Elizabeth Glater: Welcome to Sagecast the podcast at Pomona college. I'm Patty Vest. In these extraordinary times, we're coming to you from our various homes. As we all shelter in place. Mark Wood: This season on Sagecast, we're talking to Pomona, faculty and alumni about the personal professional and intellectual journeys that have brought them to where they are today. Patty Vest: Today, we're talking with associate professor of neuroscience, Elizabeth later, a scholar whose research explores genetics and behavior. Mark Wood: So welcome Elizabeth. It's good to have you with us here, sort of with us and not with us as we all are these days. Elizabeth Glater: Yeah, it's nice to be here. Mark Wood: So how are you adjusting to a life in the time of coronavirus? Elizabeth Glater: I think it's a work in progress, still adjusting, but trying to enjoy the, the fun parts of being able to be at, be at home a lot and all the little projects you're always meaning to do. Now, you actually have some time to do that. So I'm trying to emphasize the positive and not listen to the news too much so that you can enjoy that. Mark Wood: It's kind of hard. Sometimes it's easy to spend a lot of your time listening to a lot of people who have uninformed opinions about what's going on. Patty Vest: And for our listeners, they can't see that Elizabeth has a lovely zoom background of a resort. She looks like she's having fun, Mary, how do you know it's a zoom bathroom could be a different background Mark Wood: And I'll have to say then the Patty is, it looks like she's on Stover walk. I'm the only one here. Who's who's really, Patty Vest: I am I'm in my home. It is a background. But back to why we're here. Elizabeth, tell us about your early years. Did you always lean toward science? Elizabeth Glater: I did. I was actually thinking about that. So my very early years I loved collecting insects and bugs and things. I grew up in a city, so that was I didn't have a backyard, so I would collect them from on the sidewalk and things, which my mom didn't totally approve of. She wasn't worry about what I was doing out there and the cracks of the, of the sidewalk. She didn't know that you were just preparing for your career, my career, but I got I got fast forward to when I was in college. I took a class in inward of Britain's zoology and one of our projects was to collect insects and then we're supposed to find each different class of insects and identify the species and make a, and you can actually preserve them and label them and all this. Elizabeth Glater: And I thought, Oh my gosh, like finally, my, my I'm actually getting to do what I want to do. And it counts as work and preparing for this. I think preparing minutes, although I was really unprepared because I just didn't actually no, that many different kinds of insects. Cause my family wasn't really that into that. So I know little kids growing up with yards and things, people are always saying like, Oh, that's a rolly pollie, that's got copper or whatever. I still remember. I had cut a cricket and my PR and my, I was trying to identify it. I was looking up in our books and looking at pictures and my professor came over and she's like, Oh, well, you know, what are you trying to identify? And she figured it would be some sort of obscoure. Mark Wood: [Inaudible] Elizabeth Glater: So I took it. And so she, but she was really nice as she kind of, wow. You know, let's look at this shape of it and looking at it next time. And I was like, I was like, Oh my gosh. Like, I didn't know. But yeah, so that was, that was a really fun, fun project. Mark Wood: So when were you introduced to when and how were you introduced to neuroscience? Elizabeth Glater: This was relatively late. Late started. Well, it was in college. I started biology was my favorite class and high school. So that was kinda my first sort of introduction to like, Oh, this is all it's stuff that I like to do. And then my, my side project was interest being interested in psychology, which wasn't offered at my high school at the time. So I had to do it on the side. So I read this magazine called, I still remember called psychology today. That was the first magazine that I got my own subscription to. So it came with my name on the label. It just came very important to me. Yes. I used to literally like read it, cover to cover. I still, I, the remember that the it's changed somewhat since then. I used to be a little bit more scientific now it's a little bit more, I don't, I don't still actually read it anymore, but anyway, that time that was very exciting. Elizabeth Glater: And so that was my, when I got, so then that those are kind of my two interests and then I got to college and the one class that I knew I wanted to pick for sure was intro psychology. And I was just dying to tell people when they asked me what courses I was taking, I was like, Oh, on I'm taking intro psych. Cause I thought that sounded like a college student because no one, you couldn't take that in high school. So I went to, to know for sure I was in college, I told them I'm so I really and so then it wasn't until I was sort of finishing college that I realized that there is this intersection between psychology and biology, which is now a science where you can do experiments in the lab and it was molecular biology