molecular Sciences, Gynecology and Obstetrics, Infectious Diseases and Oncology. That long list of appointments reflects her wide ranging interests and research pursuits, which focus on characterization of biological barriers in health and disease in order to design more effective formulations for prophylactic and therapeutic drug delivery. 00;01;17;22 – 00;01;41;28 Ernie Hood She received funding from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund in 2015 for her project, titled The Role of Vaginal Progesterone Delivery in Cervical Remodeling and Preterm Birth, which was part of the fund’s program to encourage preterm birth research and is now called the Next Gen Pregnancy Initiative. Laura Ensign, welcome to Focus In Sound. 00;01;42;17 – 00;01;44;16 Laura Ensign Thank you. It’s fun to be here. 00;01;45;12 – 00;02;02;13 Ernie Hood Laura, I’d like to concentrate first on your work on preterm birth and then will widen out to include much of your other research. Tell us about your recent study of a vaginally delivered nano medicine method for preventing preterm birth. 00;02;03;11 – 00;02;26;13 Laura Ensign So one of the major issues with preterm birth is that there are not many therapeutic options. So we don’t have good ways of preventing preterm birth using drug products. And there’s really only one approved product on the market. And even that product recently had a failed confirmatory clinical trials. And it’s quite possible that that drug will even get removed from the market. 00;02;26;25 – 00;02;48;25 Laura Ensign And so one of the things that we actually sought out to do here was not just to improve drug delivery. So often the research idea we’re maybe looking at better targeting or making drugs more effective, reducing side effects. But in this case, it’s both that. But then also there’s just not a lot of options to begin with. And so we started with progesterone. 00;02;48;25 – 00;03;13;03 Laura Ensign And because that’s something that has been shown to work, it’s progesterone is kind of the pregnancy hormone. And so we were looking at ways to better deliver progesterone vaginally, which has shown in some clinical trials to have some positive effects on preterm birth prevention. But we figured in that case we could do a more targeted, more effective drug delivery to the uterus and the upper tracts. 00;03;13;03 – 00;03;38;06 Laura Ensign And so but the interesting thing that we found in the animal model that we were working with, where we were really focused on inflammations inflammation as a cause of preterm birth, we found that the progesterone alone actually wasn’t working very well. It wasn’t very therapeutically effective. And so what we ended up having to do then was actually more of a drug discovery kind of biology type project where we were then using other molecules. 00;03;38;06 – 00;03;59;29 Laura Ensign So the molecule in particular is it’s called an attack inhibitor. Basically what it does is it changes gene expression, right? And so we ended up figuring out that if you use that drug in combination with the progesterone, then you actually see prevention of the preterm birth. But then the other thing that was interesting about it is that it was really the vaginal drug delivery. 00;03;59;29 – 00;04;34;21 Laura Ensign So the targeted delivery with the nanomedicine system that was more effective, whereas if you dosed by injection or something systemic, then it had no effect still. The other thing that was that was interesting about the work, though, is that in the context of inflammation, you’re also concerned about the developing fetus, particularly neurological development. And so if you’re prolonging then gestation in a setting where you have inflammation, you also want to make sure that your drug treatment is also addressing the inflammation and making sure that neurological development is occurring normally. 00;04;35;02 – 00;04;59;03 Laura Ensign And so that was something that was particularly exciting, is that in the mouse model, the pups that were born with the neurological and neuro motor characterizations, they they appeared to behave and develop. Neuro typically are normally compared to animals that had no inflammation and no drug treatment. And so that was something that was particularly exciting about this as a preliminary observation. 00;04;59;27 – 00;05;12;14 Ernie Hood Well, that certainly sounds like a very exciting result. Do you anticipate moving this approach into human studies? If so, when? And will you conduct that phase of the research? 00;05;12;28 – 00;05;41;26 Laura Ensign Yeah. So actually, one of the things that we’re looking to do now, now that we’ve looked at kind of the role of gene expression and modifying gene expression, this is an area called epigenetics. And so that’s actually something that’s coincidentally become very a very hot topic even in clinical studies. So looking at epigenetics and epigenetic markers and and women and patient samples, and that’s something that Burroughs Wellcome is very interested in at this stage as well. 00;05;42;06 – 00;06;01;02 Laura Ensign The idea then is that, you know, maybe it’s not your genetics, not your DNA, it’s it’s how your DNA is being free. And so can you change things about that if there are things turned on that need to be turned back off, you know, and Vice versa. And so one of the things that we’re actually trying to do now is even kind of grow the drug screening. 00;06;01;02 – 00;06;23;26 Laura Ensign So use the preclinical animal models and and and do drug screening as a tool then to identify potentially more therapeutic options and then also ones that may be safer for use in pregnant women in pregnancy because that’s, of course, is a major concern. Whenever you’re talking about treating a pregnant woman, you’re worried about safety for both the mother and the fetus. 00;06;24;09 – 00;06;50;13 Laura Ensign And so we’re trying to kind of build a pipeline. And we have these research tools now we can build this pipeline and then determine, you know, best candidates that might be feasible to move into clinical studies. But then as far as clinical translation, the thing that’s perhaps exciting about the Nanomedicine approach and the formulation approach is that this is actually a it’s a very similar approach to what was what was. 00;06;50;13 – 00;07;16;16 Laura Ensign We also spun out into a company a number of years ago. I’m sorry. Center We started a company that’s called Cullin Pharmaceuticals, probably now has two approved products, coincidentally eyedrops that use very similar formulation approaches. And so should we end up identifying a drug candidate? Yet the potential for moving into clinical studies and actually doing the translational stuff is is it’s much it’s actually realistic. 00;07;16;24 – 00;07;24;02 Laura Ensign So we’re not talking about nanotechnology as science fiction. You know, there’s already approved products that are based on these kinds of formulation approaches. 00;07;25;00 – 00;07;35;21 Ernie Hood Laura, you are also using Nanomedicine to advance drug delivery in ophthalmic settings. Mm hmm. Also, about some of the work you’ve been doing in that area here. 00;07;35;24 – 00;08;05;00 Laura Ensign I often get questions about that. So I like working on the eye and being in the summer institute and then also having an appointment and gynecology and obstetrics and working on women’s health. What’s the crossover? Right? Like, what’s the similarity? And so it’s really the underlying similarity is just we’re talking about mucosal surfaces and so mucosal surfaces being, you know, any of the external epithelial surfaces, there’s several, including the airways and the gut. 00;08;05;00 – 00;08;27;16 Laura Ensign And so then the reproductive tract in the eye. And so the idea then is that these formulation approaches, if you’re if you’re able to increase, you know, kind of drug absorption and delivery through mucosal barriers and into epithelial tissues, then there’s actually a lot of similarity and what can be beneficial for directly for the eye as for the reproductive tract and the formulation approaches. 00;08;27;17 – 00;08;56;29 Laura Ensign And some of the cases are actually quite similar. So we do work on a number of drop formulations as well. So for various ocular indications, we’ve done work and published in surgery for glaucoma and for age related macular degeneration and all sorts of eye diseases, other kinds of corneal diseases, neovascularization, all these kinds of things. So basically any drug that you would want to increase, the amount that gets into the eye, it’s a it’s something that we work on. 00;08;57;12 – 00;09;26;14 Laura Ensign And so in various different kinds of formulation approaches. But then interestingly, the underlying approach and the e

In this edition of FOCUS In Sound, we are honored to welcome to our microphones the winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Dr. Robert Lefkowitz of Duke University. Dr. Lefkowitz is James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Medicine, Professor of Biochemistry, Professor of Pathology, Professor of Chemistry, and Member of the Duke Cancer Institute. He has been at Duke since 1973. He and his team pioneered understanding of receptors, particularly G-protein coupled receptors, or GPCRs. He has been a member of the board of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund since 2019. Most recently, he just published his memoir, titled “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Stockholm: The Adrenaline-Fueled Adventures of an Accidental Scientist.” Transcription of “Interview with Dr. Robert Lefkowitz” 00;00;02;17 – 00;00;31;15 Ernie Hood Welcome to Focus In Sound, the podcast series from the Focus newsletter published by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. I’m your host, science writer Ernie Hood. In this edition of Focus In Sound, we are honored to welcome to our microphones the winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Dr. Robert Lefkowitz of Duke University. Dr. Lefkowitz is James B, Duke Distinguished Professor of Medicine. 00;00;31;25 – 00;01;06;24 Ernie Hood Professor of Biochemistry. Professor of Pathology. Professor of Chemistry. And a member of the Duke Cancer Institute. He has been at Duke since 1973. He and his team pioneered understanding of receptors, particularly g protein coupled receptors, or GPCRS. He has been a member of the board of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund since 2019. Most recently, he just published his memoir titled A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Stockholm. 00;01;07;07 – 00;01;14;23 Ernie Hood The adrenaline Fueled Adventures of an Accidental Scientist. Bob Lefkowitz, welcome to Focus In Sound. 00;01;15;08 – 00;01;18;03 Robert Lefkowitz Thank you very much, Ernie. It’s a pleasure to be with you today. 00;01;18;19 – 00;01;37;23 Ernie Hood Bob, your contributions to science and medicine are well-documented. So with your permission, I’d like to spend our time together in this setting on some other things, particularly your book and your philosophical approaches to life and to a career in both research and clinical medicine. 00;01;38;01 – 00;01;40;24 Robert Lefkowitz I’d be a pleasure to talk about those things with you today. 00;01;41;08 – 00;01;59;18 Ernie Hood First of all, Bob, I have to tell you how much I enjoyed reading your book. It was warm, funny and really communicated your gregarious personality, your love of science, your devotion to medicine, and your mischievous side. How did the book project come about? 00;02;00;04 – 00;02;20;27 Robert Lefkowitz Well, that’s an interesting story. As you know from reading the book, I’m a bit of a raconteur and I love telling stories. I love telling stories. And anybody who’s worked with me or knows me knows that I love to tell stories, sort of like your aging grandfather. I mean, you hear the same ones over and over, but at least I always know people to regale with my various stories. 00;02;21;05 – 00;02;59;16 Robert Lefkowitz In any case, for golly, a couple of decades now people have been urging me to write some of these stories up. They keep saying Bob wanted to write a book, wanted to write a memoir, tell the stories. And I always could find reasons not to do it. And I strongly suspect I would not do it. But then several years ago, one of my former trainees, one of my former postdoctoral fellows, a guy named Randy Hall, who had been with me in the nineties for a few years and is now a professor of pharmacology at Emory, was visiting me because he, like me, is an ardent duke basketball fan, and he comes up once every few 00;02;59;16 – 00;03;16;07 Robert Lefkowitz years to watch a game with me. And over dinner before the game, I was regaling him with stories and he started with the usual refrain, Bob, why don’t you write these things up? And I said, Man, I can’t do it. I’m too busy. He said, Look, I’ll make a deal with you. He says, Do you know the book? 00;03;16;17 – 00;03;43;16 Robert Lefkowitz Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman. And I said, Yes, I do know that book. It’s a classic. It was a book in which Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman, also a raconteur, tells many of his interesting and quirky stories to a former trainee of his fellow member. I think Ralph, late and together they wrote them up. So Professor Hall says to me, Bob, I make a deal with you. 00;03;43;16 – 00;04;04;25 Robert Lefkowitz How about you tell me your stories? I’ll write them up a record them, Write them up. You can edit them. I will put together a book. And I said, Let me think about it, which I did. But it seemed like too good an offer to refuse. So we started. We spent about a year, pretty much all of 2019, basically doing it. 00;04;05;01 – 00;04;28;15 Robert Lefkowitz The procedure was we would talk by phone for an hour and a half to 2 hours. Once a week, he’d record everything, write up the stories. He developed a nice narrative structure to put the stories into, which was basically the story of my life and career. And together we shaped the book and we found ourselves a an agent, a literary agent, and he found us a very nice publisher, Pegasus. 