Meet the CHED Heads

In this debut episode, the co-directors of Penn State’s Center for Human Evolution and Diversity (CHED) are interviewed by a recent graduate of the university about the origins and mission of their Center – and this podcast.

HOST:
Amy Mook, 2020 graduate of Penn State’s Genetics and Developmental Biology program

GUESTS:
Nina Jablonski, Evan Pugh Professor of Anthropology, Penn State 
Mark Shriver, Professor of Anthropology, Penn State 

Transcript

Mark Shriver: 

From Penn State’s Center for Human Evolution and Diversity, this is Tracking Traits

Nina Jablonski: 

Hello and welcome to the first episode of the Tracking Traits podcast. My name is Nina Jablonski and I’m the co-director of CHED, the Center for Human Evolution and Diversity at Penn State.

Mark Shriver: 

And I’m Mark Shriver, the other co-director of CHED at Penn State. Welcome to the podcast.

Nina Jablonski: 

The idea behind this project is to give our undergraduate students a chance to interview scientists here at the university who are engaged in exciting, novel research projects that forge new pathways to understanding human evolution. 

Mark Shriver:

All of these scientists being interviewed - including Nina Jablonski and me - have something in common. All of us have a passion for this subject that gives our podcast its name: We love to track down the evolutionary drivers of the incredibly diverse and interesting traits exhibited by our fellow human beings.

Nina Jablonski: 

And  by ourselves, for that matter.

Mark Shriver:

Yes indeed. And ourselves.

Nina Jablonski: 

And so our hope is that by sharing that passion with our colleagues and our students, we might be able to open things up and share that passion with you, the listeners, as well.

Mark Shriver:

That’s the goal.

Nina Jablonski:

And so, in this first introductory episode, Mark and I are interviewed about CHED; how it came to be, what it’s all about, and where we’re trying to go with it.

Mark Shriver:

Our interviewer in this first episode is Amy Mook, a recent graduate of Penn State’s Genetics and Developmental Biology program. Amy actually worked in my lab assisting with DNA extractions for the ADAPT4 study, and also completed an independent research project based on the extraction of DNA from strawberries.

Nina Jablonski:

Amy did an outstanding job interviewing the two of us – the original “CHED Heads” – and that is exactly the kind of student that keeps our passion for science going, because she’s got it too – just like all the students involved in the new podcast. 

Mark Shriver:

Yes, the future of science is looking bright, with all these great young scientists coming up to take things forward.

Nina Jablonski:

So without further ado, here’s our conversation with Amy Mook.

Amy Mook:

Well, good morning, Nina and Mark. It's so great to sit down with both of you today to talk about CHED. I know that maybe some people at Penn State are aware of what CHED is, but, Nina, could you get us started with explaining to us what is CHED and also what CHED stands for?

Nina Jablonski:

CHED is the Center for Human Evolution and Diversity at Penn State. We started this center about seven years ago, and our goal was to really bring together people who are interested in studying human evolution and diversity from multi- and transdisciplinary perspectives.

Nina Jablonski:

Penn State is really good at getting people together in virtual organizations. Most centers at Penn State, in fact, are virtual centers. We don't live in a bricks and mortar building, but we have a virtual coalition of people who share a philosophy about how we can go about looking at a set of phenomena from new perspectives. And so, basically, we are a crucible for people to come together and think about and study human evolution and physical diversity, from new perspectives.

Amy Mook:

I love that. What I'm gathering is that a lot of the reason why CHED was created was to bring people together. And, Mark, obviously I wasn't in those initial meetings to create CHED, but thinking about what was that main reason? Was it to bring people together? What was the need for creating CHED?

Mark Shriver:

I think, in anthropology we're really familiar with synthetic work, so working across different disciplines and being technically expert in something, but keeping in mind the big picture. And we thought we could help facilitate people finding new collaborators and new approaches that are combining different areas of expertise. So one of our goals throughout has been that the proposals that come to us have to be multidisciplinary and have to span different colleges, different departments, and that sort of thing, to help encourage people to find new collaborators and find new ways to address these really old questions that we're still very interested in.

Amy Mook:

Why the two of you? Why were you great facilitators for creating the center? Mark, if you wanted to talk a bit more about how your expertise plays into the center.

Mark Shriver: 

Both of our interests separately developed into recent human evolution. This is not the only thing that Nina and I study, but that's one of the things that we really share and had shared before we even met when Nina joined the department..

