Faith Wong, Class of 2024
I took a Biomedical Research 19 Seminar on Landmark Studies in Cancer Treatment with Professor Torres in the Fall 2020 quarter at UCLA. This class was extremely thought-provoking and intriguing, and it has made me interested in learning more about cancer research in the future. Professor Torres is currently conducting research on proper mitotic spindle assembly and its faulty regulation in human diseases at UCLA.
Faith Wong (FW): What was your journey as a researcher like and how did you become interested in the research?
Professor Torres: I did my undergraduate at University of California, Santa Barbra and started off as a Biology major. After my first year, I did a summer research internship looking into sea anemones and the anthropogenic effects on EcoWalks that occur along the coast. That got me started in thinking about the scientific process of things. Then I joined a lab that was doing genetics research mapping the genome of the tetrahymena thermophila. After that, I started getting interested in telomeres, the ends of chromatids. During my junior year, I did a research internship with Nobel Laureate Elizabeth Blackburn at UCSF. I graduated with a degree in cell molecular and developmental biology, and moved onto graduate school at Princeton University. I did research there with Virginia Zakian and my thesis was on genomic stability. I then looked for labs doing cell cycle research and ended up at Stanford’s medical school in the Department of Biology with Peter Jackson, who was doing cell cycle research. That basically covers the breadth of my research interest. I went from ecology to basic genetics to looking at the mechanics of the cell cycle to looking more at the connections within cell division and human disease.
FW: What problems have you faced and what did you want learn from them?
Professor Torres: I think one of the major problems as you go through your trajectory from undergraduate to graduate to post-doctoral fellow, you're often going to have bottle necks to where your research is at a critical point, and you need to get past that bottle neck in order for the project to survive. When you hit that bottleneck, it’s easy to get discouraged. So I would say that the problem that I’ve faced is how do I solve this or how do I get past this in order to advance my research and continue my career. I would say with big problems come big solutions and you typically you know hunker down, think about it, work through it and just being persistent I think really helped get me through those bottlenecks. I think those are the major problems that I have face – research bottlenecks and how to get past them.
FW: If you had unlimited resources what do you think you would use it towards and how would that affect your research?
Professor Torres: So if I had more resources, I would invest it in more modern technology that would help us to get more detailed information from the studies that we do. This would decrease the burden of time on the research and the cost of the research as well. So I would say investing in good instrumentation. For example, for our lab, it would be a high end microscope that would allow us to do things that we currently can't do. They weren’t available when we started, but now they are available and it would be great if we could have one of those. There always has to be this reinvestment in good technology that will allow us to do better science.
FW: Due to COVID-19, are you still conducting your research right now? How are you adjusting to the current situation, and how has this changed how your lab has operated?
Professor Torres: COVID has really limited the amount of research that we do. The reason is because we're only allowed to have a certain number of people in the lab. For example, no more than four people can ever be in the lab. The problem is that I have a total of 12 people in my lab, so what do you do? Luckily, we have some people that are strictly computational, so they can work remotely. I am now working remotely, so that frees up my spot too. Everybody else that is not doing either one of those has to cycle in. But that means that any individual can only do 4 to 5 hours a day whereas before they could do 8 or more hours if they wanted to a day. So its limited the amount of productivity of our lab as far as research goes, but we're applying the time that we have outside the lab to do things like data analysis, writing manuscripts for publication, and writing reviews on the specific areas of research we conduct. We try to keep as productive as we can doing other things that are equally as important for the overall program that we have.
FW: What academic accomplishment are you the most proud of?
Professor Torres: I'm always very proud of the scientific achievements – our breakthroughs, our publications, and individual awards. But I'm also really proud of how well the students I have personally mentored in my lab have done. At the undergraduate level, I’ve mentored around 40 undergraduates throughout the time I’ve been at UCLA and I would say that 97% of them have gone on to do amazing things. I think this was really important for me to see that the time that you spend with students was really important to them, but it's equally gratifying to me to see that my students are doing so well. That's been one of the most rewarding thing.
FW: Could you please elaborate more on some of your publications?
Professor Torres: As far as research goes, we work on cell division. Specifically we work on proteins that are involved in forming the mitotic spindle, which is a microtubular structure that is important for congressing the chromosomes to the metaphase plate during the process of cell division and for segregating the sister chromatids to the opposite ends of the cell. The cell will then bisect down the middle to divide the cytoplasm, making one cell go into two cells. So, looking at the machinery of the mitotic spindle is really critical. We have also been looking at molecular motors that are involved in forming the cilia, which are antennas that are at the surface of a cell. We discovered that one of these proteins that we have identified was actually involved in the complex of dining, which was a macromolecular motor that’s involved in transport of cargo along microtubules. In this case, this protein was involved in bringing cargo to the base of a cilium and potentially transport into the cilium. Without this protein, the cilium falls apart, and when you don’t form the cilium, it leads to a series of diseases known as ciliopathies. Specifically, the disease that we were looking at it was Short Rib Polydactyly Syndrome, and it was the first molecular link to that disease by protein. And it was gratifying that a couple of months later, a genetics paper came out showing that they had identified mutations in that protein in humans that were suffering from that disease. This was one example where the molecular aspect came before the genetics which is rare because typically you get a genetic mutation and then you follow what the molecular mechanism is. These are the discoveries that we are the most proud of because they link a mechanism to potential pathology use.
FW: How can students prepare to work in this field?
Professor Torres: I would say our research is very interdisciplinary and we have some people just doing strictly computation. So they’re working with analyzing proteomic data that we do in the lab or they're working to develop new tools for biologists to use. For other things in the lab, we use standard molecular biology, So learning about molecular biology, cell biology, computation, and human physiology is important for the work that we do. Most labs have a deeper focus in one area, but our lab spans chemical biology, cell biology and computation at the same time. We have different people working on different aspects of it. It’s all related to cell division, but at very different angles.