00;04;28;19 – 00;04;34;24 Robert Lefkowitz And as they say, the rest is history. The book was published just a month ago and seems to be off to a good start. 00;04;35;13 – 00;04;46;15 Ernie Hood I particularly enjoyed learning about your love of listening to and telling stories. Tell us about the importance of narrative in research and in clinical medicine. 00;04;46;27 – 00;05;09;16 Robert Lefkowitz Well, I think, you know, people people tend to think that clinical medicine and research are totally disparate enterprise pieces, and in some senses they are, but they also have some things in common. And one of them is the importance of narrative. This was first brought home to me at one of the very earliest points in my clinical training in medical school at Columbia. 00;05;10;04 – 00;05;42;03 Robert Lefkowitz So I was doing my very, very first clinical rotation as a third year medical student. I guess I would have been like in the summer of 64, although I was a student at Columbia, I was doing that rotation at the Mount Sinai Hospital on Fifth Avenue in New York City, and I had this wonderful attending physician, Mortimer. It was the very first day of rounds with him, and there were a group of students and a couple of interns, and a case was being presented by one of the students. 00;05;42;26 – 00;06;07;02 Robert Lefkowitz And after some discussion, some doc debater turned to me and they said, Mr. Lefkowitz, you’ve heard the case and the discussion. He said, I’d like you to represent the case with the following proviso You may change none of the facts or data, but you’ve got to tell me a different story. Well, I was nonplused. I said, Well, but the data, all the story, I mean, how can I tell you a different story? 00;06;07;15 – 00;06;26;14 Robert Lefkowitz He said, Well, that’s what I want you to do. I was flummoxed. I said, I can’t do it. So he went around the room and nobody was willing to even try. He said, okay, just this once I’m going to illustrate for you. And he went ahead without changing any of the facts of the story and told a rather different narrative. 00;06;26;24 – 00;06;55;11 Robert Lefkowitz He emphasized certain points that had been not emphasized in the initial presentation and having brought the narrative out in such a different way. He arrived at a rather different diagnosis with a different prognosis and treatment. We were all very impressed. And over the course of the months that we spent together, he made us do that every day. And so we all learned in a clinical setting that data are data, but they’re not the story. 00;06;55;11 – 00;07;18;05 Robert Lefkowitz The story is something you impose through your own synthetic abilities and creative city on the data. Now, at that point in my career, I never dreamed I would become a scientist. I had no desire to become a scientist. But years later I would learn in the laboratory that exactly the same thing was true. Data are data. They are not a story. 00;07;18;06 – 00;07;39;20 Robert Lefkowitz So after we’ve been working on a project for a while and feel that we have enough data to write, a paper will generally sit down and we’ll have a number of figure panels, which will be the different panels of data that we want to show in the paper, and then we’ll start moving them around. You may want to take this figure and then and that becomes the last figure. 00;07;40;08 – 00;08;11;24 Robert Lefkowitz Alternatively, you could swap them out. What was the last figure would be the first figure? That would be a totally different story. And then little by little, we we work out what is the best narrative to impose on these data. So it’s really very much the same exercise. And I really owe doc debater the credit for first raising my sensitivities to the fact that a narrative is something that you shape data into, not necessarily the opposite. 00;08;12;13 – 00;08;22;15 Ernie Hood You call yourself an accidental scientist after your early career in clinical medicine. How did you serendipitously transition into research? 00;08;22;25 – 00;08;52;17 Robert Lefkowitz Well, you used exactly the correct word, Ernie. It was serendipity. I graduated medical school in 1966, and that was the height of the Vietnam War. At the time, there was conscription. There was a draft, a lottery draft for all men over 18 years of age. And it was exactly that. It was a lottery. Everybody got a number, a draft number and a draft card, and they literally picked the numbers out of a big barrel. 00;08;53;07 – 00;09;11;15 Robert Lefkowitz And if your number came up, you were drafted and spent your foot. For the most part, you were going to spend your time in Vietnam. And if your number didn’t come up for you, you were scot fre

In this edition of FOCUS In Sound, we meet a Burroughs Wellcome Fund grantee who is innovating in methods of detecting infectious disease. Dr. Amy Wesolowski is an assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. She holds a BA from College of the Atlantic, and earned her PhD from Carnegie Mellon in 2014. She completed her postdoc at the TH Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University. Amy received a 2016 Career Awards at the Scientific Interface, or CASI, grant from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund to further her work on the impact of human travel on infectious disease dynamics. She has studied those elements associated with malaria, dengue fever, rubella, measles, Ebola, and most recently, COVID-19. She uses data generated from mobile phone calling records to quantify travel patterns. Transcription of “Interview with Amy Wesolowski” 00;00;02;00 – 00;00;34;00 Ernie Hood Welcome to Focus In Sound, the podcast series from the Focus newsletter published by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. I’m your host, science writer Ernie Hood. In this edition of Focus In Sound, we meet a Burroughs Wellcome Fund grantee who is innovating in methods of detecting infectious diseases. Dr. Amy Amy Wesolowski is an assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. 00;00;34;10 – 00;01;03;27 Ernie Hood She holds a B.A. from College of the Atlantic and earned her Ph.D. degree from Carnegie Mellon in 2014. She completed her postdoc at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University. Amy received the 2016 career awards at the Scientific Interface, or Cassie Grant from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund to further her work on the impact of human travel on infectious disease dynamics. 00;01;04;07 – 00;01;24;28 Ernie Hood She has studied those elements associated with malaria, dengue fever, rubella, measles, Ebola, and most recently, COVID 19. She uses data generated from mobile phone calling records to quantify travel patterns. Amy Wesolowski, welcome to Focus In Sound. 00;01;25;17 – 00;01;26;12 Amy Wesolowski Thanks for having me. 00;01;26;27 – 00;01;30;10 Ernie Hood Tell us about the overall approach your research employs. 00;01;30;27 – 00;01;59;15 Amy Wesolowski Sure. The majority of my research is really focused on trying to understand how people travel and ways that we can measure and quantify human mobility patterns and then how that relates to infectious disease dynamics. So that’s sort of the focus of the first welcome grant that I have. It’s really trying to use particularly mobile phone data and other sources of data in low and middle income countries to try to quantify and model human travel patterns. 00;01;59;15 – 00;02;04;06 Amy Wesolowski Then look at how those patterns can help inform models of disease spread. 00;02;05;03 – 00;02;11;25 Ernie Hood How did you use that approach to study COVID 19 patterns, as you published recently in Nature Communications. 00;02;12;12 – 00;02;40;25 Amy Wesolowski That Nature communications paper is trying to look at how we might be able to use mobile phone data to monitor and evaluate different aspects of the pandemic. So in general, mobile phone data is often used to try to look at how people are traveling or if there’s like aggregations or congregations of people in different places. And given that most of COVID is transmission, a lot of it happens in sort of like enclosed places and things. 00;02;41;10 – 00;02;59;04 Amy Wesolowski We’re trying to figure out different ways that you can kind of measure these things. So if you put in travel restrictions, do people travel less if you put in additional social distancing? Do people go to grocery stores less? And so mobile phone data can help provide sort of a real time estimate of those measures and metrics that we can try to evaluate. 00;02;59;27 – 00;03;21;23 Amy Wesolowski Are people actually traveling less and going fewer places? And so in this paper, we just tried to review and outline sort of different aspects and different epidemiological questions and how mobile phone data might be used. So not just in terms of contact tracing apps, which I think is what they’re often thought about, but also thinking about population mobility patterns, too. 00;03;21;28 – 00;03;39;09 Amy Wesolowski And then sort of what are going to be some of the biases by using mobile phones. And if you’re using things that rely on smartphones, for example, what are the biases in terms of who is the actual population at risk and what are these different kinds of data is in these different kinds of methods able to measure. 00;03;39;22 – 00;03;42;11 Ernie Hood So what were some of the results of that study? 00;03;42;28 – 00;04;07;02 Amy Wesolowski Yeah, So I think some of the results are that there’s a lot of promise in using mobile phone data because a lot of people own a mobile phone. It’s possible now and companies and telecom regulators are becoming much more open to being able to utilize some of these data for public health purposes. And there’s a lot of work and a lot of like pipelines on how you can actually extract these data and analyze these data. 00;04;07;13 – 00;04;28;00 Amy Wesolowski I think one of the main points that we sort of wanted to raise in this was that ultimately you really want to be able to show that you’re capturing patterns that are relevant to disease transmission. So, for example, like a mobile phone data might be able to say that to people or within x meters within one another. But there’s a lot of variability in that. 00;04;28;00 – 00;04;51;26 Amy Wesolowski They could be in completely separate buildings. They could both be wearing masks. And as you need to get a finer and finer measure of behavior, it’s important to think about are these data actually able to capture those patterns and are they able to capture those patterns for the populations you’re most interested in? So with COVID 19, there’s a lot of disparities in who actually has the most severe disease and who actually is getting infected. 00;04;52;02 – 00;05;13;19 Amy Wesolowski So thinking about sort of how those biases, you know, if you’re really interested in mortality, that’s predominantly in older age groups who might be people who are less likely to own a smartphone, for example. So these kinds of data might not be as relevant for some of those questions, even if they’re still able to estimate sort of population level clustering and mobility patterns. 00;05;14;07 – 00;05;19;16 Ernie Hood Do you think there are further opportunities to use your methods in relation to COVID 19? 00;05;19;25 – 00;05;43;27 Amy Wesolowski Yeah, I think so. I think increasingly what they might be able to be used for is trying to look at how populations are sort of going back to normal travel patterns and behavioral patterns and aggregation. So I think there is a lot of different studies that sort of show mobility measures of clustering aggregation, all these things in different mobile phones that have all dropped as the pandemic started. 00;05;43;27 – 00;06;06;03 Amy Wesolowski But they’re all going back up. And we’re also seeing there’s a lot of other factors that are not just related to mobility that are probably coming into play. You know, how well can people isolate? How can people quarantine? So I think there’s still going to be a useful measure alongside other types of data and metrics of being able to sort of get some sort of real time estimate about how populations are behave yet. 00;06;06;22 – 00;06;13;26 Ernie Hood What about issues of privacy related to mobile phone data? How do you safeguard against inappropriate breaches? 00;06;14;01 – 00;06;38;17 Amy Wesolowski It’s a really big concern, and particularly as you’re trying to get information on a much, much finer scale. So most of the work that we’ve done has been a lot of aggregated mobility and population level mobility patterns. So looking at how many people are traveling on a given day between, you know, like counties or state or something, which is, you know, that’s thousands and thousands of people often, or mobile phone subscribers. 00;06;38;23 – 00;07;13;16 Amy Wesolowski And I think that increasingly with SARS-CoV-2, you’re really interested in really, really fine scale behaviors. And the finer you get, the more issues there are with privacy. And so oftentimes, you know, we will analyze data if it’s only one subscriber who’s made a trip or something, because that could be identifiable. We’ve been working a lot with mobile phone operators and regulators to try to sort of push and and have a platform where aggregated data and aggregated mobility patterns are able to be shared more broadly and that they’re aggregating in a way that there’s fewer privacy concerns, but they’re still there. 00;07;13;21 – 00;07;34;18 Amy Wesolowski But I think the issue with SARS-CoV-2 is, as you want a really, really fine understanding of behavior and individual level behavior. A lot of those privacy concerns have not been really fully addressed. So I think that it’s still an issue and it still hasn’t really been fleshed out in in the regulators aren’t really sure, you know, the companies aren’t. 00;07;35;00 – 00;08;01;08 Amy Wesolowski And so I think there are things that can be done about sort of like still making the data sort of aggregated or like summary measures and those sorts of things. But I think that part of it is about that everyone is sort of aware about like the public health utility and sort of the public health good about these kinds of data and that ways that it’s still getting information to policymakers who often don’t actually want very, very individual level details. 00;08;01;08 – 00;08;37;10 Amy Wesolowski Right. They want to have summaries and ideas about behaviors. So I think it’s sort of always going to be sort of a play between what is actually useful to inform decision making and

