Biotech LifeStream: Flowing with the Innovators of Tomorrow

Camila Zanella, Harvard PhD: A neuroscience researcher's life | Collaboration in research | Looking at the next generation researchers

• Paeto Wangweera • Season 1 • Episode 2

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"Keep being curious, and keep questioning."

Our guest today is Camila Zanella, a Harvard Ph.D. student from Brazil. Camila is an expert researcher working on experiments related to neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. In this episode, Camila shared remarkable insights about her experience working in such a prestigious lab.

Summary of the topics covered

- The road to becoming a biology PhD 
- Research/ life harmony 
- The research environment at a laboratory in Harvard
- The research on fruitflies for neurodegenerative diseases
- The ups and downs of Collaboration in research 
- The field of biotech in the future 
- Advice for students 


Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Lifestream podcast, your gateway to the cutting-edge world of biotechnology. Deep dive with us into the heart of biotech, discussing questions like potential advancements and dilemmas in the field. On Lifestream, we bring conversations to life with honorable professors, ceos and the next generation of strong biotech passions. Join us on this journey of discovery and inspiration in the ever-evolving realm of biotechnology with your host Pato.

Speaker 2:

Okay, welcome to our show, Camilla. How are you doing today?

Speaker 3:

I'm doing great, and how are you?

Speaker 2:

I'm great. I'm great. It's really nice to have you on our show. Let's get right into the first question. First of all, can you just introduce yourself to our audiences and just what do you do in your career, or maybe what you just do on your free time as well?

Speaker 3:

Okay, so thanks for having me. It's a great pleasure to help you with your questions and interviewing, and this process is really important for people that want to have a career in science. So my name is Camila Zanella. I am originally from Brazil, I am a biologist and right now I'm doing a post-doctorate degree, meaning I finished my master's and my PhD degree and now I'm pursuing a post-doc at Harvard Medical School, and so I work currently with Alzheimer's disease, so I try to understand the mechanisms underlying the disease, doing basic research, and in my free time I play music, so I like to play different instruments.

Speaker 2:

That's pretty sick. Can you tell us what instrument you play? Hmm, that's pretty sick, can you?

Speaker 3:

tell us what instrument you play. Yes, I started playing guitar when I was 13 and I learned how to play cello recently, and now I'm currently taking keyboard classes.

Speaker 2:

Hmm, is music kind of a way of getting out of your kind of work mode?

Speaker 3:

Like, does it relieve your stress? Kind of like that it does. And as far as you go in science, especially when you're doing your phd or things that you're doing experiments are really hard and very challenging. You get your brain very tired, so it's really good to come home and have some way to relieve that and it kind of boosts your creativity. So it is. It is a way to relieve that and then kind of boost your creativity. So it is.

Speaker 2:

It is a way to navigate difficult times well, it really matches with your expertise, right, because you are doing neuroscience and I'm pretty sure you kind of have like an uh, like an understanding of how music affects your performance or academic performance, something like that. Yeah, that's pretty cool.

Speaker 3:

It is. It is really cool and this is one thing that if I eventually end up having my own lab, I would be thrilled to study the effects that music have in the brain. So there's a lot of people who are studying this right now, so this is really, really interesting.

Speaker 2:

That's great. Now, Camila, can you describe what initially inspired you to immerse in the field of biology, especially in your expertise of neuroscience, and also what inspired you to pursue a PhD? Because that is a really big decision that people make.

Speaker 3:

So when I was in high school, I already liked biology quite a lot and I would always have like extra questions other than what I was just seeing in school. So I would just come home and not just study for a test, I would just start studying things that I wanted to know the answer. So right now, with the technology you have, you can just Google things up and you can read articles and you can read things and you have access to a lot of information. So it started with that. So I really love genetics at the time. I really love it, the things that I was learning in biology and things about the brain, and so I decided to pursue my career in biology. So I did a test and I passed and I got in college, I was accepted and then I started having a lot of migraines at the time and so I went to the neurologist and he got a little concerned because I was having a lot of headaches, and so he opened a neuroscience book in front of me. He opened that brain and, instead of being worried that something could be wrong with me, I just got fascinated. I was like, oh my god, all these headaches I'm having, all this trouble the brain is responsible for all this. I just want to study this.