and do microscopy, but to answer questions about the brain and why we do it, what we do. And I was sort of like, why isn't everybody in this field? Like, there's nothing better, you know? So that was kind of so that's when I, so I went to graduate school then and neuroscience after that. And so that's always just been just lucky. It's sort of the timing that these fields came together as such an explosion of exciting research going on while I was in grad school. And, and, and that, was it a grad school that sparked your interest in pursuing an academic career where the debt come about? Elizabeth Glater: I, you know, that's my, I guess all a part of me was in college. I looked at some of my professors there and I thought, Oh, this looks like a good job. I would like to do that. But then I still wasn't really sure at that point. So I went to a small liberal arts college. I went to Swarthmore college. So then going to graduate school, being at a big university and seeing how, what it's like to run a lab there, I was kind of still trying to decide, okay, where where's the right place for me to you know, sort of ultimately where I'd like to end up and then, you know, everyone always tells you that, you know, there's still a few jobs and it's going to be really hard to do what you want to do. So my philosophy was always just to enjoy what I'm doing in the moment. Elizabeth Glater: So I was like, well, as long as I'm enjoying graduate school right now, I'll just worry about what's going to happen after that. And as long as the postdocs coming, okay, we'll just worry about that. So luckily my method worked out cause I was really ecstatic to end up here at Pomona. So yeah, so I, so I guess so I guess, yes, but I wasn't, if you would ask me at the time, I would always have said, well, I'm still kind of figuring, you know, figuring things out, but it was always kind of definitely one of the choices in my mind, what I wanted to do. So sounds like a very healthy outlook to enjoy the moment. Well, especially now, right? Yeah. But yes, yes. In general I feel like, cause you can never really, I tell this to students when they're trying to figure out what they want to do when they graduate. Elizabeth Glater: And there's always kind of that advice that people give you, you know, this is where the world is going, so you should do this or that. And so I always say, you know, just follow it. You want to do it because no one really can predict exactly what's going to happen in the world. So, but I think if you're doing what you enjoy, that you can't really like regret that, right? Like, because at least you enjoy it at least, you know, it's something that you like. And then if it turns out that it's got horrible job prospects or, or, you know, at least you can be like, well, I gave it my best shot and I knew that's what I really wanted to do. And I think ultimately people really enjoy what they do is they usually just kind of rises to the top because people see are your passion, your enthusiasm for it. Like someone's going to hire you to do something and you're a bit comfy, like your main income. It can be you know, a side, side project that you work on. So I'm a big proponent of doing, doing what you really enjoy and what you're passionate about. And then the details will kind of work itself out. Even if you can't see that coming all the time. Mark Wood: Let's talk about your research a little bit. You're you've studied genetics and behavior. How did you how did you get interested in that particular topic? Elizabeth Glater: Yeah. Hmm. So as I said, I started off just sort of, kind of I'll give you the path. So I still would have to be interested in how that, how the brain functions and that how just the different ways that people study brain. So one of the things I think is great about neuroscience is that you can understand it at so many different levels. You can understand what's going on a level of how a cell functions, how non functions and how these nods interact together to then produce behavior for it, for the organism. And I got really excited when I learned about the research of dr. Cori Bargmann, who studies C elegans, which are kind of nematode. And they're super tiny about the size of a grain of rice. And they have a super simple nervous system. So only have 302 neurons that's opposed to us. Elizabeth Glater: Did we need to start a contest? You have about 80 billion neurons in our brain. So you have very few neurons. And some early researchers in the 1980s were able to work out what we call the connectome, which is a fancy way of saying that we know every single neuron in this form and how they connect to each other. We call the connections between neurons synapses. So we have this amazing map of kind of what we'd like to think of kind of the hardware for how the nervous system works. And what's so great about working with these little creatures is they're surprisingly conserve with humans. So even though you might think, what did we have in common with a worm? You'd be surprised we have a lot and especially and nervous system gene stuff you think about. You've probably heard of different neurotransmitters, like serotonin dopamine, glutamate C elegans has the same has the same neurotransmitters and very similar neurotransmitter receptors. Elizabeth Glater: So we can actually learn a surprising amount from setting this simple worm. And one of my favorite things that you can do is sort of manipulate you can actually manipulate its genes to change the function of its neurons. And then you can go all the way through to look at the behavior, to see how you've changed the behavior of the, of the worm. And you can do all of that in one little organism and one small research lab. You don't need tons of expensive equipment or anything, and you can ask these really interesting questions, but you can kind of address it, all these, all these different levels of thinking about, you know, how do genes affect things and how to have the neurons function in a Berlin. And then ultimately I think, you know, the readout of neurosciences is behavior. So how an organism then somebody changes what it does. I mean, it can feel kind of amazing that, you know, just sort of tinkering around the lab and making some changes that you can make a worm, do something that it wouldn't normally do. You can get it to like something that I didn't like, or you can get it to stop moving or start moving. I'm just making these, these changes in it. And so then sort of the ultimate sort of validation that, okay, this we're understanding how the system works because you can manipulate it. Elizabeth, Patty Vest: What does that look like? So you're you, your lab works with the c. Elegans. How, how, if you were to describe what you do in your lab and when your students, how, how does that work? Elizabeth Glater: Oh, wow. Okay. so I usually have, was we had a pretty big lab a semester, so I had, I think, eight students in and out of the lab and things were going so well. It would actually make me really sad when we had to pack everything up and stop, please. I was like, it's like right when the projects were taken up, that's okay. Cause when, when one other attribute of c. Elegans Is they can be stored in the freezer. So we could freeze down all of our strains and they're safe in the freezer and we can come back and bring them back to life and keep working with them when we get back in the lab. So don't worry too much, but it was still but so my lab was sent to be study a food choice, which is how the worms decide what to eat. Elizabeth Glater: And that's because it's a decision that they really care about. It's really important to them kind of, as it is to us teen rates, if you eat good foods, you're going to have a healthy long life, have lots of offspring, but if you make bad choices or food that makes you sick, that's, you know, that's the good that the worms have to make the same kind of decisions and the food that they eat is bacteria. So we study how they just terminate among different species of bacteria. And you sort of have three different angles of how we look at that. We look at how we can manipulate genetics to change the food programs. We can actually manipulate their environment. So if we give them different foods to eat, when they're growing up, it changes their preference later. And then we have a chemistry project, or should I collaborate with dr. Elizabeth Glater: Chuck Taylor and the chemistry department here at Pomona where we're trying to understand the chemicals that are released by the bacteria that the worms rep used recognize the bacteria. And what's kind of fun about this project is that we've known for a long time, the different pure odorants that are detected by c. Elegans, But we didn't know how they recognize mixtures. And that's one of the things where we're learning to look at. So when a student kind of comes in the lab, how do we usually start? We usually start with learning kind of the basic techniques for how to work with the worm. One of the big things they have to learn is what we call picking worms, which just means just transferring worms from one place to another. So the growth on is at our plates with bacteria on them. The worms reproduce, the one worm can have 300 offsprings very quickly. Elizabeth Glater: They can eat all the fruit on the plate and start to star. So to avoid that with just something we you're constantly every three or four days, your chance for a couple worms turn the plate so that the worms thing were up. So the first thing I think they tend to learn as that. And then depending on the specific project, students often work with that student has already been in the lab to learn how to do different, different techniques and things. And so every student always has kind of their own project where they all kind of connect to each other with the different, with the different overall questions that we're asking. Mark Wood: So tell us a little more about, about your students and the work they do. How important are that your work and and what are they learning along the way? Elizabeth Glater: Well, the students, together, they are the people who get the done. So without them, there would be very, very little to talk about. So so in the students at Pomona are amazing. We kind of give them, you know, kind of a little start and they're just, I'm often running. I it's, I was reading the thesis of one of my students need them, the, a song just that she's graduating this year. And because of everything was kind of crazy right before everyone left that I hadn't seen her data for maybe the last few weeks