In this Special Edition of FOCUS In Sound, we meet with the CEO and President of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, Dr. Louis Muglia, who will guide us through the Fund’s multi-faceted response to the COVID-19 pandemic and will discuss the Fund’s stance on Social Justice. Transcription of “Interview with Louis Muglia” 00;00;02;02 – 00;00;32;25 Ernie Hood Welcome to a special edition of Focus In Sound, the podcast series from the Focus newsletter published by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. I’m your host, science writer Ernie Hood. In this special edition of Focus In Sound, we meet with the CEO and president of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, Dr. Louis Muglia, who will guide us through the fund’s multifaceted response to the COVID 19 pandemic and will discuss the fund’s stance on social justice. 00;00;33;23 – 00;00;36;16 Ernie Hood Lou, thank you for joining us on Focus In Sound. 00;00;36;26 – 00;00;47;16 Louis Muglia Ernie, thank you for this interview. I look forward to it and conveying some of the enthusiasm I feel about what Burroughs Wellcome Fund can contribute during this extraordinary time. 00;00;48;07 – 00;01;01;19 Ernie Hood Lou, you were named president and CEO of the fund in January of this year and the ink was hardly dry on your contract when the COVID 19 crisis cropped up. What has that been like for you? 00;01;02;14 – 00;01;24;02 Louis Muglia Well, I can tell you, when I started at the Burroughs Wellcome Fund as the president and CEO of the organization in January of 2020, I had had a long experience with the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. I had been one of their initial awardees in the biomedical sciences in 1995. I’ve been an advisor under review committees for many years, including up until I became the president. 00;01;24;14 – 00;01;47;25 Louis Muglia And I was so excited about not only what the Burroughs Wellcome Fund had been doing, but also the potential it has for moving forward as a real intellectual innovation catalyst for all kinds of great science moving forward. And we began a strategic planning exercise at that point about what things we want to keep, what things we wanted to modify, which things we wanted to move forward. 00;01;48;07 – 00;02;17;13 Louis Muglia And I must say, COVID 19 was not one of the considerations in that portfolio at the time. And at this point, I don’t think COVID 19 is changing our long term strategies, trajectories and priorities. But what it has reinforced to me is how important organizations like the Burroughs Wellcome Fund are That can be flexible, adaptable, nimble and prioritize based on acute needs to invest funding in critical situations. 00;02;17;24 – 00;02;44;28 Louis Muglia And so as challenging, as devastating as the issues around human health and COVID 19 have been around, the continued wounds that racial injustice portend for society, we’ve been allowed to have our organization step up to the challenge and figure out how we can have the most impact in this transformative period of human history. 00;02;45;18 – 00;02;52;10 Ernie Hood Let’s explore the fund’s response to the pandemic. How has it affected Burroughs Wellcome Fund operations? 00;02;52;24 – 00;03;14;11 Louis Muglia Well, just in the way we work every day. I mean, we’re a small family of Burroughs Wellcome Fundstaff. We have an extensive extended family of advisors and colleagues that we use our board of trustees to help us shape our mission moving forward. And usually we hosted those events at the Burroughs Wellcome Fund headquarters in Research Triangle Park. 00;03;14;12 – 00;03;42;17 Louis Muglia It’s an incredible facility that is a real opportunity to generate a hub for engagement across not only Research Park but across the United States and across the United States and Canada, which we look forward to doing when times again allow that to be a safe opportunity for us. But what’s happened is we’ve moved to entirely virtual platforms, entirely video conference engagements with our advisory committees, with our finalists for awards. 00;03;42;24 – 00;04;07;04 Louis Muglia We’ve run now successfully awards for the career award, the medical sciences career awards at the scientific interfaces, Pathogenesis of infectious diseases and others on virtual platforms. And I don’t think we’ve lost much momentum in doing so. The engagements have been great. We’ve come to a resolution about who our final candidates should be, and we’re entirely invested in those programs as we have been in the past. 00;04;07;17 – 00;04;31;15 Louis Muglia So that’s all been, I think, very positive. It’s been disappointing not to have the engagement in-person, but for many reasons. Now we’ve rethought our priorities and feel like this has caused us to come to some, I think, needed conclusions. First, I think it’s good to have our advisory panels together to understand and communicate more effectively as a team in making decisions. 00;04;32;00 – 00;04;52;18 Louis Muglia But probably it makes more financial, environmental and safety sense to not have twice as many finalists as will be. Awardees. Come to Burroughs Wellcome Fund headquarters for 20 minutes. There are 20 minutes in the sun to interview with the panel when they can do it virtually and have the same impact. At least that’s my impression of how it’s done. 00;04;53;03 – 00;05;18;19 Louis Muglia What we’ve additionally done is, as you might guess, we fund a lot of symposia, workshops, convenings at the Burroughs Wellcome Fund headquarters now that have been either delayed or canceled, which is unfortunate, but what it’s done is allow us to have resources to funds that would not be utilized now that we can use to impact COVID 19 directly. 00;05;18;22 – 00;05;42;18 Louis Muglia So we’ve reprioritized many of those funds for acute projects, which we didn’t envision six months ago. So we fostered a workshop for our early career investigators to bring them together to help them meet the challenges they’re facing with starting their laboratory amidst this time of real struggle, of transitioning institutions which have been delayed, of even finding a job. 00;05;42;19 – 00;06;15;15 Louis Muglia Many universities now have hiring freezes for new faculty members, so it’s a challenging time for them. We’re helping them try to get through that. We’ve been very flexible with our funding in terms of no cost extensions, about allowing reprioritization of funds to address COVID 19 issues. And then last, we’ve had a request for proposals amongst our network of awardees to put things forward for short term funding consideration to try to solve this problem of COVID 19 in a basic science way more acutely. 00;06;15;24 – 00;06;35;28 Louis Muglia So we just awarded two research grants to collaborations amongst our awardees from Burroughs Wellcome Fund in the past and we’re excited about moving goes forward. And we did this within within a two month period of time, which is extraordinary turnaround for Grant. So we want to get these things started implemented in having impact as soon as we can. 00;06;36;11 – 00;06;57;18 Louis Muglia And last, I think we’ve been working very closely with the North Carolina schools and the North Carolina museums to help them get through this period as well. As you might imagine, education is being sort of reinvented. Our North Carolina museums are struggling and we’re trying to figure out how to make educational resources as widely available to as many individuals as possible. 00;06;58;14 – 00;07;14;00 Ernie Hood Lou, on June 2nd, in the wake of the widespread demonstrations following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, you issued a statement on the fund’s stance on social justice. Would you briefly recap that statement for us? 00;07;14;15 – 00;07;41;10 Louis Muglia Well, Ernie, as you know, I think deeply affected all of us at Bruce Walker Fund, as well as our country as a whole and the world as a whole as we’ve seen in the outcry after it. And as you know, the Burroughs Wellcome Fundhas been an organization that has had as one of its core foundational values a commitment to foster diversity, equity and inclusion in science, education and society. 00;07;41;20 – 00;08;20;07 Louis Muglia We are absolutely passionate about that. I think you can look at our portfolio and see that we’ve invested in diversity enrichment programs at the K-through-12 level, undergraduate level graduate student level and into early careers. And we are passionate about that and we feel we just cannot be silent on these issues of enormous social injustice that continue to manifest themselves in our society that was really founded on the values of human dignity, freedom and justice that we seem to abandon and let struggle through our existence in this country. 00;08;20;08 – 00;08;54;17 Louis Muglia We are a country of diversity, and that has been one of our great prides. I think it was especially challenging for us knowing that we have been invested in this area and we recognize how science and STEM education in diversity have been one of our core driving factors. But now we have to go past that. We have to go past that to address the inequalities and injustices of race more broadly, because it’s a pervasive aspect of society that affects all of these other things in our pipeline, and we are committed to doing that. 00;08;54;17 – 00;09;23;26 Louis Muglia We will not stand quiet. We will look to engage other philanthropic organizations. And in joining us in this. And I think, as you will see, we’ve gone beyond the traditional boundaries of just science, technology, engineering and mathematics to really address social injustice and what race means at a more fundamental level with things we’re investing. And like the race exhibit we’re bringing to North Carolina, which we’re very proud of in terms of engaging the public. 00;09;24;07 – 00;10;00;02 Louis Muglia And we continue to try to build networks of diverse voices in our portfolio of family colleagues at every level, whether they’re award

In this edition of FOCUS In Sound, we meet a Burroughs Wellcome Fund grantee who is not only an accomplished scientist, but also a published children’s book author. Dr. Theanne Griffith has just had the first two of her three-book STEM-themed chapter book series called The Magnificent Makers released, with number 3 scheduled to come out in September 2020. Griffith is an instructor in the Department of Physiology, Pharmacology, and Neuroscience at Rutgers University. She is a neuroscientist with a Ph.D. from Northwestern University. She completed her postdoc at Columbia University in 2019. In 2017 she was recognized in the Burroughs Wellcome Fund’s Postdoctoral Enrichment Program. Transcription of “Interview with Dr. Theanne Griffith” 00;00;02;13 – 00;00;40;21 Ernie Hood Welcome to Focus In Sound, the podcast series from the Focus newsletter published by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. I’m your host, science writer Ernie Hood. In this edition of Focus In Sound, we meet a Burroughs Wellcome Fund grantee who is not only an accomplished scientist, but also a published children’s book author. Dr. Theanne Griffith has just had the first two of her three book, STEM themed chapter books series called The Magnificent Makers, released with number three scheduled to come out in September 2020. 00;00;42;03 – 00;01;22;01 Ernie Hood Griffith is an instructor in the Department of Physiology, Pharmacology and Neuroscience at Rutgers University. She is a neuroscientist with a Ph.D. from Northwestern University. She completed her postdoc at Columbia University in 2019. In 2017, she was recognized in the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Postdoctoral Enrichment Program, the PDP provides a total of $60,000 over three years to support the career development activities for underrepresented minority postdocs, rural fellows. Theanne Griffith. 00;01;22;09 – 00;01;24;02 Ernie Hood Welcome to Focus In Sound. 00;01;24;12 – 00;01;26;19 Theanne Griffith Thank you. I’m really delighted to be here. 00;01;27;10 – 00;01;40;06 Ernie Hood Then I’d like to start our conversation by getting to know you a bit more. Tell us about your journey and what got you to where you are today. As both an academic researcher and an author. 00;01;40;14 – 00;02;07;23 Theanne Griffith Well, I’ve definitely always been a science kid. Ever since I was little, I’ve been really fascinated and curious about the world around me and understanding it. When I was younger, I went through phases of wanting to be a vet and then a doctor. But then when I was in high school, I took an AP biology class where I was introduced to neuroscience, and then I absolutely fell in love with neuroscience and went on to pursue my bachelor’s at Smith College. 