Speaker 3:

And so at the time I was already involved with junior science, so I was already a junior scientist. I was already involved with junior science, so I was already a junior scientist. I was already going to a lab, I was studying plants, I was studying genetics, I was working a lot with bacteria and cloning, but I was not studying the brain. And so I just came up to my professors and I said I want to study the brain, I just am thrilled about it, I want to read about it, I want to know more.

Speaker 3:

And they were non-neuroscientists. But they told me go and figure it out, come back to us with a question you want to answer, with a plan of an experiment. And so I did some homework and I went back and forth in a lot of meetings with them, and then we just come up with a whole project that I could develop in the university. So that's how everything started. And so once you are curious, you just want to answer questions and you learn a method and you get an answer. You analyze that result that gives you motivation to ask other questions, and so the science go, and that's when I decided to pursue my PhD.

Speaker 2:

Okay, and since you made like an abrupt switch from genetics to neuroscience, how was the transition? Like it must have been hard, I'm pretty sure.

Speaker 3:

So transitions are never easy, but if you are following a passion, you're following something you really love to study. It just flows. So during my master's I still wasn't studying alzheimer's disease. I was in a lab that was studying defensive behavior in rats. So I was still studying the brain and I was still trying to understand the neurobiology and connecting like nuclei in the brain and how those structures function together to promote a behavior. But that was not Alzheimer's disease and I really wanted to dig into Alzheimer's disease models. So in my free time I would just read papers about Alzheimer's disease.

Speaker 3:

I would just read papers about memory and behavior and how those things work together, so the transition is easier. When you're going to a field that you like, you would just read and feel more motivated to understand what's happening yeah, that's great.

Speaker 2:

That's um one of the advice you would give to students too.

Speaker 3:

Right, just follow your passion yeah, so that very cliche, but it's very real. So when you're very motivated about something, it's very likely that you will do a good job. So I feel a little cautious about giving advice, because everybody has a different story, everybody has a different path and everybody has a different set of opportunities available. So I think that being curious and not giving up on your dream is a big start as an advice.

Speaker 2:

All right, that's great. That's great. Well, thank you so much for all the stories that you gave us. Now can I ask you to describe your experience at Harvard, and I would like really you know specific stories, if, if you could provide it for us so I joined Harvard Medical School in December of 2019 and right now we are in April 2024.

Speaker 3:

So it's been a couple of years and I can only compare the story of being in Harvard with the story compared to the places I've been before, and so the first real shock I had is the amount of resources we have. So our lab is really big and therefore we can afford a lot of reagents, a lot of kits. That, if you're doing like biochemistry, if you're doing in vivo, if you're doing in vitro experiments, that makes your life a lot easier. So that is really a limit where what is your question of your project and what your mind can think about on how testing those ideas, and then you can just do it. And that was very, very different when I was in Brazil, where our lab was smaller and we had less resources. So if I wanted to do an in vivo experiment that involved virus injection in the brain, that was something we would love to do, but we would just not have the resources to do it. And here I have done multiples of those experiments already. So that's one example, those experiments already. So that's one example.

Speaker 3:

Another specific example from my experience is that people work a lot. So people work almost every day. So every time you go to the lab you will find someone doing experiments or reading or writing rants, and that extends to PhD students from PhD students to professors. So you see them in the lab and holidays, and so and I think it has been a very important experience in terms of learning so you have a chance to collaborate with different labs. My lab currently has collaborations with people from different universities around the United States, and also we collaborate with MIT, so we kind of have a chance to collaborate with people that is not doing just biology but is also doing like systems biology and computational biology. So I'm learning a lot, not just inside of my field.

Speaker 2:

Oh, and would you say that it is a stressful experience, since you talked about how they work on holidays and stuff like that, or would you describe it more as a really good experience, a fun experience?

Speaker 3:

So I think that that will depend for every person. So to me, I still am allowed to do my own time in the lab. So for my case, I understand that it's important to have time off, because that's how I recharge and that's how I am able to have ideas and keep my project going well. So for me it's a good experience, because I am in an environment and we have to understand that Harvard is a huge university and your lab is just a part of that universe. So your lab is going to be very different. So you cannot take Harvard as my lab, because there are different labs with different professors and things are done differently. So in some cases some pis or some principal investigators will want their students to be in the lab from eight to six, from nine to five, and this time that's not my case, but my pi, so she's very flexible. So I am allowed to have my days and my time. So for it's not a stressful experience.

Speaker 2:

Oh, okay, and with the amount of resources, the only thing that's limiting you is just your own mind. Would?

Speaker 3:

you say that, yeah.