before spring break. So I told her that reading her thesis, I felt like was reading a suspense novel because I was so excited to see what she had done. And so I really, I was like, he was thesis was like a page. I was like, Oh my gosh, I didn't know. Elizabeth Glater: She had a chance to do that experiment before you had to pack things up. So that was, that was just really fun. It was just sort of like the, you know, it's like candy, you know, it's just like all this amazing work happening. So we had talked about doing some experiments, but, you know, I wasn't sure what she had time I'd had time to do. So, so that was fine. So the students definitely really, I feel like at the beginning we talk about sort of the questions of the project and sort of some highlight experiments to do. And then pretty quickly they're saying like, Oh, should we try this? Or can we do that? Or one of my students would say, wow. And I said, yeah, that's fine. You can try that. And then kind of sheep asleep, they pull out over it loud, like, well, I kind of already did so here I'll show you the data from that. Elizabeth Glater: So, yeah. So there, so there are a great crowd I'm slowly worthy who graduated in 2018 and really hired me or the work we did with identifying the different chemicals that bacteria release. And it's just kind of you know, she has as an undergraduate she published two papers was she's first author on, which is pretty, I'm usual from an, an undergraduate college. And now she's in graduate school at university of British Columbia and she's going on the pursuing the chemistry route. But she, she really learned both. So she was, she was a chemistry major and she learned all the chemistry techniques, but she also would come over to my lab and the neuroscience department, and she learned how to work with worms and do all of the neuroscience techniques and how to take care of care of the worms. Yeah. So it's just, it was kind of you know, if you had told me when I started at Pomona, Oh yeah. Elizabeth Glater: You'll you'll help me. Or, you know, you have a student who will be able to figure out for you what bacteria are releasing. I would have said really. Cause I used to give talks before we got to the chemical part and I would, I showed this bacteria called saturation marcescens, which the worms does love. They just love, love, love the smell of this bacteria, but unfortunately it's not good for them and makes them sick. It's pathogenic and die. And so people are always like, that's so strange. Why are they so attracted to it? And so I would get this question and I'd have to say, I don't know, they're releasing something that's really attractive, but I don't know what it is. And then I was actually this talk, we had a joint symposium with the graduate school and the Claremont colleges and at the end of the talk, someone asked that question and I said, you know, I don't know. Elizabeth Glater: I wish I could find out. I said, Oh, well, there's this there's people here that you could collaborate with to figure that out. And I'm like, Oh, so yeah, that's kind of how it all, how it all starts. So Chuck Taylor, I started collaborating and then he said, so was actually already working in my lab at the time. Just was this her very first semester for first year. And she started off a couple of hours a week coming in and learning how to just make media and sort of take, take care of the lab and do lab tours and things. And she did a great job at that. So we're like, okay, you want to move on and work on a research project. And then Chuck Taylor was like, I have this great chemistry student. And we're like, Oh my gosh, you know, it's the same student. Elizabeth Glater: So it just, it just really work out. So she ended up staying in the lab for her all her four years between my lab and Chuck's lab. And then we even convinced her to stay a little bit the summer after she graduated and she trained the next group of students and how to do the techniques and things. So I guess it was a long answer, but yes, come on. As students, students are amazing at doing great work and I go to conferences and things I've been to. And people come by the poster and they'll, they'll say, well, I thought Pomona was an undergraduate institution. And I'll say it is, I have to let you know, I'm convinced now these are really under, you know, undergraduates, but it's for the students, you know, like new they're the ones who did it. But yeah. So I just feel like if you give people, you know, smart people, the time and resources, I feel like, you know, the, sky's the limit for what, what you can do Patty Vest: Since we're on the topic of your students. What, what are some of the things that they go on to do? So you mentioned, mentioned the case of slave what are some of the other paths that some of your students have gone into? Elizabeth Glater: Yeah, it's a bunch I've gone onto graduate school and neuroscience graduate school. Some are a lot go to medical school, some going to teaching. And it sounds go on and some work and allowed for a couple of years as a lab technician. And then they go on to medical school or graduate school. Yeah, one of my first students just makes me feel old, but she's just, you know, actually just this week that she grabbed, so this is Melissa chamber. She was actually