00;02;08;16 – 00;02;35;05 Theanne Griffith Subsequently, I got my doctorate at Northwestern University. I’ve always been really excited about research and fascinated by the brain and our nervous system in general. But something that I’ve also always been really passionate about was, you know, reading and writing or storytelling. And so I’ve always had kind of a dream of becoming an author, but I didn’t necessarily know how to accomplish that. 00;02;35;05 – 00;02;56;15 Theanne Griffith And I think I’ve spent a lot of time just focusing on science, perhaps a more traditional career path. But then when I was working as a postdoc at Columbia University and I was on maternity leave with my first daughter, I kind of had this like epiphany where I decided, now’s the time. If you really want to be a writer, just go for it. 00;02;56;16 – 00;03;18;07 Theanne Griffith And I always knew I wanted to write children’s books. Children’s books, I feel like, are very special. And you really have an opportunity to engage kids in whatever you’re writing at such an early age when their imagination is really limitless. And so, you know, I started I created a website. I did all of the things to try and kind of pursue this career as an author. 00;03;18;07 – 00;03;39;27 Theanne Griffith And I was contacted by an editor at Random House. She was really interested in acquiring a STEM themed chapter book series. And given I was a scientist and a writer, she thought that I might be interested in the opportunity. And I was definitely very interested. And so I guess from there this kind of snowballed and the magnificent makers were born. 00;03;40;26 – 00;03;45;00 Ernie Hood And tell us a bit more about the Magnificent Makers. 00;03;46;21 – 00;04;05;23 Theanne Griffith Yeah. So the Magnificent Makers are the STEM themed chapter book series. So these chapter books are kind of early readers for recently independent readers ages about 7 to 10. They also kind of work as read aloud for younger children because they’re heavily illustrated. And I just want to give a little shout out to the awesome illustrator of the series, Reggie Brown. 00;04;06;02 – 00;04;31;10 Theanne Griffith He’s done an amazing job bringing the characters to life and really keeping kids engaged through through the artwork. So these books follow Best Friends, Pablo and Violet on Out of This World Science Adventures in this magical makerspace or laboratory called the Maker Maze. And the Maker Maze is run by this very centered, kind of kooky scientist called Dr. Crist. 00;04;31;23 – 00;04;59;13 Theanne Griffith And in each book, they cover a different science topic. So they’re transported through this magical portal to the maker maze after receiving a riddle from Dr. Crisp. And then while they’re there, they have a challenge that they need to complete in 120 maker minutes if they’d like to be able to return. And since they love science so much and they really have fun in the maker maze, they’re always kind of rushing against the clock to make sure they finish the challenge in time so that they can return. 00;04;59;17 – 00;05;33;05 Theanne Griffith And so each challenge has three levels. And again, they have 120 minutes to beat all three levels and finish before time is up. And so, along with a different science theme being part of each book, there’s also kind of a real life lesson that is conveyed. So in the first book, How to Test the Friendship, kind of as the name implies, there’s some friendship issues where one of the main characters, Pablo, feels a little bit jealous by this new kid, Deepak, who ends up going along on the adventure with him and Violet. 00;05;33;05 – 00;06;11;02 Theanne Griffith And so he has to work through those emotions of jealousy and friendship. And so I’m in book two, which is all about the brain called brain trouble. So not only do they learn about the brain, but they also learn how important it really is to work as a team. Then finally, Book three is called Writing Sound Waves, and that book is all about our senses and the kind of life lesson or whatever, like ultimate storyline is that the kids learn about appreciating and understanding differences because one of the characters that goes along with them to the maker Maze Henry, he reveals at the end that he has sensory processing disorder, and that explains some of 00;06;11;02 – 00;06;31;17 Theanne Griffith his odd behavior while he was in the maker maze. So yeah, that’s kind of the gist. Like I said, the main characters are Pablo and Violet, but each book always brings in a new group of people that also accompany them to make a maze. So it’s a lot of fun, a lot of action, a lot of learning that also goes along in the story. 00;06;32;02 – 00;06;35;12 Ernie Hood Tell us about the hands on activities included with the books. 00;06;36;09 – 00;07;04;04 Theanne Griffith Yeah, thank you for reminding me. So each book at the end comes with two hands on activities, because science is something that is very much a hands on thing. There’s definitely the intellectual side of science, but there’s very much research is literally doing science. So it was important to have that tie in with the books. And so during their challenge, Pablo and Violet are always tasked with making something. 00;07;04;12 – 00;07;33;20 Theanne Griffith So in the first book, they have to make, for example, a plastic bottle boat. And so at the end of the book, they’re instructions for kids to actually make that same boat. So there’s always instructions where they can make the exact same thing that Pablo and Violet made in the book. And then there’s a second activity as well that maybe is usually a little bit more and maybe steam, So a little bit more arts involved for kids who are having more artistic leanings, they can still have that tie in with STEM. 00;07;33;26 – 00;07;40;17 Ernie Hood You speak quite affectionately of your characters. Have they really come alive for you as part of this process? 00;07;41;23 – 00;08;07;28 Theanne Griffith Very much so. And it’s kind of strange how that happens. As I was kind of preparing for my writing journey and trying to inform myself and listening to a lot of podcasts, I heard authors talk about that, how their characters kind of take on a life of their own and and kind of become extensions, like they become their own entity that are almost independent of the author. 00;08;08;12 – 00;08;33;02 Theanne Griffith And at first I thought that was so cliche, but it’s very true. It’s surprisingly true. You know, especially the more and more you write them, they just kind of take on this world of their own and they just kind of exist almost outside of you. And and I do kind of feel like affection for them, you know? And it’s so nice that Reggie has done such a nice job with the illustrations, because then I have an actual visual. 00;08;33;02 – 00;08;39;25 Theanne Griffith You know, when I think of, like, it’s a very concrete person, like what they look like and everything, it’s it’s, it’s fun. It’s great. 00;08;41;10 – 00;08;45;25 Ernie Hood Do you think your characters will help recruit children of color to STEM? 00;08;46;07 – 00;09;20;18 Theanne Griffith One thing that was really important for me was that the characters that are in these books

In this edition of FOCUS In Sound, we meet a Burroughs Wellcome Fund grantee who participated in the development of a remarkable new pathogen detection technology that may be vastly important in the detection and surveillance of COVID-19, among several other pathogens. He and his colleagues have just had a landmark paper published in Nature, describing the technology and its importance in the battle against the pandemic pathogen. With this story moving so rapidly, I should include that we recorded this interview on April 17, 2020. Transcription of “Interview with Paul Blainey” 00;00;03;27 – 00;00;33;02 Ernie Hood Welcome to Focus In Sound, the podcast series from the Focus newsletter published by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. I’m your host, science writer Ernie Hood. In this edition of Focus In Sound, we meet a Burroughs Wellcome Fund grantee who participated in the development of a remarkable new pathogen detection technology that may be vastly important in the detection and surveillance of COVID 19, among several other pathogens. 00;00;33;21 – 00;01;12;25 Ernie Hood He and his colleagues have just had a landmark paper published in Nature describing the technology and its importance in the battle against the pandemic pathogen. With this story moving so rapidly, I should include that we record of this interview on April 17th, 2020. Dr. Paul Blainey is a career member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and a tenured associate professor in the Department of Biological Engineering at M.I.T. He is an expert in micro analysis systems for studies of individual molecules and cells. 00;01;13;09 – 00;01;45;24 Ernie Hood He is applying this technology to advance the understanding of DNA protein interactions, evolutionary processes, functional differences between cells, disease processes and drug target discovery. Paul holds a B.S. in chemistry and a B.A. in mathematics from the University of Washington and earned his Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Harvard University. He completed his postdoctoral research at Stanford University in the laboratory of Steven Quake. 00;01;46;11 – 00;02;23;23 Ernie Hood He was recognized by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund in 2011 with the career award at the scientific interface. When he was still at Stanford, the award description in 2011 was particularly prescient, as it talked about from single cells to populations using microfluidics, genomics and culture to better understand infectious disease. In the post genomic era. The just published Nature paper is titled Massive Multiplexed Nucleic Acid Detection with CAS 13. 00;02;24;09 – 00;02;36;06 Ernie Hood The new platform it describes may be a huge game changer in the quest for large scale testing for COVID 19 infections. Paul Blainey, welcome to Focus In Sound. 00;02;36;12 – 00;02;38;14 Paul Blainey Thank you very much. I’m so glad to be here. 00;02;38;25 – 00;02;46;12 Ernie Hood Paul, introduce us to this new testing platform that you and your colleagues have developed called Karman CAS 13. 00;02;46;21 – 00;03;20;08 Paul Blainey This has been a wonderful effort by a really amazing team. And so let me start by acknowledging the rest of the team. This was a really tightly integrated collaboration between my research group, Pardis Sabeti Research Group and Brode and Deb Hong’s research group at the Breast. And in particular, I want to acknowledge a lot of the junior team members, particularly postdocs Sherry Ackerman, Cameron Myhrvold and two students, Gautham Thakur and Kathryn Frechette, who made just a special contribution along with the broader team. 00;03;20;22 – 00;03;51;05 Paul Blainey Now the system we put together is a really interesting and powerful fusion of new microfluidic technology and an amazing CRISPR based nucleic acid detection assay called Sherlock. And so what we did was find a way to implement the Sherlock assay chemistry in teeny, tiny nanometer scale microdroplets that are spread out in an array that enables us to read them out using microscopy. 00;03;52;00 – 00;04;07;22 Paul Blainey And so what this has enabled is a capability to run many, many different nucleic acid detection tests. And here we do have a focus on detecting viral sequences. And to do this quickly and at a low cost per test. 00;04;07;22 – 00;04;12;18 Ernie Hood How has CRISPR been incorporated into the system? And what role does it play. 00;04;13;08 – 00;04;29;20 Paul Blainey In our system? CRISPR enzyme CAS 13, plays a role in the nucleic acid detection chemistry, so it binds nucleic acid molecule and helps generate a signal that we detect using optical microscopy. 00;04;29;29 – 00;04;40;24 Ernie Hood Was the ability to detect the COVID 19 coronavirus something you were already working on, or was it a situation where you could expand your system to include it? 00;04;41;16 – 00;05;06;08 Paul Blainey So I’ll back up and give a little bit more history around the microfluidic platform. We started work on this quite a number of years ago for a totally different application. We invented this platform for small molecule drug screening and it was still several years ago that we decided to repurpose the microfluidic platform from small molecule screening to infectious disease diagnostics. 00;05;07;01 – 00;05;39;02 Paul Blainey And so COVID 19 and the SARS-CoV-2 virus were not on our radar at all. Our interest with the platform was to develop and deploy what we refer to as a pan viral assay panel that includes assays for essentially all the important viruses in the world that infect humans. And so from the beginning we did have a Corona virus panel, but at that time, COVID two was not known to the world. 00;05;39;22 – 00;05;54;22 Paul Blainey And so while the paper was in review, we learned about the outbreak, of course, and moved to really quickly develop a new assay for the SARS-CoV-2 virus and incorporate that into our large pan viral assay panel. 00;05;55;03 – 00;05;59;09 Ernie Hood Did you have to make adjustments on the fly to accommodate the pandemic virus? 00;05;59;17 – 00;06;22;03 Paul Blainey One of the things that’s really wonderful about our assay system is that it’s actually quite easy to incorporate new content, and we don’t have a lot of issues with cross-talk among different assays. So it was actually relatively straightforward to incorporate a new test to cover the strains involved in the outbreak. And we were able to do that in a short period of time. 00;06;23;03 – 00;06;35;11 Ernie Hood Paul, I do want to hear more about the Carmen CAS 13 platform, but before we expand our discussion, tell me, what do you see as the headline here, particularly given the current pandemic? 