Dr. Jose Pruneda-Paz

Associate Professor Department of Cell and Developmental Biology

with Sharanya Sriram

What was your journey into academia? What was most instrumental or important to you?

My journey is an unusual one. I’m an immigrant, so I have a two-part journey — the first part was as an undergrad student and PhD student back in Argentina, which was my initiation into academia. The systems are very different. The one thing that is emphasized in both places is education. In the very early stages of your training, you have to get involved with teaching and education of undergrad students. The requirement of instruction in a PhD program, for example, or even as an undergrad student — I was also a TA as an undergrad student — starts nurturing your passion for helping and teaching others to be part of this big enterprise that higher education is. And of course, there is also the research component, which I’m really passionate about as well.

I think it’s really important is to have good mentors. That’s something I always tell students here. Make sure that you choose a lab you enjoy going to, and where your mentor fulfills your expectations as a mentee. There are of course multiple mentoring styles, and multiple mentee styles, and I think it’s up to mentors and mentees to figure out whether they are a good match. It’s a bidirectional relationship. Having good mentors, mentors that support and understand you, is probably one of the most important things for career and development of passion for your work. It’s a really critical decision that sometimes people overlook.

Especially in the very early stages, anything you learn is going to be useful. Even the things you don’t like will be useful, because at the very least you know what you don’t like, and that can be as helpful as knowing what you like. You know what to look for afterwards. When you are an undergrad, or even at the PhD level, my suggestion is to look for the type of guidance or mentorship you’re going to get wherever you go, rather than the specifics of what you’re studying. Then as you move on, especially after you finish your PhD and you decide whether to continue in academia, you’ll have to start thinking more about what you really like in terms of your research topic. Some mentors will really train you well and develop you as a researcher or as an instructor, so as you move on to the later stages, you can choose more specifically the area or topic you would like to study.

I think that really reflects my journey in academia. I got the right mentorship. I was in a small lab when I was a PhD student, with lots of interactions with the professor running the lab, even daily interactions. We would work on the bench together sometimes. Especially with undergrads, I still make myself available and work with them on the bench to teach them techniques at the beginning. And I think I do it, in part, because that has been my experience as an undergrad and grad student.

Then I came to the U.S. around 20 years ago, which was very different in many ways. I changed from a small lab to a big lab that had 30 or so members,

I changed languages from Spanish to English, and I changed organisms — I did my PhD studying soil bacterium that can degrade environmental pollutants, but here I started working in plants and circadian clocks. I had not been trained in plant biology or chronobiology before I came to the U.S. for my postdoc. But in terms of the independence that I needed to work in a large lab, I had the right foundations, so I didn’t find it too challenging to transition. In the long run, it was very advantageous. If you think about how long it took me to transition, yeah, maybe it took me a couple of years to get adjusted to all these changes, but in the long run it gave me a much broader perspective. Although I didn’t work with plant pathogens in my PhD, I worked with bacteria, and in my postdoc I worked with plants specifically, and in my lab now we are using bacterial pathogens to study how the clock is influenced by bacterial pathogen infections. So in a sense, I could bring a little bit of that previous expertise into my work.

Are career prospects in research the same now compared to when you started?

I think nowadays, what I see is that in the younger generations, there’s a better understanding of the many career paths you can take when you decide to do research. Academia is certainly one path, but there are many options in industry, or even in legal matters like patents. As you develop yourself as a researcher, if you’re in the right place, maybe what you thought was an academic path might change because you might realize ‘This is not what I like.” In institutions like UC San Diego, you have many opportunities to explore those alternate paths. There are many workshops and informational events where you can get in contact with people that took Career Path A, B, C, or D, and that can spark your interest in taking a different direction.

Figuring out what you’re passionate about can be very difficult. In the long run, if you can discover that thing which you enjoy and really love, that’ll be the main driver of whatever you do. That is something that is very difficult to teach. You can nurture passion and love for research, but there is something that is innate to each person that makes you more passionate about certain things. If you can find that passion, that will really, really ease your path into whatever you want to do. I feel like I’ve figured that out.