literally my very first student in the lab and she just finished medical school and she's going to start her residency at UC Irvine So that's pretty exciting, but it asks I'm like, how could that happen? Because I just picture her as a student, but yeah. So it's great. I should, she came back to visit the lab, I guess that was last summer or maybe it was, I don't know, or the spring anyway, she met a few of the current students in the lab and they started asking her all these questions about, you know, how do you get into medical school and what's medical school, like, and they were just, just so hungry for that information to hear it, you know, directly from like, you know, Pomona alums. Elizabeth Glater: So she was answering her questions and she said to me afterwards, she said, Oh wow. I hadn't realized that I, I began to experience that can be helpful. Someone else say, Oh, absolutely. So yeah, now she's going to be close by. So I'm hoping we can have her come back and visit again. Mark Wood: So Elizabeth, why did you in the first place decide to teach at a liberal arts college instead of a larger university where you might've been able to focus more on your research and had had grad students? I obviously you have some great students here, but what was your, what was your decision making process? Elizabeth Glater: Yeah, well, I I love teaching, so that was, that was really important to me to be in a place where I could spend time on teaching and having, and have that be valued. And, and guess in terms of getting and also wanting to be at a small place so that I could be the kind of teacher I want to be. So spending a lot of time with students kind of coming up with sort of maybe not standard assignments, but like things like going out and collecting insects or something like that. So I really, I really wanted that to him to be a little bit sort of experimental and how I think about my teaching, having the room, like in the teaching labs that we do, we give students a lot of independence. We teach them kind of techniques and things, and that usually in the first part of the lab, and then the, towards the end of this semester, we let them do an independent project where they can kind of come up with ideas on their own and test things. Elizabeth Glater: And I'm just always amazed with the creative projects that students are able to come up with. So that I'm just as excited as they are to see a little, let's see what happened, you know, no one's ever done this before. So I think it's so all of those pieces. And then when I thought about the research piece, it's definitely, it's true things move more slowly than if you're at a research institution where you have graduate students and postdocs working full time a year round on a project. But I like to think of it as the students are the, are the same people. You're, you're just, you're getting them at an earlier stage of their career, but there'll be a student and I can, it's funny because they themselves think, Oh, you know, I'm just learning. I don't know anything. And it's just like, no, I can see it already. If this is the direction you want to go, you've got the skills that you need to keep moving forward. But, but it's nice to it's not, I think about like, almost like a tree growing. It's like we get to see them at their kind of their, their young tree. Elizabeth Glater: And it's just a really exciting time to see so many changes happens, either their interests evolve and sort of that moment where they sort of realized like, Oh, this is, this is what I was looking for, because sometimes you haven't been exposed to that much yet, depending on. So you're trying to figure out, okay, what am I interested in? And you just, you haven't gotten to it yet because no, one's going to tell you about, you know, so not IX research with C elegans when you're in high school, but maybe some people will, but so generally it's kind of this chance to say, Oh, this is what I like to do is sort of putting it together. People who like to do, you know, computer science and programming and realizing you can use those skills to, you know, analyze a neuroscience data or, you know, just sort of like, Oh, or I had someone who was great at drawing and there is a whole career path and medical illustration and say, Oh, I didn't even know that I could put together these, these two ideas. So I think that's, it's just a fun, fun part to be kind of part of their lives. And I need so much changes from first year to when they graduate in terms of their, you know, they go from taking courses and everything, just having a manager and, you know, having ideas what they want to do next. So it's just, I think this is really some time to interact with them. Patty Vest: Elizabeth, you mentioned that you enjoy it, the liberal arts setting, because you liked teaching. Tell us about your classes. What are some of the classes that you're teaching now or, and some of the classes that you, you enjoy teaching? Yeah. Elizabeth Glater: So I teach intro neuroscience which is a really fun class to teach. We kind of get to start at the very basics, kind of, we teach the, the foundation of information that we feel like, you know, any neuroscientists would need to know sort of how neurons function, basic neuroanatomy about the different structures of the