00;06;35;25 – 00;07;10;26 Paul Blainey I think the headline here is really one about hope. We’re incorporating here not only a new assay chemistry, it’s actually not CRISPR technology, but PCR technology that’s on the front lines of nucleic acid diagnostics addressing the outbreak today. And so there are these powerful new CRISPR based assay chemistries. And then also on the instrumentation side, we’re introducing this microfluidic platform for Microscale testing, which has some advantages in terms of reducing the cost per test and enabling many tests to be done. 00;07;11;15 – 00;07;30;22 Paul Blainey And so I think in the context of the pandemic, the headline is really that there’s a lot of room for creativity and innovation to develop new types of tests to address it. And given the current situation, I think it’s quite clear we’re going to need an all of the above strategy to beat back the pandemic. 00;07;31;16 – 00;07;39;02 Ernie Hood How will use of this system contribute to improvements in COVID 19 testing? I know that’s been a major issue worldwide. 00;07;39;17 – 00;08;08;06 Paul Blainey Our system is really focused on test throughput and it can vary efficiently. Test each patient sample for a large number of target sequences, which could be different parts of one virus, different strain, variations of one virus, or a whole diversity of viruses in each sample. And so it’s fairly unique in that regard. We have not constructed it in a way that’s suitable yet for rapid point of care testing. 00;08;08;21 – 00;08;20;21 Paul Blainey And so we see the role for the reported version of the system as being in surveillance either for clinical screening tests or for a public health screening and surveillance testing. 00;08;21;21 – 00;08;24;03 Ernie Hood Is the turnaround rapid in this case? 00;08;24;13 – 00;08;47;25 Paul Blainey The test in the micro health system currently takes several hours to return a result. So it’s not it’s not really suitable for rapid point of care testing. Now, we’re already working on future versions that would be much faster and use really simple instrumentation that would be well-suited to a point of care implementation or testing at the point of care. 00;08;48;14 – 00;08;57;26 Ernie Hood I understand from the paper that the platform is sensitive, specific, and statistically robust. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? 00;08;58;07 – 00;09;31;28 Paul Blainey Absolutely. We were really glad to see that even in the micro-scale nanometer format that the Kaman testing platform maintains the animal or sensitivity that had previously been demonstrated for the Sherlock assay chemistry. And so it really has this exquisite sensitivity while maintaining really high specificity. At the same time, now one of the unique features of our droplet array platform is that each test actually consists of many of these nanometer droplet replicates. 00;09;32;08 – 00;10;04;00 Paul Blainey And so that gives us a lot of statistical robustness in order to make sure that we make the right call for each test, because we can check the results across the many nanometer scale replicate assay reactions. Another feature is that that average number of reactions per test is continuously adjustable, and so we can dial in the statistical power of the test case by case so that

In this edition of FOCUS In Sound, we focus on a dynamic scientist from UCLA who has been recognized in the past by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, and we’ll see how that recognition has had a profound effect on her work, her career, and her scientific contributions. Transcription of “Interview with Ariana Anderson” 00;00;02;02 – 00;00;32;26 Ernie Hood Welcome to Focus In Sound, the podcast series from the Focus newsletter published by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. I’m your host, science writer Ernie Hood. In this edition of Focus In Sound, we focus on a dynamic young scientist from UCLA who has been recognized in the past by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, and we’ll see how that recognition has had a profound effect on her work, her career and her scientific contributions. 00;00;33;15 – 00;01;06;07 Ernie Hood Dr. Ariana Anderson is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA, where she also received herbs and Ph.D. degrees. She is also principal investigator and director of the UCLA Laboratory of Computational Neuropsychology. In 2014, she received the Burroughs Wellcome Fund career Award at the Scientific Interface, a $500,000 grant to fund her work over a five year period. 00;01;06;26 – 00;01;29;14 Ernie Hood She was given the Cassie specifically to support her research on the placebo effect. We will hear all about that. But Dr. Anderson has used the funding along with her K 25 career award from the National Institute on Aging to pursue a variety of important scientific endeavors. Ariana Anderson, welcome to Focus In Sound. 00;01;29;23 – 00;01;31;10 Ariana Anderson Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here with you. 00;01;31;23 – 00;01;52;27 Ernie Hood I know you are the proud mother of four children, but I’d like to start our conversation with the venture you have referred to as your fifth child, the free app you’ve developed and released called Chatter Baby, which is available at Chatter Baby Dawg. Tell us about this app designed to measure and interpret infants Cries. 00;01;53;15 – 00;02;15;26 Ariana Anderson Chatter Babies is an app that we developed for two purposes. The first purpose of the app is to help parents understand what their baby needs. Now, there’s a long history of scientific literature going back about 50 years that looks at the differences in infant cries associated with not just with different states. So, for example, a baby in pain cries differently, but also looking at markers of neurodevelopmental disorders. 00;02;16;15 – 00;02;36;03 Ariana Anderson So, for example, some of the earliest work found that babies with bacterial meningitis, babies with Down’s syndrome, babies with epilepsy may show different patterns of their cries than babies who are neurocognitive bleed intact. What we wanted to do do was to see whether or not we could develop an app that would, first of all, help parents predict what was wrong with their child at that moment. 00;02;36;03 – 00;02;49;19 Ariana Anderson Is baby fussy, hungry or in pain? But second of all, collect infant cry data for another purpose, which is to see whether long term babies with abnormal cry patterns become more likely to get a later developmental disorder such as autism. 00;02;50;09 – 00;02;55;12 Ernie Hood So how did you develop and train the artificial intelligence powered algorithm? 00;02;55;25 – 00;03;18;02 Ariana Anderson Well, like any algorithm, what we needed was lots of data. So we collected almost 2000 total audio samples of babies. Now, these babies were either laughing neutral, or they were crying from a stimulus, which was labeled by the mother and also an expert mom panel who went checked it over. So, for example, we got painful cries from babies who were either getting vaccinated or getting their ears pierced. 00;03;18;17 – 00;03;34;22 Ariana Anderson The other cries like hungry or fussy or scared or tired were things that were nominated by the parents. And then we had a mom panel go through all of those other cries and say, No, that baby doesn’t sound very hungry to me. So if all of the mom panel did not agree on the label, the cry, it was excluded from our study. 00;03;35;11 – 00;03;56;27 Ariana Anderson With those labeled cries, we use standard speech recognition technology. So we extracted about 6000 different acoustic features from each cry. So these were things like the energy, the frequency, the different melodies and prosodic patterns that were existing. And we use these to classify and predict on new cries what the baby’s cry reason was AI fever. 00;03;56;27 – 00;04;09;20 Ernie Hood Very good. That must have been a very exciting undertaking. How can both deaf and hearing parents use Chatter baby, to help understand what their babies are trying to tell them in their vocalizations? 00;04;10;01 – 00;04;32;15 Ariana Anderson Chatter Babies A free app that’s available on Google Play and also on the Apple Store. When you download Chatter, baby, you send a five second audio sample to our servers where we run our machine learning algorithms on it. It returns to you a probability of fuzzy, hungrier pain. Much like a weather report. And it allows you then to interpret based on the results the most likely reason for your baby’s cry. 00;04;32;28 – 00;04;37;17 Ernie Hood I see. And what’s the application for particularly for deaf parents? 00;04;38;07 – 00;04;55;27 Ariana Anderson Deaf parents and hearing parents both have the same need. Why is my baby crying? So it actually works exactly the same. Now we’d like to continue in the future to make this something that we can use for remote monitoring. We’re trying to figure out now how to, for example, set this up similar to an Alexa, where it hears a baby crying. 00;04;55;27 – 00;05;11;01 Ariana Anderson It will be able to notify the parent in a different area of the house. So we’re working now on expanding our algorithms and also integrating them into remote monitoring systems so that deaf parents can be notified, for example, when their baby’s in another room, whether or not their baby’s crying, and if so, why? 00;05;11;12 – 00;05;19;06 Ernie Hood Ariana, you’ve had this project going since 2013. Is the artificial intelligence learning more and more as it goes? 00;05;19;19 – 00;05;37;18 Ariana Anderson Absolutely. So what we do with this is that our app is also a method of collecting data. So before when we were collecting data manually, we only had a smaller sample to work with. But now that we have large data sample, we have a few hundred thousand baby cries to work on. We’re using deep learning algorithms to identify what the patterns really are. 00;05;38;00 – 00;05;54;14 Ariana Anderson The deep learning just gives us a better idea of how to classify these babies and whether or not whether or not the baby cries depends on things like the age or the nationality or any other underlying medical condition that the baby might have. So because we have a big data set, we’re able to identify better what the baby needs. 00;05;54;14 – 00;05;59;03 Ariana Anderson And we’re also able to use more sophisticated deep learning algorithms to pursue these objectives. 00;05;59;17 – 00;06;08;29 Ernie Hood Tell us about the application you’ve been working on to use Chatter Baby to help identify infants who may be at risk of being on the autism spectrum. 00;06;09;14 – 00;06;28;04 Ariana Anderson We’ve seen some really wonderful small sample. Studies show that babies who are at risk for autism, so babies who have an older sibling with autism are they show different cry patterns. So if a baby is a year old or even 18 months old, someone can listen to that baby cry and see that that doesn’t sound right. It just sounds a regular sounds a little bit off. 00;06;28;04 – 00;06;52;12 Ariana Anderson It doesn’t have the same tone as a typical baby. Now, these are wonderful studies. They’re very strong evidence, but they’re based on small samples. What we’re doing with chatter, baby, is we’re not just collecting infant cries, but works, collecting extensive developmental history. So we ask parents questions about the pregnancy, about any sort of genetic risk, whether or not there’s a sibling, the family’s autism, whether or not the baby had a difficult delivery. 00;06;52;12 – 00;07;10;01 Ariana Anderson A number of risk factors that we know may be associated with increased autism risk. After that, we follow the babies for six years, starting at age two, we send them screeners for autism using standard instruments that calculate whether or not their child is at higher risk for autism, or we continue to follow them until they’re six years old. 00;07;10;26 – 00;07;33;21 Ariana Anderson Then we’ll be able to go back and look at all this wealth of data we’ve collected and identify whether or not the children who got later diagnosed with autism had the abnormal vocal patterns early. Now, we don’t just have to look at vocal patterns. We’re also looking at other things. So, for example, whether or not there was a problem with the baby’s delivery, whether or not the baby was premature, whether or not they spent time in the nick, whether mom use drugs during pregnancy. 00;07;34;03 – 00;07;41;20 Ariana Anderson We’re collecting a variety of risk factors that we can use later on, and the vocal patterns are going to just be one of the many clues we’re able to assess. 00;07;42;11 – 00;07;51;27 Ernie Hood That sounds very exciting, and I’m sure it’s going to yield some important information going forward. How successful has Chatter, baby been up to this point? 00;07;52;13 – 00;08;16;06 Ariana Anderson We’ve been very successful in attracting a wide user base. We have been featured in medium major media outlets in all countries around the world. So, for example, just recently we’re in the biggest newspaper in Lebanon. Now, because of this, we’re able to get a variety of data sources which allow people to get a variety of participants across the world that we wouldn’t be able to get if we