Faith Wong (FW): What was your journey as a researcher like and how did you become interested in the research?
Professor Torres: I did my undergraduate at University of California, Santa Barbra and started off as a Biology major. After my first year, I did a summer research internship looking into sea anemones and the anthropogenic effects on EcoWalks that occur along the coast. That got me started in thinking about the scientific process of things. Then I joined a lab that was doing genetics research mapping the genome of the tetrahymena thermophila. After that, I started getting interested in telomeres, the ends of chromatids. During my junior year, I did a research internship with Nobel Laureate Elizabeth Blackburn at UCSF. I graduated with a degree in cell molecular and developmental biology, and moved onto graduate school at Princeton University. I did research there with Virginia Zakian and my thesis was on genomic stability. I then looked for labs doing cell cycle research and ended up at Stanford’s medical school in the Department of Biology with Peter Jackson, who was doing cell cycle research. That basically covers the breadth of my research interest. I went from ecology to basic genetics to looking at the mechanics of the cell cycle to looking more at the connections within cell division and human disease.
FW: What problems have you faced and what did you want learn from them?
Professor Torres: I think one of the major problems as you go through your trajectory from undergraduate to graduate to post-doctoral fellow, you're often going to have bottle necks to where your research is at a critical point, and you need to get past that bottle neck in order for the project to survive. When you hit that bottleneck, it’s easy to get discouraged. So I would say that the problem that I’ve faced is how do I solve this or how do I get past this in order to advance my research and continue my career. I would say with big problems come big solutions and you typically you know hunker down, think about it, work through it and just being persistent I think really helped get me through those bottlenecks. I think those are the major problems that I have face – research bottlenecks and how to get past them.
FW: If you had unlimited resources what do you think you would use it towards and how would that affect your research?
Professor Torres: So if I had more resources, I would invest it in more modern technology that would help us to get more detailed information from the studies that we do. This would decrease the burden of time on the research and the cost of the research as well. So I would say investing in good instrumentation. For example, for our lab, it would be a high end microscope that would allow us to do things that we currently can't do. They weren’t available when we started, but now they are available and it would be great if we could have one of those. There always has to be this reinvestment in good technology that will allow us to do better science.
FW: Due to COVID-19, are you still conducting your research right now? How are you adjusting to the current situation, and how has this changed how your lab has operated?
Professor Torres: COVID has really limited the amount of research that we do. The reason is because we're only allowed to have a certain number of people in the lab. For example, no more than four people can ever be in the lab. The problem is that I have a total of 12 people in my lab, so what do you do? Luckily, we have some people that are strictly computational, so they can work remotely. I am now working remotely, so that frees up my spot too. Everybody else that is not doing either one of those has to cycle in. But that means that any individual can only do 4 to 5 hours a day whereas before they could do 8 or more hours if they wanted to a day. So its limited the amount of productivity of our lab as far as research goes, but we're applying the time that we have outside the lab to do things like data analysis, writing manuscripts for publication, and writing reviews on the specific areas of research we conduct. We try to keep as productive as we can doing other things that are equally as important for the overall program that we have.
FW: What academic accomplishment are you the most proud of?
Professor Torres: I'm always very proud of the scientific achievements – our breakthroughs, our publications, and individual awards. But I'm also really proud of how well the students I have personally mentored in my lab have done. At the undergraduate level, I’ve mentored around 40 undergraduates throughout the time I’ve been at UCLA and I would say that 97% of them have gone on to do amazing things. I think this was really important for me to see that the time that you spend with students was really important to them, but it's equally gratifying to me to see that my students are doing so well. That's been one of the most rewarding thing.
FW: Could you please elaborate more on some of your publications?
Professor Torres: As far as research goes, we work on cell division. Specifically we work on proteins that are involved in forming the mitotic spindle, which is a microtubular structure that is important for congressing the chromosomes to the metaphase plate during the process of cell division and for segregating the sister chromatids to the opposite ends of the cell. The cell will then bisect down the middle to divide the cytoplasm, making one cell go into two cells. So, looking at the machinery of the mitotic spindle is really critical. We have also been looking at molecular motors that are involved in forming the cilia, which are antennas that are at the surface of a cell. We discovered that one of these proteins that we have identified was actually involved in the complex of dining, which was a macromolecular motor that’s involved in transport of cargo along microtubules. In this case, this protein was involved in bringing cargo to the base of a cilium and potentially transport into the cilium. Without this protein, the cilium falls apart, and when you don’t form the cilium, it leads to a series of diseases known as ciliopathies. Specifically, the disease that we were looking at it was Short Rib Polydactyly Syndrome, and it was the first molecular link to that disease by protein. And it was gratifying that a couple of months later, a genetics paper came out showing that they had identified mutations in that protein in humans that were suffering from that disease. This was one example where the molecular aspect came before the genetics which is rare because typically you get a genetic mutation and then you follow what the molecular mechanism is. These are the discoveries that we are the most proud of because they link a mechanism to potential pathology use.
FW: How can students prepare to work in this field?
Professor Torres: I would say our research is very interdisciplinary and we have some people just doing strictly computation. So they’re working with analyzing proteomic data that we do in the lab or they're working to develop new tools for biologists to use. For other things in the lab, we use standard molecular biology, So learning about molecular biology, cell biology, computation, and human physiology is important for the work that we do. Most labs have a deeper focus in one area, but our lab spans chemical biology, cell biology and computation at the same time. We have different people working on different aspects of it. It’s all related to cell division, but at very different angles.
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