Mark Shriver:

But really looking at recent human evolution, and especially with a more open mind as to what we could study and what's worth studying, sometimes sensitive issues, but in dealing with that, especially with anthropological colleagues, we have this broader perspective that includes culture and trying to help people. The things we discover can really help to promote a better understanding of diversity. That's in our name, diversity across populations, diversity across the sexes. And we really thought we could help establish a framework for people to do more better work in those areas.

Nina Jablonski:

And just to add to that, I think what has been really interesting for me and for Mark has been that our own research programs have really benefited from this perspective. We met, actually, back in 2006, when we were both in the heat of some original research of our own into the evolution of human skin pigmentation.

Nina Jablonski:

And I think anyone who studies this area recognizes that it has to be studied from a variety of perspectives in order for it to make sense. And then, it's one of these important phenomena in human physical diversity that everybody is interested in and has terrific impacts on our health and social wellbeing.

Nina Jablonski:

And so, we, as individual researchers, had to become more multidisciplinary in our perspective. So, I think the fact that we as individual scientists had to broaden our horizons in order to do our research more competently really brought home to us the importance of instilling this perspective in as many people as we could. And we knew that Penn State would be interested in doing this from its basis of institutional collaboration.

Amy Mook:

So the both of you are involved here at Penn State, but we know Penn State is a huge place. So how did the two of you come together? I know you have such great expertise that plays into CHED, but how did the two of you even make that connection to start this center?

Nina Jablonski:

Well, I can start out on that, because I know back in 2012, when we got the first inkling of wanting to start this center, I realized that that this was something that I didn't want to do on my own, and that so much of what was going on in the study of human evolution and human diversity was going on in the genetic and genomic space. And I knew that, although I was aware of this research, that I wasn't doing research there myself, but my treasured colleague, Mark Shriver, with whom I had a really good relationship at that time, was doing research in that space. And I thought this would be just something really good to start and work on with Mark.

Nina Jablonski:

And so basically since the center has had its own identity, Mark and I have been co-directors, because we really represent, between ourselves, much of the diversity that we seek to instill in others and other teams.

Amy Mook:

Mark, that's quite a compliment she's thrown at you there. She was seeking you out to help her out. But do you want to also elaborate on how that morphed into CHED?

Mark Shriver:

I guess we'd known each other maybe 10 years before that. I know Nina and I started corresponding, because we were some of the few people interested in human pigmentation and really getting to the genetics and the evolution of that. So, we had a longstanding relationship around science, and then personally when Nina joined the department. But yeah, I mean it is an awesome time to be doing this kind of work. There's so many technological breakthroughs and tools on the anatomical side, studying physiology, you have these remote sensors that are just like a Band-Aid patch you put on and can measure lots of things throughout the day. And then the genomic side. It's really not a question any more can we get the sequence data? It's really what's interesting sequence data to get and how do you  look for genes and explore their histories?

Mark Shriver:

And there's a lot of people at Penn State working on this, a lot of experts. So we knew them and we figured, "Maybe we can do something good, introduce people to each other." Also, this is a great way to get to know the administration of the university and to really see how things work behind the behind the veil. And that's useful practical information, useful for our trainees to learn about how institutes function.

Mark Shriver:

So, really all of those things were part of the interest I had in working with Nina on really building this up. At that time, too, I had recently come back from Morehouse College. I spent a year there. And I've always been interested in race issues and how genetics reflects on our societal misunderstandings of these and what anthropology can do to help us correct that. And I think that's been a central theme that Nina and I have shared that we wanted to bring out in some of the CHED projects that we're involved with.

Amy Mook:

It's great to hear that CHED really does have a good home at Penn State in creating that collaboration among so many people across the university. So in thinking about that a bit more specifically, Nina, if you could elaborate on some of those roles that the center currently plays, and what kind of  research does it support?

Nina Jablonski:

we set out a call for proposals in the fall of every academic year, for innovative pilot research projects. We really want to get people who are interested in starting something new or starting a new branch of an existing program, and as Mark alluded to a little while ago, what we encourage is individual investigators to team up with people often who they wouldn't have teamed up with before from entirely different colleges who might bring something completely different to the table. Let's say an anatomist who may want to work with an engineer or someone in computer programming in order to better understand a phenomenon under investigation.

