The End of Microbiology and Immunology with Lilly Radoshevich, PhD
23m
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Art at the End of the World Class
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THE WORLD IS ENDING! Again. Doomsdayers and apocalyptic prophets have warned of coming calamity for millennia. Still, humanity persists.
This podcast invites entrepreneurs, scholars, community leaders, artists, and many others to envision the end of the world according to their expertise.
Art at the End of the World is a hybrid class and public program series supported by theUniversity of Iowa Stanley Museum of Artand theUniversity of Iowa School of Art and Art History, and taught by Associate Curator of Special Projects,Vero Rose Smith.
Today’s guest isLilly Radoshevich, PhD. Lilly is Assistant Professor of Microbiology and Immunology and Assistant Professor of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Iowa, and runs a lab dedicated to exploring listeria. She also has a very cute dog
Music was written, performed, and produced byGabi Vanek.
Transcript edited by Ellie Zupancic, University of Iowa Class of 2020
--FULL TRANSCRIPT--
THE WORLD IS ENDING! Again. Doomsdayers and apocalyptic prophets have warned of coming calamity for millennia. Still, humanity persists.This podcast invites entrepreneurs, scholars, community leaders, artists, and many others to envision the end of the world according to their expertise.
I’m Vero Rose Smith, your host, and this is Art at the End of the World.
Today’s guest is Lilly Radoshevich, Assistant Professor of Microbiology and Immunology, and Assistant Professor of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Iowa. Lilly received her BA in biology and French at Grinnell College, also in Iowa, and her PhD in biology and biomedical sciences at the University of California San Francisco. Our conversation was recorded on Wednesday, April 1st, 2020.
S: I’m really excited for your answers, and I’m sorry we have to do it in this format, but I appreciate your being flexible. If you could introduce yourself and tell us about your current role—
R: My name is Lilly Radoshevich and I am currently an assistant professor at the University of Iowa. I am a scientist and I have teaching duties with the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, but my primary role is to run a research laboratory. We work on the host—that means us—and cell response to bacteria; in particular, the bacterial pathogen Listeria monocytogenes, which you’ve probably heard about in the context of food recalls. The idea behind our research is to try to learn more about cell stress pathways, including pathways that are normally antiviral, in order to see whether or not we can target them. But, right now in this unprecedented time, I've actually switched some of my work to working in collaboration with Stanley Perlman and Wendy Mauri on Coronavirus; so that's kind of exciting.
S: Wow—I know you're really passionate about Listeria because you have a dog whose name is Lister; that’s lovely.
R: Yeah, that is after Dr. Joseph Lister, so equally nerdy; but he was really important for our times currently because he figured out that doctors were giving their patients bacterial infections. He was one of the first to figure out how to sanitize operating rooms and to instill in doctors to wash their hands, which is a very relevant and timely topic.
S: Is it ever. Could you tell us a little bit about how you got to where you are professionally? What is your background and your training?
R: Yes; I actually went to college in Iowa, at Grinnell College, just an hour away. At that point, I was really interested in human health. Initially what I thought I wanted to be was a medical doctor, but then I realized I was really more fascinated by scientific questions associated with human health, and that I was better suited to being in a laboratory. So, at Grinnell, I was given the amazing opportunity to do a summer abroad where I worked in a lab at the Pasteur Institute—which is one of the birthplaces of microbiology—and that inspired me even further. After that, I went and did my PhD in biomedical sciences at the University of California San Francisco, and after my PhD in which I was working on host cell stress responses that are altered in cancer biology, I switched back to working on host-pathogen interactions during a postdoctoral fellowship at the Pasteur Institute. So, because of that early exposure I had, I ended up applying and working for six years abroad at the Pasteur Institute. Then, after that, I applied for my own laboratory and the University of Iowa hired me—and that's how I found myself here.
S: Thank you; and for anybody that might not know: where's the Pasteur Institute located?
R: The Pasteur Institute is located in Paris, France, and it was initially established by Louis Pasteur himself. Right now, it's a very vibrant research campus in the fifteenth arrondissement of Paris, so there they currently work on lots of bacterial pathogens; they also work on the current Coronavirus and lots of emerging pathogens. The emerging pathogens are typically viral infections, so there's a laboratory currently working around the clock on Coronavirus there, too.
S: To work and live in France did you need to also have fluency in the French language?