Speaker 3:

So the thing is you are allowed to have great ideas, and that's why a lot of people in many labs they come up with ideas and they end up making biotechs.

Speaker 3:

They have a project, and so this is what we have to kind of understand how the logistic is. So if you're in a lab and you're working with a specific project and you see that that can help people, that can cure disease, and your pi is supportive of that, you can go ahead and get investors in your idea and you can open your own biopharma, your own company. But in other labs you might have a lot of ideas that don't fit your project. So in that case you have to hold your horses, study your idea and then maybe wait for a future opportunity, because currently my lab is really really great and developing skills for people that want to have their own labs, and so that means doing basic research and understanding important and fundamental biological questions and then putting this information out there so everybody will have the opportunity to read our papers and our publications in a couple of years. So it really depends on which lab you are, but you're pretty much limited by your own ideas.

Speaker 2:

And when you do research, do you consider about the clinical trials? When you do research, do you consider about the clinical trials?

Speaker 3:

So our lab doesn't. So our lab is careful in a way where our main model of the lab is Drosophila melanogaster. So imagine we study Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, Alexander's disease and so on in fruit flies. So we are very careful to validate our findings from Drosophila in mammalian systems because that's close to the human, as close as we can get. But that's where our research ends. So if we have a very great finding, we're going to write a great publication, we're going to put that available to other people, Maybe use that information to go on for clinical trials. But our laboratory currently is not interested in running those type of experiments, which have lots and lots of layers of more complication and design than you have to think about. So we are in the basic research side.

Speaker 2:

Oh, so you're like the initiative part.

Speaker 3:

All the ideas come from you guys I wouldn't be so ambitious to say that, but we contribute, we contribute a lot yeah that's cool.

Speaker 2:

That's cool, that's really cool actually. Um, I'm pretty surprised. Okay, well, can you describe some big milestone in your research career, like do you have a really significant finding or something new or or experimental you have encountered?

Speaker 3:

yeah. So right now I am working on two projects. This is again not a hardware thing, but it's a thing in my lab, um, where every postdoc in my lab only has postdocs. We are allowed to choose two projects to work on, so we can choose what is more exciting for us. Of course, I picked Alzheimer's disease because I wanted to study that my whole life and one of my projects is so novel that I'm not allowed to talk about it.

Speaker 3:

So I went to a conference, a genetics conference, because we do a lot of genetics still in the lab with the Drosophila and I really wanted to go in the conference and talk about it and show the results and say, oh, this is so novel, we're finding this in the brain for the first time.

Speaker 3:

People have shown this in different systems, but we are seeing in the brain and my professor was like, no, we need to be careful. We want the publication to be out first. We want to tell a story, we want to test this. Then you will be allowed to talk about it. So I would say I can answer your question in maybe one year or so, when we put this paper out. Then I can tell you all of it. But yes, I do have some really cool and novel findings that I'm working on, and so I can just tell you that it's related to Alzheimer's disease and is related to how the neurons trigger cell death and how that is expected to happen in the field. So we are kind of digging into those mechanisms expected to happen in the field.

Speaker 2:

So we are kind of digging into those mechanisms. All right, um, yeah, I see, so I'll be waiting for your publication. You have to let us know once you publish that paper. I'm going to read through every, every word of them. Actually, all right, um, and in terms of working or collaborating with your colleagues, is there any tips and tricks you've learned through collaboration in research?

Speaker 3:

Yes. So I am very lucky that I have great co-workers, I have great colleagues, so it's it's a pleasure to collaborate, and by collaborating I mean, oh, you need help with this experiment, let's do the experiment together. Or oh, you learned something in the past that I don't know, can you teach me? And vice versa. So we have a very collaborative environment.

Speaker 3:

And so I think that a very important thing is about collaboration is because I had the opportunity to collaborate with many people over the years so this is not just during my postdocs, during my whole life is to understand the personality of the person you are working with. So sometimes people are really good and really organized and if they schedule us to start the experiment at 9am, okay, I will be there at 9am, but some people have a different personality and they will show up at 11. And then you will be really mad and then you'll be like you know, respecting my time, and then you kind of have some conflicts. So I think that when you collaborate with someone understanding, like, their limitations or how they like to work or what is the expectations in terms of time, in terms of result, and having things clear right away will just make the collaboration better.

Speaker 2:

Okay, so would you say the most important part is communication and saying what you prefer.

Speaker 3:

Absolutely yes.