brain, how the brain develops sensory processing and then and then motor systems, you know, how we, how our movement is controlled. And I think what I try to do in classes is kind of flip things around. I think students sometimes get the idea because we have these big textbooks that we know everything, and that's far from the truth. There are so many things we still don't know about how the brain functions. And so, but we, we don't tend to write that in textbooks. Right. Elizabeth Glater: We focus on writing about what we know because that's, that's what academics do. Right. We talk, you don't really want to have a textbook full of, like, we don't really know this. We don't know that. And we're still working on figuring that out. So yeah. So I try to get students to kind of realize that so that it doesn't feel like this old stale field where it's out, that it's things are waiting for it. And also that when they come up with, you know, sometimes they're, I'm trying to explain something and I'll ask a question to say like that, that is a great question that we don't have an answer to right now. I can, you know, people are trying to work on how to, how would I answer that? Or, and so just to feel like, you know, to trust their own kind of intuition about, huh, how would that work or how to figure out so, so that is, so it feels more like an inquiry. So you're focusing more on the questions that you're trying to figure out because that's what scientists really do. We don't spend much time thinking about, Oh, look at all the things we already know. Isn't that great. Right. Always going on to the next thing, but what about this? We don't know this yet. We don't have this yet. How can we figure that out? Mark Wood: So during these very strange times when we're all working from home, how, how are you doing with your classes? How are, how are you carrying forward and are your, you know, are, are, is there any part of the research you were doing with your students that can continue forward or is that all on hold until they can come back in the fall? Elizabeth Glater: Yeah. Yeah. So with the research students are, they're doing their data analysis right now, so they can do that. But in terms of doing experiments, yeah, that's pretty much I'm hold, which is, it's a sad, but, but we're all in the same situation. And then in terms of the teaching, it's kind of interesting. I've never taught remotely before. So I read some resources and we had a bunch of workshops over spring break to think about how we wanted to sort of change our course to teaching online. I know it was. And so I, I sort of started with the idea that we would do a lot of what's called asynchronous learning, which is what a lot of online universities do. So you kind of log in and answer questions and you watch video lectures and things. So I kind of started the very first week. Elizabeth Glater: I started the class that way, which is completely different of course, than what we normally do in class. And then I could tell from the students, they were kind of like, this is not what we, it was not what we were used to. So we actually ended up changing it up. So we have zoom classes now where we all meet as a group. And one, sometimes I give kind of more of a, sort of an interactive lecture where they give them background. And then other times we read journal articles and we discuss the findings in the article and critique the paper. So that's pretty much stayed the same thing that we would be with doing the class. And then the nice thing that I found is that I feel like zoom when you have a lot of people. I mean, not even that, it really, honestly, more than four people feel like it's hard to really pay attention to everybody and what's going on. Elizabeth Glater: So we've done we did some one-on-one meetings. They write it for this class. This is my upper level course called genes and behavior. They write a research proposal. And so what we did is we, I set up a one on one meetings with every student in the class to talk about their they wrote a outline for their research proposal. So we discussed that and and how they're going to move it on to the next step of actually writing up the research proposal. And those conversations were really fun. Cause that's the point where you realize that we've gone from sort of introducing them to these different genetic techniques that are used to study neuroscience and behavior to now that they've become sort of theirs, they're part of their toolbox. So we're talking about, Oh, you can do this experiment. You can do that experiment. Elizabeth Glater: And they're saying a little bit, what about this? I was like, Oh, this is so great. So I have to answer them like, well, yes, but inside I'm like, Oh, that's so great that they're even like that they're asking these questions that they're able to sort of, you know, we're sort of brainstorming together about good ideas for, for experiments to do. So that's turned out to be kind of even more rewarding, I think in this time when we're sort of more separated to kind of feel like you still had that interaction and kind of working together on a project Patty Vest: And on that line Patty Vest: You'd mentioned that there's, there are a lot of questions still unanswered, especially in neuroscience. What are some of the research