Nina Jablonski:

So, what we do is we create a request for proposals that basically puts it out there. "Hey, what about doing research in an integrative way on a particular broad theme in human evolution, in the origin of human diversity?" We usually keep our requests very broad in the hope that we will catalyze as many interesting proposals and ideas as possible. And we have gotten just some great ones, because we have terrific creative faculty out there.

Mark Shriver:

I'll add to what Nina was saying about our calls for applications. Those generally include the requirement that an undergraduate student be involved in the project and that they can get $5,000 extra funding if they do that. That's a nice bit of money for summer work for an undergraduate student. So, we're really trying to extend this as broadly as possible, because the future scientists matter even more than the current scientists. There's many more future scientists, we hope. And that's part of our plan, is really to make this an outreach so that people can learn from what we find fascinating and the kinds of work that we spend our days and nights and weekends doing, as you know, Amy, from working in the lab.

Amy Mook:

So you're really bringing attention and support to so many cool research initiatives and also sparking some really great ideas and people do see that broadcasting looking for research similar to this. So, Mark, if you could elaborate, we're sitting down here now recording a podcast series and you all are bringing in some people to do some research. What is that connection there? What are you hoping to get out of this podcast series or hoping for the audience to get out of this?

Mark Shriver:

Part of working in science is actually reporting your science and making it available for others to critique formally, but also informally. You're not really happening unless you're part of society and part of what's  going on. So making sure people know what we're doing and can learn from that and maybe contribute to that in some way is really one of our central goals.

Nina Jablonski:

I think this is one of the most interesting aspects of CHED, is that we do research on human evolution and diversity, and we don't choose to look at specifically sensitive and pejorative topics, but we look at topics that people have been interested in and that are socially important. And part of research is figuring out how to talk about this, how to have constructive and deep conversations about difficult topics with people from all walks of life, including young people.

Nina Jablonski:

So, I think this is really good for us as scientists. It's great training, especially for young scientists and graduate students, because they learn not only the technical background of doing the science, but also the importance of how to speak about it.

Amy Mook:

Obviously I'm a STEM student and also work in Dr. Mark Shriver's lab. So, I may be a bit biased and have some interests in all of these topics that we're going to be discussing, but from what I've gathered, the audience isn't just STEM students. So, Nina, could you talk a bit more about the broad idea of who is the audience of this podcast?

Nina Jablonski:

Well, we really hope that it will be a wide variety of people, especially young people, because we really want to put a face to science. Even though you can't see us, you'll be able to hear our voices and our excitement about the science that we do.

Nina Jablonski:

Through these podcasts, we'll not only talk about the science that we're doing, but we'll talk about who we are and how we got interested in this. And what I really hope is that more young students and middle school, high school students, will listen to this and say, "Hey, yeah, I'm interested in stuff too. And I can do this too." They will feel empowered to think about, "Well, I can do this. I can be a scientist." And in fact, they can.

Nina Jablonski:

So, this is all about not only the science, but the personal stories of the scientists and how they got involved in this enterprise. And I think to me, one of the most important messages is to drive home that this isn't a job. This is a really interesting way of life. It's an interesting way of looking at the world, and it's really compelling and fun, and it's a great way to contribute to the world.

Amy Mook:

I think that's such a unique way to put it, that it is a way of life. I think I've been able to have a glimpse of the research life a bit as an undergrad., but I think what's been most interesting to me in having conversations with these individuals is why did you do this? What are your interests? How did you even get here? And I think everybody has such a unique perspective to share, which is really exciting.

Mark Shriver:

I think that's an important part of our program here, is hearing from the people as people about their lives and how they developed the curiosity, when did that happen, and then when did they see it was going in a good direction, that they could build a career on? Who did they reach out to as mentors? So that whole personal history is important and interesting. It's the biography. It's also something maybe students can turn to and reflect on and just learn about. I don't think there's enough of these science stories, how you got interested in science out there from scientists. So I think that's going to be a really interesting part of this and probably useful to students.

Amy Mook:

Obviously we're going to get to speak to both of you more individually, but could you give us a little bit of a sneak   peek , as to what we're going to hear about in future podcasts?

Nina Jablonski:

We actually have a roster of really diverse speakers and topics for our first podcast series, from people who have studied the evolution of temperature regulation in human skin, from really innovative perspectives, to people who have investigated the evolution of bitter taste and why bitter taste might be related to eating particular kinds of vegetables. Our podcast topics will span the entire range of the kinds of research that we support, from human genetics and population genetics, to studies of anatomy and functional anatomy and physiology, to studies of perception. So, I think this is going to be a real tour of, in a sense, modern human biology.