Speaker 2:

Okay, that's great. So, talking about the ups and downs of the research, can you share some specific instances and how you manage them?

Speaker 3:

yes.

Speaker 3:

So I would say that music for me was something that saved me from most of the downs I had in the research and it's very unfortunate to say, but the downs are way more often than the ups.

Speaker 3:

So you go super excited to the lab and you plate your neurons and you want your neurons to look great, and next day you go check on them and they're all dead and you just don't understand what happened. You use the right media, you use the right ingredients I mean neurotrophic factors and all that so you played it at the right time, Use the protocol that is established and your experiment just didn't work. And that's extremely frustrating, and that's just one example. If you go to the in vivo part, for me it's even harder because I had to work with mice. For me it's even harder because I had to work with mice. And so if you have to perform a surgery and you have to inject a compound or you have to inject a virus in the brain and the animal doesn't make all brain outside of the lab, for me was something that always helped navigating through the difficult moments of science.

Speaker 2:

And for you. You talk a lot about music, but do you have an alternative to music as well? Exercise, yes.

Speaker 3:

So exercise is something that helps me a lot, especially for anxiety, um. So I would say exercise I am social, so going out with my friends helps, um, but I know that for some people they are less social, so that's kind of not that good to release anxiety or to recharge um. Going for walks, going for bike rides, um, and also sometimes, if you feel like you need having a therapist, also help so you have someone to like navigate how your thoughts work and things like that.

Speaker 3:

So all of those things are really helpful somewhere specific you like to go in cambridge um, I think I like the child's river a lot, so they have a bike path, so you can bike around.

Speaker 3:

I know what you're talking about yeah, I love that area like the alternate, but that's in the side boston side of it, but I love that the area to watch sunsets and things like that yeah, yeah, I like I went to summer in harvard for seven weeks so I kind of know like the places and stuff like that how? How was your lab?

Speaker 2:

um, it was not. It was not a lab. It was just a summer like summer study, like I take courses with a with a few harvard students, that's it.

Speaker 3:

I had a high school student last year. He came all the way from England.

Speaker 2:

Oh.

Speaker 3:

And he stayed in our lab for a few months and it was great to work with him. He was super, super smart, he was hardworking, he would do experiments in the lab and learn super fast. It was great. It was great, it was great to have him.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, there's so many talented people that just come across the world and we meet them. That's crazy.

Speaker 3:

I wish I had more students.

Speaker 2:

to be honest, oh, really, do they inspire you or something?

Speaker 3:

I really love teaching in the lab, so for me it's just fascinating and it's different from my co-workers where they want to have their labs but they want to have postdoc level lab, which is a lab where people already know everything or like a lot of things and publish, publish, publish papers. I somehow enjoy when someone doesn't know the technologies, the methods and they need to learn. So I kind of see oh really, is that how it works? So I, I go in the lab. I didn't know how to do this. Now I know how to do this. You see the person growing and learning and having fun in the lab by learning things and I, I really enjoy this okay, now I'm gonna.

Speaker 2:

I'm gonna shift towards, like um, towards a more of a perspective towards the subject of biology and the subject of research. What are the significant changes in the field of biology or neuroscience that you foresee in the coming years and how do you think these changes is going to impact your research and other PhD students as well?

Speaker 3:

So that's a great question and I feel that if I knew the answer for this, I will be in a stage where I will be ready. I had a professor. He was teaching evolution and he used to tell us guys, we love proteins, but proteins are not the future. In the future, people will focus on RNA or RNA in general, and we will be like oh, okay, okay. And here we are. We had the COVID and then we have the RNA vaccines, and he was right. So people started studying RNAs and he was just visionary. Like everybody was thinking about the protein, because proteins aggregate, because proteins stop functioning and then you have like a lot of diseases associated to that and unfortunately I cannot tell what's going to happen in the future of neuroscience, so I don't have the answer to that question.

Speaker 2:

That's pretty cool. Yeah, I think biology is one of the fields where you have to keep adapting to the, you know, to the evolving world. Like one of the few would be computer science. I mean, that's obvious, it's growing really, really fast. But then biology is growing super fast too and I feel like most of the students nowadays they miss it. They always. It might be a little bit personal or just relating to my high school experience, but I feel like students only see the change in computer science or technology, and that's covering other subjects. Like no one talks about chemistry or no one talks about physics, Everyone talks about computer science, and I just think that hinders some growing minds and some passions, because I think, um, there are a lot of interesting things in the field of, um, biology, chemistry, physics, whatever. But you know, chat gpt is taking the spotlight, so you know, I wouldn't blame.