projects that you you're working on right now or will work in the future? Yeah. Elizabeth Glater: So so kind of have some real sort of different spokes, I guess, going on, I'll connect it to the idea of food place. So one project that I'm really interested in which, so we talked about how worms recognize these mixtures, which is how they recognize different species of bacteria that released these different mixtures of orders. And so one of them that I'm really interested in it as the idea of kind of perception versus just directly what you sense in that from the components. So just to kind of give an example, right? You could have a complex mixture, let's say a mixture of five different odorants, but when you smell it, you might just say, Oh, that smells kind of like blueberry pie. You don't actually identify all the sub components that make up that, that smell. And we're trying to figure out if worms do the same thing or not, we're still working on. Elizabeth Glater: So I can't answer that. That's our question. We're basically trying to understand kind of how, how they identify these next years, whether it's, it's a sum total is kind of a whole different percept that they live like that, or whether they're always able to sort of identify the components, making it up. Of course it will depend on the orders and how many and all of that. But we're just trying to answer that very basic question. Cause I think that's so interesting about the nervous system and the brain is that you can perceive sensory input coming in, but we're, and we think that our sensory representation is of the world around us. But in fact, their brain is doing constant sort of interpretation of what's going on instead of the famous example where a video is shown to students in the class and people are playing basketball and you're your superiors, you tell the students, okay, count how many baskets the team wearing the black shirts gets or something. Elizabeth Glater: And so they, they do that. And what they don't know is in the background or the video, there's a, somebody in a gorilla suit who walks through, walks through the background of the video. And you asked the students at the end of the video, did anyone see the gorilla? And they I'll say, what gorilla, what are you talking about? And then you ask them to do it again, where they don't have to count. You're just watching the video and then they see, Oh yeah, that's the grilling part? Is it just because your attention is focused, you can completely miss something that's playing on. So I think that's something that I'm interested in seeing if we can kind of model how that could happen. And the worm is all, we can kind of trick them between directly they're sensing and versus what they're perceiving and kind of how to untangle those things. Elizabeth Glater: And so we're working on doing that with, with the order of mixtures. So that's kind of one big project. And then the, the other one is more kind of a genetics project, which is the idea that we know that many neurological disorders are inherited because they run and run in families. For example, you know, the, the greatest risk factor in sense for developing something that schizophrenia is probably because someone in your family has schizophrenia. And so we thought the humans, you know, my sequenced almost 20 years ago and we thought, Oh, we'll know the genetic basis of all these inherited disorders. That's 2020. And you probably know that we do not know the genetic basis of many inherited disorders. There's few that we do know, but I would say most of them, we still don't know. And the reason why is it's complicated, it's not going to be as simple as just one gene being involved, probably multiple genes are involved, could also be that different genes that mutate mutated in different people that lead to similar symptoms that we call the same disease. Elizabeth Glater: And so C elegans is great because we can manipulate their genes very easily and we can keep their environment the same, right? People, human studies are always challenging because you have that mix of nature and nurture. But with worms, it's pretty easy to uncouple those things. So one of my projects is studying I look at different populations of worms that have different genetic backgrounds but different in their food preference. And then trying to understand how the genes affect their food, food preference. So that's a way, so it's not looking at, so it's kind of indirect rate. We're not looking at something like schizophrenia, but we are looking at something that's encoded in the genome in this case, their food preference. And then we're working on mapping the genes that seem to affect their food preference and seeing what kind of changes in genes happen. And so that ultimately will help us in picking up about ideas for different changes in June. We can look for in humans that might affect genes and lead to disorders. Mark Wood: So on that note, unfortunately we're out of time. So we're going to have to wrap this up, but we've been talking with Elizabeth Glader associate professor of neuroscience. Thanks, Elizabeth. This was fun. Patty Vest: Thank you. Thank you, Elizabeth. And to all who stuck with us this far, thanks for listening to Sage cast, the podcasts of Pomona college stay safe and until next time.