Mark Shriver:

And one I would add to that list is also behavior: perceptions and cognition and behavior. Those are also very sensitive topics because people generalize and stereotype, but they're also ultimately controlled by our evolutionary trajectories, and specifically controlled by the effects of individual genes and environmental experiences and exposures.

Amy Mook:

I'm lucky I've been able to see behind the scenes what our lineup here is, but I think you're making a great point that there are so many researchers using such advanced technologies and new ideas, and we're going to get the opportunity to hear from many different people, including the two of you, both as anthropologists. But I think also on our lineup are people outside of anthropology, and they're talking about their collaborations with people across the university and beyond as well. So I think that that plays really well into talking about CHED, is collaborations go beyond anthropology, but also you two were able to really find each other within the department and create something great out of that friendship that you already had.

Nina Jablonski:

And also, we've recognized that while many researchers don't see themselves as being anthropologists or evolutionary biologists, that almost all of them are interested in the human dimension or evolutionary context of their research. And so when we forced their hand to think about this more through a multidisciplinary project, they really enjoy it and they grow themselves. And so, for us, it's a lot of fun, but also we see other researchers really broadening their own internal perspective. And this is great for science.

Amy Mook:

we have so many different and interesting things that are going to be covered in this podcast series. So, I'm sure the audience can likely find a podcast or two that they're definitely more interested in. But, I think that that broad array of topics really speaks to the mission of CHED itself. And I know that, Nina, you shared that CHED's been around for seven years now, but where do you both see CHED going? What are some of those future goals? Mark, if you wanted to get us started on where you see CHED going in the near future?

Mark Shriver:

This year we took a break to focus on the podcast series and really get that going. So I think that's an important step, is really working on our outreach and our social presence to allow people to benefit directly from what it is that we've been doing.

Mark Shriver:

We also had our first Darwin Day celebration with an invited speaker. And that was excellent. So we want to engage the community here and also online with these sorts of outreach activities while still focusing on the basic research. And I think we've been very successful in helping people get larger projects started, several funded projects with external money from NIH and NSF, the NIJ, have been funded through work that they started with our grants.

Mark Shriver:

So, I'd really to see that continue. The reaching out to undergrads is great, and then also just the outreach in general, so that we can have some of these broader conversations because as Nina was saying, there are sensitivities around human biological diversity all of these contrasting deep themes run through the work that we're supporting and trying to get going here. So I really think there's a bright future in specifically these kinds of areas.

Nina Jablonski:

And I would just add to that excellent overview that Mark gave by saying that we really hope that our continued support of these small research projects will encourage people to take risks. Some of our research projects have been phenomenally successful and have gone on, others have not. But that's okay. You know,  science is all about exploration and making mistakes. And sometimes the risks that we take, the hypothesis that we make, are not good, and they're proven to be misleading or incorrect. And that's fine. But we want to encourage people to just try it. The old expression about breaking eggs in order to make an omelet it's really true. We hope to explore some new avenues of scientific work and then really push the frontiers of what is possible, especially as we move forward in advanced methods of studying the human genome and its relation to the environment and behavior.

Amy Mook:

Well, thank you both so much for taking some time to introduce us all to what CHED is and what we're going to see in some of the upcoming podcasts. I'm really grateful that I have the opportunity to know both of you and to be involved as an undergraduate student. I know that my fellow undergrads that are completing these podcasts with us would also agree that it's a great opportunity to learn from these researchers, learn about their lives, create those relationships. So, really lucky to have this opportunity and looking forward to hearing the rest of our podcast series develop.

Nina Jablonski:

Thank you very much, Amy, for taking the time, and I'm really looking forward to hearing from all of our other scientists and just enjoying this ride along with all of our listeners.

Mark Shriver:

Yeah. Thanks, Amy. You've done an excellent job interviewing, and really look forward to hearing the other podcasts.

Mark Shriver:
Tracking Traits is a production of Penn State’s Center for Human Evolution and Diversity. Our producer, audio engineer and musical theme composer is Cole Hons, and our logo was designed by Michael Tribone of mtribone design. If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe through your favorite app, and help us reach more people by sharing it with others and rating us on Apple podcasts. You can also follow us on social media and learn more about CHED and all of our interviewers and guests at our website, ched – that’s C H E D dot L A dot P S U dot E D U.