Speaker 3:

Yeah so I I think that when, when it comes to to biology, now that you brought up, like the computer science, we, we recently did um single cell RNA sequencing experience, in which you sequence all the RNA that's in the cell and we get a bunch of targets, a bunch of meaning lots of genes that are up or down regulated and that is in Excel sheets and we have like hundreds, we have thousands of genes that are altered but that can give us an idea of pathways or things that can be going wrong.

Speaker 3:

But when it comes to biology, unless you test that in an actual experiment, you don't really know the answer. And so you you can have as many predictions as you want when you go and you do the experiment, that's when you're actually gonna get the answer. And I think that the the most important thing for biology is to write it down and document everything you're doing so you can have a reproducible experiment. So once you answer a question here, or you answer the same question in the other side of the world, if you apply the same conditions, you're able to get the same result. So I think this is the biggest challenge result.

Speaker 3:

so I think this is the biggest challenge and I think that this, being improved over the years, we would get like better quality research what impacts on that directly is the pressure that people have to put out publications, and I think that that directly impairs the quality of the science people are doing. So there's a lot of papers out there that you read and you try to reproduce. You just don't reproduce the data. So those are just big, big, big topics for maybe another podcast.

Speaker 2:

All right, that's really good to hear. So for the last question, I would like to ask you how would you advise students who want to appreciate their passion in biology or specifically in neuroscience as well? Just any general advice.

Speaker 3:

OK. So I think that the first thing I would say is keep being curious and keep questioning. So I would advise talk to a lot of people questioning. So I would advise talk to a lot of people. And I know that sometimes people are not going to be that friendly or people who just don't have the time to talk to you, but sometimes they will and people are usually nice and they're usually willing to help. So try to imagine yourself in a couple of years, what you imagine doing, what would you like to be? What would you like to be solving? So if you would like to understand how the brain works, or if you would like to understand how memories work, just do some readings and try to find people.

Speaker 3:

Nowadays it's so easy to find people online and just send an email or send a message through linkaging and then talk with them and ask things like how is your day-to-day like? So, for example, if you don't like doing a lot of readings about a specific topic, or if you don't like the idea of being in a lab doing experiments, then maybe you can start thinking as early as you can. What are the other options for you? Maybe would you be happier in the computer running a code to get a nice answer to a nice question and then other people can do the experience for you. So this kind of thing. And I think it's also very nice to do internships. So try to communicate with professors or people in company and ask if you can be an intern for a specific type of time, and then you can see oh, I actually like this a lot or this is not for me. So I think that those would be like my general advices.

Speaker 3:

And last but not least is um, I always say this to everybody only take advice from people that are where you want to be.

Speaker 3:

So if you are talking with someone and you kind of sense oh my god, this person is just so productive, like, this person has a thousand papers published, but when you're talking with that person, you kind of feel that person is not happy, for example, and oh, should I? Is that what I want for myself? Like, do I want to have a thousand papers and that would make me happy, or do I want to have a different lifestyle and I want to be able to do other things? And that comes to the last piece of advice is always question the information you have. So you read something, just don't believe that that's the full true. So be open, because even when you are doing an actual experiment, you might do it another time and the result might be conflicting. So just be open to the advice you're listening and then try to listen to your inside voice, or your gut feeling, as we say, if that matches to what you actually want.

Speaker 2:

That's great advice. All right, Camila, it's been a pleasure having you on our show today. Anything you would like to add?

Speaker 3:

It was a pleasure and I actually am available if anyone wants to talk to me. If anyone has more questions about how I do experiments or how science work, how my day looks like or things like that, I can actually give you my email and people can feel free to reach out. As I said earlier, I really like talking to people young people because I think that that can be like really motivating. It's a beautiful time in life where you guys are choosing what you want to be and choosing what you're going to do for years, and it's totally okay to change your mind. So if you start biology and you hate biology it's too many names, it's too complicated and you want to go and study physics, mathematics, you want to be an engineer or something different, it's totally fine.

Speaker 1:

Thanks so much for joining us on this episode of the Lifestream Podcast. If you are enjoying the show, please feel free to rate, subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to your podcasts. That helps others find the show and we greatly appreciate it. Once again, thanks for listening and we hope you'll join us again on the next episode of the Lifestream Podcast.