This special edition of FOCUS In Sound is a panel discussion on career development from the Fund’s headquarters in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina on October 10, 2018, during the Networking Meeting for New Awardees. Transcription of “2018 Career Development Panel” 00;00;00;28 – 00;00;28;26 Ernie Hood Welcome to a special edition of Focus In Sound, the podcast series from the Focus newsletter published by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. I’m your host, science writer Ernie Hood. In this special edition of Focus In Sound, we bring you a panel discussion on career development that took place at the fund’s headquarters in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, on October 10th, 2018. 00;00;29;08 – 00;01;00;24 Ernie Hood During the networking meeting for new awardees, the awardees were treated to the wisdom of four distinguished guests from different backgrounds and at different stages of their careers. Dr. Nancy Andrews is the Nanaline H. Duke, professor of pediatric and Dean emeritus of the Duke University School of Medicine. Among her many achievements, she has been chair of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund board since 2015. 00;01;01;13 – 00;01;29;09 Ernie Hood Dr. Merrie Mosedale is a research assistant professor in the Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapy Ethics at the University of North Carolina Eshelman School of Pharmacy. She is the recipient of a Burroughs Wellcome Fund. Innovations in Regulatory Science Award. Dr. Fernando Pardo-Manuel de Villena is chair of the Department of Genetics at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. 00;01;29;22 – 00;02;05;11 Ernie Hood As chair, he oversees the department’s research enterprise, including multiple dedicated research centers. He is an international leader in the field of genetics. Dr. Rasheed Gbadegesin is a professor of pediatrics and professor in medicine at the Duke University School of Medicine. He is the principal investigator of a recently awarded Burroughs Wellcome Fund Physician, Scientist, Institutional Award. We begin with a brief introduction by Burroughs Wellcome Fund President Dr. John Burris. 00;02;05;25 – 00;02;40;14 Ernie Hood Then each of the four panelists will speak about their careers for a few moments, followed by questions from the event’s attendees. I will voice the questions from the audience to enhance their audio quality. We hope you enjoy the discussion and find it a value wherever you find yourself in your career path. Dr. Burris Today, we’re very excited to have four distinguished panelists who are going to provide advice from their perspectives on establishing a career established in your laboratory. 00;02;41;00 – 00;02;46;27 Ernie Hood Each of them comes from a slightly different perspective, and I think that will be helpful to you, Dr. Andrews. 00;02;47;18 – 00;03;09;13 Nancy Andrews So in thinking about what to say today and having done this, I don’t know, three or four times, maybe more, before I wanted to choose a topic that I thought probably wouldn’t come up with the other speakers because they’ll they’ll be able to help you in in practical ways that I may be a little too remote to help with. 00;03;09;29 – 00;03;32;00 Nancy Andrews I should say I maybe this is another disclosure. For ten years, I was the dean of the medical school at Duke. And so I watched many new faculty members come in in that role. And so I know something about it from that perspective and years ago, starting my own lab. But I wanted to to mention something that I think might otherwise be forgotten. 00;03;32;00 – 00;03;54;26 Nancy Andrews But looking back at my own career was very important. And in fact, your in being here kind of taking the advice I’m about to give you. And and that is that in science, perhaps this is true in any field. Networking is really important or building your network. And you do that in many ways. You do that by going to meetings like this. 00;03;55;06 – 00;04;23;19 Nancy Andrews You may do it by being coming involved in a professional society that you work with. You do it by just getting to know other people at the institutions you pass through during your training. And as you start your career, I would say, may be the least effective way to do it is to go up to a famous speaker after he or she gives a talk and say, Hi, I’m so-and-so, shake their hand and that’s it, because it’s not really going to start a relationship. 00;04;23;19 – 00;05;01;20 Nancy Andrews But looking back at my own career, the people who I met starting in medical school and graduate school, and then through different kinds of committees and organization and and travel to give talks at other institutions. The people I sat down with for half an hour when I was a visiting speaker who I thought were in a completely different field, end up being people who enriched my science in various ways, made it possible that when I needed to learn a new technique or find somebody who knew something about something I didn’t know anything about. 00;05;02;03 – 00;05;30;19 Nancy Andrews I could call on people from from that whole rich spectrum of connections that I developed over the years. So it’s something that in a way you’ll do passively. But I just want to urge you to, to value that because it makes a huge difference over time. I still think back to people I knew even as an undergraduate and they at the time, you know, we were students or they were faculty and I was a student and I didn’t really think about it. 00;05;30;19 – 00;05;55;04 Nancy Andrews But now being able to call them up and say, you know, I need to know something about malaria way outside my field, or we’re trying to recruit somebody who is in your field or whatever. It’s made science a lot better to have that breadth. Sometimes it can mean going to a seminar in an area that’s completely different from what you think about, and you might not even get to know a new person through that. 00;05;55;04 – 00;06;16;28 Nancy Andrews But but constantly stretching the way that you look at science going outside of your own field and developing what really turn out to be often lifelong connections is the version of networking that I want to put in a plug for. I think it makes a huge difference and you’re already doing it. But but over time, do it a lot more. 00;06;17;29 – 00;06;46;00 Merrie Mosedale Hi everyone. I’m Merrie Mosedale. I’m a research assistant professor and assistant director of the Institute for Drug Safety Sciences at the U.N. C Eshelman School of Pharmacy. So I am at the very opposite end of the spectrum here in terms of career experience as some of my more established colleagues on the panel. But I’m happy to share my experiences and my thoughts and hopefully they’ll be beneficial to you. 00;06;46;13 – 00;07;14;21 Merrie Mosedale So if I’m a research faculty member in the School of Pharmacy, it’s a little bit of a different position than a tenure track faculty. And I’m actually in the process now of trying to make that transition from research faculty to tenure track. And I’ve taken a little bit of an alternative route to get there. I was actually a research investigator at a toxicology research institute called the Hamner Institutes here in the Triangle area. 00;07;15;06 – 00;07;55;00 Merrie Mosedale And at the end of 2015, when Hamner closed down, I actually transitioned with my whole group over to the School of Pharmacy to serve in this research assistant professor role. And, you know, I have to say it’s been definitely a nontraditional route, but a great opportunity and great experience for me for many reasons. So serving in a research faculty role has allowed me to serve as a principal investigator for independent research projects, to secure my own funding to apply for and obtain funding many of the same types of funding opportunities as you can in a tenure track role. 00;07;55;27 – 00;08;19;15 Merrie Mosedale So I’ve been able to apply for and receive NIH grants, industry contracts and also private foundation funding. And I was a 2017 recipient of the Innovation and Regulatory Science Award. And so of course, that’s helped me bolster my CV, which is great as I prepare to make this transition into a tenure track role, I’ve been able to lead research projects. 00;08;19;15 – 00;08;47;15 Merrie Mosedale I gained that experience, which has been very valuable. I’ve been able to manage a team of students and post-docs and research scientists and research associates. I’ve, you know, with my own funding, been able to gain experience in managing funding and then also managing a research lab, which is very valuable as well. You know, I think it’s been a great opportunity to prepare me as I make this transition to a tenure track role. 00;08;48;08 – 00;09;06;24 Merrie Mosedale So, you know, I was thinking about the kind of advice I could give at my level that could be valuable to other folks participating today. And, you know, I was really thinking other three kind of things that I’d want to talk about. But really, when I thought more deeply about it, they all really fall under the same umbrella. 00;09;06;24 – 00;09;50;25 Merrie Mosedale And it’s similar to what Nancy was saying, that relationships are very important and they’re important clearly at all stages of your career. So I think the three kinds of relationships that I thought about were mentorship. And I’m sure you’ll hear this from other folks on the panel and probably other folks you’ve heard in these kinds of settings before how valuable it is to have a mentor that really believes in you, that supports you, and that can help guide you as you try to move forward in your career, both scientifically to provide feedback on your research projects and research questions and and pursuing funding opportunities, but particularly on your career and how to move forward in 00;09;50;25 – 00;10;19;06 Merrie Mosedale your career and to help make the right connections with other individuals that can help you move forward. Second, you kn

Program Officer Alfred Mays Provides Insight into the Career Awards for Science and Mathematics Teachers Transcription of “Career Awards for Science and Mathematics Teachers” 00;00;02;19 – 00;00;20;01 Ernie Hood We are here to share some important information about the career award for science and mathematics teachers from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. Joining me now is fund program officer for Science Education and Diversity, Alfred Mays, who oversees the award program. 00;00;20;01 – 00;00;43;26 Alfred Mays The Career Awards for Science and Math Teachers is one of our more recent awards. We’ve had several cycles It’s being offered every other year. We begin in 2012 and we concluded our last session in 2016. Now we’re upon our next cycle and we’re looking forward to creating greater awareness across the state with this particular award as its title. 00;00;44;01 – 00;00;52;17 Alfred Mays It recognizes the best and brightest in STEM across the state. It references science and math, but we like to say that it’s really recognizing STEM teachers. 00;00;52;26 – 00;01;01;15 Ernie Hood Alfred The deadline is rapidly approaching for this year’s awards applications. Fill us in on when it is and what needs to be done. 00;01;01;18 – 00;01;30;28 Alfred Mays We open up the request for proposals on May 21st through an online submission that can be made through the open application period, which, as you stated, closes September 24th of this year. And we did that in a strategic way. We want to provide teachers with awareness of this award at the end of the school year that would allow them time over the summer to actually reflect and prepare their proposal and to hopefully make final submission at the beginning of the school year. 00;01;31;03 – 00;01;44;07 Alfred Mays We typically ended the application previously in mid-September, but knowing how busy teachers are at the beginning of each school year, we decided to extend it an additional week. So we’re very hopeful that that will result in an increase in the applicant pool. 00;01;44;08 – 00;01;50;26 Ernie Hood Are there any other important aspects of the application process that interested teachers need to know? 00;01;51;02 – 00;02;24;19 Alfred Mays I think the grant applications and in some instances can be intimidating, especially when you’re referring to the best and brightest across the state in STEM teaching and learning. I would offer to teachers that the Burroughs Wellcome Fund seeks to recognize the best and brightest, and we know that teachers across the state are talented. Many of them feel that promoting themselves is somewhat difficult, but we seek for them to do that, to highlight their accomplishments, to highlight the body of work, their successes and what they would propose in terms of having an impact on student growth and outcomes. 00;02;25;02 – 00;02;41;00 Alfred Mays So the grant application itself is somewhat formal. The process and reviewing selections is somewhat formal, but teachers should be able to relax and simply reflect and propose knowing that they do wonderful things in the classroom every day. And we just like to know more about what they’re doing and recognize that. 00;02;42;10 – 00;02;50;04 Ernie Hood So should interested teachers contact you directly if they have questions about the application process or the status of their applications? 00;02;50;09 – 00;03;14;24 Alfred Mays I think those interested in applying should perhaps go to our website and get a get general overview of the the award program itself. And after reviewing the information, share on the website, feel free to give our staff a call for any questions or if they’re in need of additional information. I would also suggest that those interested perhaps visit our website and look at our prior award recipients. 00;03;14;24 – 00;03;27;21 Alfred Mays Our cohort of awardees stand ready to answer questions and actually share information about their experience from the application process through the actual end of the war period and the impact that they’ve had as a result of the war. 00;03;28;13 – 00;03;37;18 Ernie Hood Alfred, thanks for joining me today. To help generate new interest and enthusiasm for the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award for science and mathematics teachers. 00;03;37;27 – 00;03;42;21 Alfred Mays Thank you, Terry, and thanks for sharing this information with our volunteers.