R: Yeah; in general, science is very international, so many people do a postdoctoral fellowship abroad. We’re lucky, with English as our first language, that the language of science currently is English, so we publish and present in English. But, you don't just interact with your colleagues and labmates when you're living abroad. I actually was a French major at Grinnell as well, and that helped me a lot in my day-to-day interactions. You can imagine that some people work in a lab who might not have ever lived abroad—so interacting with my colleagues and labmates, speaking French, was really, really useful. But many of my American colleagues in that laboratory didn't speak French initially when they arrived—they took classes and developed the language during their postdoctoral fellowship.
S: Amazing. Before college how did you get interested in this work? What originally drew you to this interest in the human body?
R: I think at the most fundamental level, I'm something of a hypochondriac—and it is not a good time to be a hypochondriac right now—but very early on, in high school, I did the International Baccalaureate program. I had really excellent teachers in biology, and at that point, because we didn't we didn't have opportunities that people do today, a lot of it was looking at the world around us and at ecology. I also had great middle school teachers that inspired me to get into science early on—in terms of looking into native animals, for example. I'm from Colorado. There was a teacher at that time who got us involved in tracking bighorn sheep, and that was really exciting. But I was really always interested in this question about how viruses and bacteria make us sick; I've always been drawn to that kind of interaction, and I wanted to understand it at a molecular level. But I also wanted my work to give back in some way. So, my ultimate goal is that hopefully, down the line maybe thirty to forty years, some of the stuff that we're working on in my lab, and some of the questions that we’re working on, could be actually applied to human health—whether that is in the context of infection, or—one really cool thing is that you can learn things, using the bacteria or the virus as a tool, about our host cells that might be important in other human pathologies, such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and cancer; so one other thing is that fundamental research can, in host-pathogen interactions, actually help us learn about other really important human diseases.
S: Could you give us a little bit more information about what exactly microbiology and immunology are?
R: Yeah! Microbiology is the study of microorganisms; this is loosely determined by the size of the organisms that we work on—that could be bacteria, viruses. That could also be parasites. Immunology is the study of our immune system. So, broadly speaking, each one of our cells has the capacity to detect foreign intruders and that would be innate immunity. Then there's a number of cells that can come in and help protect our body from infection, and those are our innate immune cells that patrol all the time. These would be cells like neutrophils or macrophages that eat up pathogens and could be thought of as first responders to an infection. Then there's a branch of immunology that studies our adaptive immune response. I think, probably, you've been hearing a lot about the idea of seroconversion—that means when your body has started to make antibodies to a pathogen. Another test that we can use in the Coronavirus example is whether or not people have actually been infected, but didn't realize because they are asymptomatic—their adaptive immune system will make a response that can be detected through a blood test.
S: Follow-up question: has studying immunology and microbiology helped you personally address your hypochondriac-isms?
R: I am not sure. I would say that, especially during our stay-at-home, shelter-in-place mandate, every day I think seasonal allergies might be the Coronavirus. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
S: You are de
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--BEGIN FULL TRANSCRIPT--
VRS: The world is ending again. Doomsayers and apocalyptic prophets have warned of coming calamity for millennia. Still, humanity persists. This podcast invites entrepreneurs, scholars, community leaders, artists, and many others to envision the end of the world according to their expertise. I’m Vero Rose Smith, your host, and this is Art at the End of the World. Today we welcome Sarah Ziegenhorn, founder and executive director of Iowa Harm Reduction Coalition. Sarah holds an undergraduate degree in geography and biology from Macalester College and has many years of experience in public policy and community organizing. In addition to her advocacy work and nonprofit leadership, Sarah is currently pursuing a medical degree at the University of Iowa. Our conversation was recorded on Wednesday, April 8th 2020.
VRS: So thank you so much for taking time to do this interview and could you introduce yourself and a little bit about your current role?
SZ: Sure, so my name is Sarah Ziegenhorn, I’m the founding executive director of the Iowa Harm Reduction Coalition. Um, for short we go by IHRC commonly and we’re a statewide nonprofit that does advocacy, technical assistance, training, education, and direct services for people who use drugs. So all of our work is really focused on protecting and promoting the health, rights, and dignity of people who use drugs in the state of Iowa.
VRS: Amazing, and how did you get interested in this work?
