Cells, Software, and Kids • Dr. Kam Dahlquist

(Professor of Biology, Loyola Marymount University || CA USA)

“I want to know how cells work on the inside, and I think pathways are the way to go. At the time period of my PhD, people were making these models of biological pathways based on only one gene, and I thought, come on, that can’t be right. There are going to be networks of genes. But this was pre-genome, and the technology wasn’t there yet. I graduated in 2000, right when genomics was taking off. For my postdoc I worked with one of the first people to use DNA microarrays. Back then there was no software at all to analyze the data. People were looking at the expression data and using Adobe Illustrator to draw pathways. My advisor hired himself a programmer to write the software to analyze the data, and I became the project lead. I spent the three years of my postdoc developing software with this software engineer who had no biology experience. I remember we had an extraordinarily long email chain.

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Now at LMU I’ve basically started my lab from scratch studying a totally different organism — yeast. I collaborate with faculty and students in the math and computer science departments. We have this loop where data from the wet lab gets fed to the math modeling group, then the visualization group, then the data can inform new experiments we should do. I’m really proud of the fact that all the research I’ve done has been with undergraduates.

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I put off having my kid for a long time. It wasn’t necessarily by design, it’s just that I didn’t want to do it while I was a postdoc, and then I was on an accelerated course for tenure. It’s been difficult working full time — I’m the breadwinner, and yet I’m the mom. Pre-child vs. post-child is like night and day. But I love my job, and throughout my career I’ve been able to find people that supported me, advocated for me. I’m very fortunate to be able to do the thing I love every day.”