In this edition of FOCUS In Sound, we focus on an outstanding teacher, Andi Webb, who has been recognized in the past by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, and we’ll see what impact that recognition has had on her career, her teaching, and her life. Transcription of “Interview with Andi Webb” 00;00;02;20 – 00;00;28;28 Ernie Hood Welcome to Focus In Sound, the podcast series from the Focus newsletter published by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. I’m your host, science writer Ernie Hood. In this edition of Focus In Sound, we focus on an outstanding teacher who has been recognized in the past by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, and we’ll see what impact that recognition has had on her career, her teaching and her life. 00;00;29;21 – 00;01;07;08 Ernie Hood Andi Webb is a math coach at Alderman Road Elementary School in Fayetteville, North Carolina. She has 19 years of experience in the classroom with a proven track record of leadership at many grade levels and in different subject areas. She is an instructional coach and mentor for other teachers and has led professional development opportunities for teachers. Andi was born and raised in North Carolina and received her education in the Cumberland County schools and graduated from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington with a double major in elementary education and English. 00;01;07;25 – 00;01;32;13 Ernie Hood She earned a master’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in education with a focus on K through eight science education. As we go here, she has traveled all over the world pursuing her passion for teaching science and math. Among the many honors Andi has won for her teaching achievements. She is a national board certified teacher. 00;01;33;01 – 00;01;53;21 Ernie Hood In 2015, she was honored with a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award for Science and Mathematics Teachers. The career award provides $175,000 in support over five years to eligible teachers in the North Carolina public school system. Andi Webb, welcome to Focus In Sound. 00;01;53;27 – 00;01;55;00 Andi Webb Thank you for having me. 00;01;55;22 – 00;02;06;14 Ernie Hood Andi, you’re roughly halfway through your five year career award funding. What has the career award allowed you to do that you would otherwise have been unable to do? 00;02;07;08 – 00;02;29;21 Andi Webb The career award has provided opportunities for high quality professional development, not only for myself, but for my colleagues on our Singapore team. The career award has also provided instructional materials for the teachers throughout my school. Kindergarten through fifth grade, as well as put instruction materials in the hands of our students that they did not have previously. 00;02;30;00 – 00;02;39;01 Ernie Hood Well, you have certainly been quite the world traveler over the past several years. Tell us a bit about some of the places you’ve visited and experience as you’ve had. 00;02;40;03 – 00;03;17;17 Andi Webb I’ve had the privilege to travel to six out of seven continents and approximately 40 countries. One of my favorite countries to travel is Indonesia. I’ve been there three times now and have hopes to return again. I worked there through a program that partnered American teachers with schools in predominantly Muslim areas. The school where I worked was formed for displaced children after the 2000 forced Toonami and I feel that the people there are what I call my Chinese family because the school is for Kola Soup, my bank, the school in Aceh, Indonesia. 00;03;18;23 – 00;03;21;29 Ernie Hood How have these many travels affected you as an educator? 00;03;23;05 – 00;03;44;26 Andi Webb The travels have affected me as an educator by making me much more open minded. I don’t think that I was closed minded prior to my travels, but I do believe that I am much more open minded than I was previously. I also think that my travels have enabled me to better relate to our students who come from different areas of the world and have very different backgrounds than what we may be familiar with. 00;03;46;07 – 00;03;54;27 Ernie Hood As an educator in Fayetteville, North Carolina, which is known for being the home of Fort Bragg, I’m sure your student population is quite diverse. 00;03;55;04 – 00;04;24;27 Andi Webb It is diverse. We actually, at our school had the highest number of English language learners of all elementary schools in Cumberland County. But in the last few years, we’ve had students that have come from Russia and even from Yemen. We have a student in our school now who is from Yemen, and he speaks Arabic. He and I have a very good rapport with each other, and I don’t think that I would have had that without my travels in the Middle East and my attempt at learning at least a few phrases in Arabic. 00;04;26;02 – 00;04;34;08 Ernie Hood You mentioned already that you’re a practitioner of the Singapore math teaching method and you’ve been to Singapore. 00;04;34;14 – 00;04;56;26 Andi Webb Yes, I and the coach for our Singapore math team. Until this year, we’ve had eight members, including myself of our Singapore math team. We lost one of our members to a neighboring school to further her career as an instructional coach, and she is now serving as the Singapore math coach at her new school. And then our principal retired. 00;04;57;07 – 00;05;04;28 Andi Webb But I was able to travel to Singapore and live and study there for three and a half months through the Fulbright Distinguished Awards and Teaching program. 00;05;05;08 – 00;05;10;26 Ernie Hood For the benefit of our listeners who may not be familiar with it. Briefly, tell us about the Singapore method. 00;05;11;03 – 00;05;33;29 Andi Webb Absolutely. What I think predominantly is best to say about the Singapore math method, it’s it’s really just best practices that as teachers we know we should do anyway. Singapore is a small country, so they’re they’re able to be much more consistent than sometimes we can be in such a large country. But one of the components of Singapore math is what we call CPA. 00;05;34;08 – 00;05;53;17 Andi Webb The C is for concrete. The P is for pictorial and the A is for abstract. So the thought process behind that is when you’re teaching children a new skill or math standard, you start with the concrete and you have manipulatives that they can use in their hands. And then you move to the pictorial level where they can draw pictures. 00;05;53;25 – 00;06;22;06 Andi Webb And then the final stage should be the abstract stage or the algorithm. And if they struggle when they get to the abstract stage, then you should back up and go back to the concrete or pictorial stages. It’s very effective in teaching, especially for struggling learners. Another concept of Singapore math is the why before the how. So typically in math we tend to teach children the how of solving an algorithm, but like in reading comprehension is very important. 00;06;22;14 – 00;06;45;15 Andi Webb So in mathematics, comprehension and understanding the why children are doing something and not just the how is extremely important and as a part of Singapore math. So children need to be able to rationalize how they came up with the solution. We also need to be able to accept multiple ways to solve a problem and have children talk about that and explain it to us so that we better understand their thought processes and how they learn. 00;06;45;24 – 00;06;55;08 Andi Webb Another component of Singapore math is called model drawing. Some people call it bar modeling. It’s very effective for word problems and it’s extremely effective for struggling learners. 00;06;56;16 – 00;07;03;12 Ernie Hood I understand that when you were studying in Singapore, the math teachers actually didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. 00;07;03;22 – 00;07;27;09 Andi Webb They didn’t. They call mathematics and what we call Singapore math. They say maths. And at one of the schools that I was assigned to the principal had asked me to explain what my research was focused upon, and I told her it was Singapore math. And she said, What is Singapore math? And she’s a Singaporean. And so I explained how we view it and she thought it was hilarious. 00;07;27;19 – 00;07;42;09 Andi Webb She asked me to explain to the staff at a staff meeting what Singapore Math was. So I did and the entire staff laughed because I thought it was funny that everyone else in the world besides Singapore, calls it Singapore math. They simply call it maths. 00;07;43;24 – 00;07;52;02 Ernie Hood And the overall. Do you think the career award has empowered you to become a better educator? And if so, how so? 00;07;53;06 – 00;08;13;18 Andi Webb I absolutely do. I think that it has made me feel respected as an educator, much more so than I ever had felt prior to becoming a career award winner through Burroughs Wellcome Fund. It has allowed me to attend high quality professional development at the national and international levels that I would not have been able to participate in otherwise. 00;08;14;03 – 00;08;38;04 Andi Webb It’s allowed me to purchase very strategic instructional materials that our school needed for our teachers and our students. I am also completing my second year of my work in my Doctor of Education and Educational Leadership for East Carolina. So there’s numerous opportunities that Burroughs Wellcome Fund has provided me I would not have had otherwise. Most importantly, the respect that I feel as an educator. 00;08;39;00 – 00;08;48;20 Ernie Hood Andi What kind of effect has the career award had on your colleagues and your school district? What is the division in the career awards funding Distribution? 00;08;49;20 – 00;09;18;03 Andi Webb The division is $10,000 per year for professional development, $10,000 per year for instruction materials, $10,000 per year for salary stipend and $5,000 per year that is saved for the awardee. At the end of the five year time frame, if you complete the entire five years of the career awar

In this edition of FOCUS In Sound, we check in with Dr. John Burris, President of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, for an annual report in sound for the Fund for 2017. It was quite a significant year in many ways for the Fund, where John has been president since 2008. Transcription of “2017 Annual Report with John Burris” 00;00;04;22 – 00;00;33;00 Ernie Hood Welcome to Focus In Sound, the podcast series from the Focus newsletter published by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. I’m your host, science writer Ernie Hood. In this edition of Focus In Sound, we check in with Dr. John Burris, president of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund for an annual report in Sound for the Fund for 2017. It was quite a significant year in many ways for the fund where John has been president since 2008. 00;00;33;19 – 00;00;40;02 Ernie Hood John hardly seems possible that a year has actually gone by since our last Focus In Sound conversation. 00;00;40;15 – 00;00;45;19 John Burris It’s been a very eventful year and I’m looking forward to chatting with you again, Ernie. 00;00;46;03 – 00;01;02;06 Ernie Hood Well, when we spoke last year, you cited the fund’s support for several researchers responding to the Zika crisis as perhaps the headline for 2016. What would you see as the lead story when it comes to the fund’s activities in 2017? 00;01;03;17 – 00;01;30;00 John Burris I think the recognition and we are not uniquely in recognizing this, that there’s an enormous group of individuals who could be doing biomedical research but are not for a variety of reasons, and those are individuals who have only an M.D. degree. Turns out that less than one and a half percent of the MDs in the United States actually conduct research. 00;01;30;13 – 00;02;08;08 John Burris And that means that certainly most of the rest are not in a position or interested in research. But if we can gather a few of those other 98 and a half percent, the individuals who are MDs to do research, we could greatly expand the number of individuals tackling the important questions that we see in biomedical research. So I think the board’s recognition of this and as I said, it’s not a new one, but the boards decision to try to do something about this, I guess I would say, is sort of our lead take home of things that we’re doing differently in 2017 and going into 2018. 00;02;08;19 – 00;02;14;25 Ernie Hood I see. Now is that the support for the funding of career awards for medical scientists? 00;02;15;11 – 00;02;41;24 John Burris No, this is actually going past that. The career words from medical scientists in the most part of those awardees, most of them are M.D. PhDs. In other words, they’re committed to a research career. They’ve specifically gotten a Ph.D., which has helped train them in research. We’re talking about the rest of the group, both in medical school and in practicing physicians, those who only have received an M.D.. 00;02;42;12 – 00;03;31;02 John Burris We’re approaching this also from a different perspective than the career awards in medical sciences, which go to individuals. We felt that the sort of point that would make the most sense to tackle this issue is at the institutional level. There are 115 plus medical schools in the United States, and we decided if we can fund a few of those medical schools specifically to do something with their curriculum, something with their training, something with residence, something with fellows, something with junior faculty members that would provide them with an environment that enables them to both learn more about research and then also to conduct research that that would be the best way. 00;03;31;02 – 00;03;54;20 John Burris In other words, to be greater multiplier, to provide large grants to several medical schools, and then tell them, try your novel ideas, see if we can increase the number of MDs who are doing research that way. So that’s why the program is quite different than CAMHS, which is the career awards in medical science, as you alluded to, where we specifically say John Doe or Jane Doe. 00;03;55;26 – 00;04;11;21 John Burris Here’s funding for you to continue research. We’re looking to somehow expand the numbers and we want then the sort of initiative and inventive spirits of selected medical schools to in fact, do that for us. 00;04;13;03 – 00;04;27;25 Ernie Hood I see. Well, thank you for clarifying that. John, beyond that headline, one of the things that’s always so impressive about the fund is the diversity of its programs and pursuits. Would you elaborate on that concept? 00;04;28;14 – 00;05;21;23 John Burris We have a rather straightforward vision to promote and support biomedical research and education. But the term biomedical is a pretty broad and overarching descriptor, and that’s enabled us to look at many different ways where biomedical research and education could be approached. I’ve just alluded to the one with the institutional program for physician scientists, but we saw many years ago a program that started in 1996 actually as an institutional program where we said a lot of the advances in biomedical research are not going to come exclusively from MDS or exclusively from biologists, but in fact from people who come from different disciplines computer scientists, engineers, physicists, chemists. 