SZ: Sure, so I uh- about ten years ago I was living in South Africa and um- I had a home stay family that I lived with for about a year during my study abroad as an undergraduate and um- in in the neighborhood where my homestay family lived was fairly low income and there were a number of women who worked in the neighborhood as, um, as street based sex workers and so I got really interested as I developed friendships with people in the neighborhood and with the folks that were engaged in this kind of survival economy. I got interested in sex worker health and rights and so when I came back from my study abroad experience, I did a research project on um- on urban transportation project in the Twin Cities, at time they were starting to build a light rail and in this area that had been notorious for people doing outdoor and street based sex work for many many decades and so I was really curious how the street project which many people saw as gentrification is going to impact the health and well being of people who were working outside on the street where this light rail was meant to be built. And so kind of from there everything else sort of flowed and developed really easily. I moved to Washington D. C. after I finished my undergraduate degree and because I had had these these research experiences and done this work in South Africa and in the Twin Cities, on the first day that I started a new job at a DC think tank during health policy work, I had a friend or colleague come up to me and say what are you doing tonight can you commit to do a forty hour training to be a volunteer at the needle exchange program here in DC? and I just having the CDC was like sure why not? I don't have anything going on and the rest is sort of history from there. So I started working with the needle exchange program in DC, providing overnight outreach on a weekly basis, so driving around the city of DC between 10PM and 7AM providing syringe exchange services to folks who inject drugs and then working with the people who do street-based sex work in the city of DC.
VRS: That's an incredible story and such amazing inspiring work. Can you tell us a little bit more about how your training influenced where you are today? So you mention your first experiences in this world of advocating for people who use drugs and people who engage in sex work as part of your undergraduate studies, could you tell us a little bit more about your course of study and then your professional training before you founded this organization?
SZ: Sure! I completed my undergraduate degree at a private liberal arts college in St Paul Minnesota called Macalester and Macalester is a small school with a number of unique opportunities for individualized study and soI majored in geography which is a really good grounding in social science research methods, especially research methods used in geographyand taking a place based approach to thinking about social problems in the world and because people in public health recognized how important place is to shaping people's health and wellbeing, there's sort of a nice synergy with community health and global health work and so I had an interdisciplinary concentration in community and global health that I completed as well as a second major in Biology. So I got sort of a well rounded training in hard sciences and social sciences and then went to work in DC at a think tank applying some of the conceptual and more theoretical training that I’d received. And I’d worked and done a lot of, a lot of social science research in geography as an undergrad and so moving to DC, the think tank that I was working at was a research one it's called the the Institute of Medicine, and now known as the National Academy, or the National Academy of Medicine and so in that role the work that we did was really focused on synthesizing research so that it could be presented to policymakers and then delivering evidence based strategies for public policy change to folks working on the Hill in DC, so people shaping federal policy. So that has been really really helpful training for the work that they do now with IHRC because it gave me a very practical lens on how to communicate about science and how to engage policy makers and build relationships with individuals who shape policy at many many levels and the work that I had done in in my undergrad and also in the five years that I spent at the think tank and made it very clear to me that a lot of times when we think about advocacy work we focus so intensely on the individual people who are making policies through a legislative decision making process but um- in public health and in federal policy work we we understand and we recognize that everybody has a role to play in making communities healthy places to live and so that has been really foundational for me and thinking about how do we achieve better health for people who use drugs in Iowa, a lot of that is done not just by focusing on advocating to politicians or policymakers but connecting with and building relationships with broad stakeholder groups community.
VRS: And what brought you back to Iowa specifically? And was there more of a need here than other places?
SZ: That's a great question and so I came back to Iowa in 2015 to pursue a medical degree at the University of Iowa and so I have diverged a lot from that path and I plan to finish my medical degree within the next couple of years. But then, I've spent a lot of time working for I. H. R. C. as something I didn't foresee I would do, sort of taking a break in medical school to work it's not very common but when I came- Iowa is my home state where I grew up, I was raised in Iowa city and on farm outside of Muscatine and so when I came back to Iowa I had been living outside of the state for almost a decade but I was really alarmed after about a year of being back, in recognizing what happened during the time that I’d lived elsewhere and so sort of as a teenager I grew up in a part of history in Iowa was rate very common for people especially at youth and adolescents to be using prescription opioids and using pills as something that they did recreationally or at a party with their friends. But by the time in had come back a lot of the people that I knew who had been casually using pills, many of them were dead, many had passed away of overdoses and then many had been incarcerated or many were actively using heroin and so on when I thought about everything I had learned in DC, both working in the needle exchange there and in the federal health policy role that I’d worked in and I knew there was so much great work going on to build community support for people that use drugs and I saw none of it happen