00;05;22;03 – 00;05;45;17 John Burris And that gave rise to, first, an institutional program and now career awards at the scientific interface. Lots of times, people getting together and looking at a longstanding problem with a different perspective is extremely productive. And we’ve been excited over the years with the KC program, as I said, career awards at the scientific interface and then under the umbrella of biomedical research. 00;05;46;02 – 00;06;13;21 John Burris We look for areas where we think they’re important but underfunded, and so we get diversity in the programs simply through tackling problems like problems in parasitology, where there’s not much research in the United States and preterm birth, which we’ve talked about in previous years. But again, this is an area of, say, 12% of births in the United States are preterm, and we don’t do much research in that area. 00;06;13;22 – 00;06;38;14 John Burris So with a big umbrella, there are lots of diverse areas that one can tackle. And I haven’t even alluded to, you know, education from different perspectives and also the workforce issues, who becomes a biomedical researcher, who goes to teach and what do we teach young kids in terms of STEM? So there’s lots of space under that tent for diversity. 00;06;38;19 – 00;06;44;13 Ernie Hood Are there any new programs or initiatives that were launched in 2017 that you’d like to discuss? 00;06;44;19 – 00;07;15;00 John Burris Well, the main one is the one that we’ve already discussed. That’s the institutional program for physician scientists. And so I think our primary efforts in terms of new have been in that area and the request for proposals have gone out. And the preliminary round of review has occurred. And we hope to make our first awards in 2018. So that’s the one big new program. 00;07;15;09 – 00;07;39;15 John Burris We remain committed to our existing programs. As you know, every five years we take a look at our entire portfolio and what we call terrain mapping. This is what’s not this past year, but we did, as I say, added that new program and then maintained status quo in terms of other programs which will run again this year and ran in 2017. 00;07;40;12 – 00;07;54;04 Ernie Hood Well, John, one of the trends I’m seeing is that you and the Fund are increasing your support for the role of science communication. Would you expound on that for us? 00;07;54;24 – 00;08;19;07 John Burris Well, one of the things that we’ve done that probably sets us apart from many foundations is that we’ve been very concerned not just in terms of educating the public, which seems to be what many people fall back on science education. In other words, they start with the assumption, well, people don’t know anything and we’re going to teach them not a very good perspective from whence to begin. 00;08;20;13 – 00;08;46;16 John Burris And so we continue to support science education a variety of ways, both at K-through-12 level and also outside of K through 12, through things such as support of the Science Festival and a variety of what I call the more standard, both formal, which is in schools and the informal which is outside of schools and that’s certainly a very big part of communication. 00;08;47;00 – 00;09;21;02 John Burris I think we’re a little bit different than most foundations in that we support and encourage communication among scientists and hope that we can improve the ability of scientists to talk to their peers and wallahs talk to people who may not be scientists. And so one of the things that we do is in our process, if you want to get one of our awards, in most cases you come to Research Triangle Park and are interviewed and communication is extraordinarily important there. 00;09;21;17 – 00;09;50;09 John Burris If there are twice as many finalists as awards, certainly if you can’t say it in an articulate fashion, you’re at a disadvantage. The other thing that we’ve noticed more junior scientists as they come up, have very little training in speaking. As I’ve said, speech classes have pretty much disappeared from the curriculum. And so there’s not much opportunity for young people to get up and speak publicly. 00;09;50;28 – 00;10;32;03 John Burris And the past graduate students and postdocs at meetings gave presentations. He would give a ten minute presentation and then be grilled by the audience in the interest of efficiency. We’ve now gone almost exclusively to posters or certainly primarily to posters that means that you put your material up in a written form and stand there and answer questions, etc. But that’s very different, as you know, than getting up in front of a group and communicating or communicating with

In this edition of FOCUS In Sound, we check in with Dr. John Burris, President of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, for an annual report in sound for the Fund for 2016. It was a momentous year in so many ways, including for the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, where John has been president since 2008. Transcription of “Interview with John Burris” 00;00;07;27 – 00;00;39;13 Ernie Hood Welcome to Focus In Sound, the podcast series from the Focus newsletter published by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. I’m your host, science writer Ernie Hood. In this edition of Focus In Sound, we check in with Dr. John Burris, president of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund for an annual report in Sound for the Fund for 2016. It was a momentous year in so many ways, including for the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, where John has been president since 2008. 00;00;40;21 – 00;00;43;05 Ernie Hood Dr. John Burris, welcome to Focus In Sound. 00;00;44;00 – 00;00;47;25 John Burris Greetings to you, Ernie. It’s always a pleasure to see you and have a chance to chat with you. 00;00;48;15 – 00;01;00;17 Ernie Hood Well, John, we want to go over several of the fund’s 2016 highlights, but get us started. What would you see as the headline for the year? Was there one overarching development in your thinking? 00;01;01;05 – 00;01;25;05 John Burris I think, as always, it’s a whole variety since we fund a large number of researchers. But one of the things that sort of jumped out at me is the response of a number of our awardees to the Zika crisis. It turns out that we had funded no one specifically in Zika. In fact, almost no one was being funded in the United States or the world on Zika. 00;01;25;05 – 00;01;58;22 John Burris But we had, because of our philosophy, which is to pick the best and brightest investigators, we had a number of investigators with the tools which enabled them to shift their focus from other model organisms, other viral diseases, other mosquito borne pathogens, and focus on Zika. So in a relatively short period of time, six or eight of our investigators actually had projects on Zika, ranging from one new was looking at how Zika was crossing the placenta. 00;01;59;02 – 00;02;28;28 John Burris Another looking at the epidemiology of Zika. So I think as an illustration of our philosophy, which is to find investigators who have the tools, the initiative, the innovative skills to pursue questions that they not necessarily even knew about when they started the project, when they started as scientists was borne out in this response to Zika. So we were very pleased with that. 00;02;28;28 – 00;02;36;16 John Burris And we put together a brochure slash booklet which chronicles the activities of six of our investigators working on Zika. 00;02;36;23 – 00;02;44;21 Ernie Hood John, what you just told me speaks very much also to what I would perceive as the flexibility of of the fund. 00;02;45;09 – 00;03;12;13 John Burris Yes. And I think probably when we talk to the individuals who receive funding from us, who are career development authorities and others, they comment that one of the reasons they particularly like being funded by the Burroughs Wellcome is that we don’t expect them to spend all their money in one year. So we don’t see anybody spending on December 28th and ordering 10,000 pipettes to use up their money for the year. 00;03;12;16 – 00;03;32;21 John Burris We let them carry money forward and we tell them we’re really betting on you as an individual and we’re betting that you will do a good job in science, in answering important questions. And we’re as flexible as those scientists are if they change direction. And it’s a reasonable change. The dollars are flexible and follow them. 00;03;33;15 – 00;03;42;24 Ernie Hood John, The fund’s basic mission, of course, is to fund biomedical research and education. How would you say that mission was pursued in 2016? 00;03;43;17 – 00;04;24;01 John Burris Well, we fund individuals and organizations, the individuals doing biomedical research. And organization. Some of our grants are actually organizational. And then in the educational world, we fund both individuals and also schools, universities, etc., is pursued the same way that it has been for many years, which is we see our goal as enhancing research and improving education. And so the way it’s pursued is as different as the individuals who pursue it. 00;04;24;19 – 00;04;54;27 John Burris So you may have one investigator who approaches this problem from a very multidisciplinary stance who connects with a lot of individuals, who does interdisciplinary research, that involves colleagues who are mathematicians or physicists or chemists or biochemists and other individuals who tend to work in a much more individual fashion. So when you talk about pursue, research is pursued because we provide flexible funding in a very flexible way. 00;04;55;01 – 00;05;17;24 John Burris And at the educational area, again, we want the funding to make its way to the ultimate recipient, which is of course the student or the teacher, the teacher as the individual who assists the student and of course the student as being the group that we ultimately want to learn more about science, more about mathematics, more about technology. 00;05;18;11 – 00;05;23;21 Ernie Hood So how were existing programs changed or expanded over the course of the year? 00;05;24;11 – 00;05;53;24 John Burris That’s a good question. One of the things that, you know, if not in our mission statement, certainly one of our principles, is that we fund areas that we consider important yet underfunded. Let me take as an example preterm birth, an incredibly important area. About 12% of babies in the United States are born prematurely. But there’s very little support for understanding of prematurity, very little understanding of the basic reproductive biology. 00;05;54;12 – 00;06;20;13 John Burris So that’s an example of how our program has evolved and grown. We see as underfunded yet important. And sometimes the opposite happens. And one of the examples of that would be what we call translational research that is moving from the bench to the bedside. Incredibly important area. When we started funding it. Very few foundations were involved in it. 00;06;20;13 – 00;06;45;17 John Burris There was very little work being done where the basic research was being translated into something that could be used to assist a patient, help procure a patient. And we were giving in the ballpark of 5 to $10 million a year, which for us is substantial. But the niche has jumped into that with both feet as established and institute specifically directed in that area. 00;06;45;25 – 00;07;02;19 John Burris And so we thought, yes, this is still important, but we don’t see it as being underfunded at the same level when we started with it. So there’s always some things move off center stage as others pick them up as other ones sort of emerge as issues of importance. 00;07;03;10 – 00;07;07;17 Ernie Hood So has the overall focus changed? Has it evolved over the years? 00;07;08;14 – 00;07;36;03 John Burris I think the overall focus of biomedical research and education has stayed the same. So that’s our mission. Our mission statement has remained the same, but within that, clearly changes have occurred. Let us talk briefly about education. Initially, we supported only so-called informal science and math education, that is education that occurs outside the classroom. And we saw that as our niche. 00;07;36;17 – 00;08;12;12 John Burris And so we focused on that when we focused on education. We’ve realized that there is a need for a lot more assistance to be provided to teachers. A number of school districts have dropped any professional development for their teachers, and we saw that in fact, a bit more of a focus on teachers was warranted, not just the informal out of school education, but also providing professional development for teachers and also recognizing teachers through career awards just as we give to the scientists. 00;08;12;29 – 00;08;38;08 John Burris So although we still remain interested in focused on science and math education in North Carolina, we are now focusing not just on providing resources and opportunities for the students, but also for the teachers, since we see how important they are. If we have a teacher, he or she will reach my classroom a day, and if they’re a specialist, they’ll even reach even more than those 30 or so students. 00;08;38;08 – 00;08;44;06 John Burris So that would be an example of sort of a change in our funding in education. 00;08;44;29 – 00;09;02;18 Ernie Hood Obviously, the fund has been engaged in these activities for many years now. Do you think you’re seeing tangible results returns on your investments in scientific research, scientists, career development and secondary science education? 00;09;02;27 – 00;09;33;02 John Burris Interesting question, because of course outcomes is something that foundations and everyone else who provides funding is always asking, is my funding having any effect? Am I changing the world for the better? And we’re pretty confident that, in fact, if we look at our researchers, our funding has made a difference and those researchers in turn have made a difference in research as it’s conducted in the United States primarily. 00;09;33;19 – 00;10;08;28 John Burris How do we quantify that? We look at things like publications. We look at where articles are published that sort of the commodity or the measure that oftentimes is applied in science. We look at how they’re moving through the promotion and tenure system. Are they getting promoted? Are they receiving tenure at various colleges and universities? We look at their funding from sources other than the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, and we’re gratified to see that they’re also getting grants from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation. 00;10;09;12 – 00;10;46;13 John Burris So by every measure, the individuals that we’