Dr. Andrew Kesner, PhD in Cellular, Molecular, Developmental Biology & Biophysics | Chief, Unit on Motivation and Arousal at Laboratory for Integrative Neuroscience, National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, National Institutes of Health

In this episode, we discuss Andrew’s experience pursuing a PhD in behavioral neuroscience through a Graduate Partnership Program with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Johns Hopkins University, how he centers human impact in his preclinical research on substance abuse disorders and sleep, and his advice for gaining mentorship experience during the PhD program to help develop leadership and people management skills.

Hosted by Brooklyn Arroyo

To connect with Andrew and to learn more about his story, visit his page on the PHutures #100AlumniVoices Project website.

Transcript

Brooklyn Arroyo

Hello, I'm co-host Brooklyn Arroyo and this is 100 alumni voices podcast, stories that inspire, where we explore the personal and professional journeys of a diverse group of 100 doctoral alumni from Johns Hopkins University. Today we're joined by Andrew Kesner, PhD in cellular, molecular, and developmental biophysics. Currently working at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Welcome to The PHutures podcast, Andrew. I'm glad to have you and be able to speak with you today.

Andrew Kesner

Yeah, I'm so glad to be here. Thank you so much.

Brooklyn Arroyo

Of course. So, let's just jump right in, and I'm really interested in your pursuit into cellular, molecular developmental biophysics and what led you into studying that.

Andrew Kesner

So, it's that's a good place to start because I I don't really do any of that. And so, I think you know my story kind of how I ended up in that department and you know with a PhD in that will be kind of the maybe different than other folks with a PhD from that department. So yeah, it's it's it's quite a mouthful. I used to remember giving presentations to people outside the department and they'd be like, oh, you know, is that a PhD in everything? I'm like, it's just biology. We'll just call it the biology. And so, I. And kind of a strange case probably from what most of the you know, PHD's that you're talking to in this program would be like because my doctorate thesis was done with the partnership between Hopkins and the NIH. So, the NIH is the National Institutes of Health. You know, the main campus is just down the highway from Baltimore in Bethesda, MD. And the NIH has these programs, called Graduate Partnership programs or GPP programs that we call them here. And there's a bunch of established partnerships between different universities. So, you know, backing up a little bit. So, the NIH is, you know, the big government Research Institute. It's a bunch of separate institutes that are all you know, I think there's 26 or so separate institutes that are all in different fields of biomedical research and they all comprise the National Institutes of Health. And there's lots of cutting-edge biomedical research going on there. So, it it makes a good place to go do thesis research, but the NIH itself doesn't have any graduate program, you know official one. So, they don't grant any degrees. So, if you want to do your thesis research at the NIH, you basically establish these a partnership with a university from anywhere in the world where you would go do your you know your coursework, training, and maybe you know some background training and then you would come to the NIH to do your thesis research. And so, like I said, the NIH has some partnerships that are established with different universities. So, Hopkins is obviously one. There's one with Brown University. There's some in Europe, like University College London and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. And so, there's several of these established partnership programs that you can apply directly to. And if you, you know, get accepted, you matriculate into one of those programs. But you can also do what are called an individual partnership, where if you're in a PhD program at another university, you can kind of contact an NIH investigator and ask if they'd be interested in hosting you as a as a thesis researcher. And you can kind of set up a partnership that way too. So, I ended up having or getting my bachelor’s degree from Hopkins, so I was an undergraduate there too, and then after that I did two years of what it's called Postbac research or Post Baccalaureate Research, also at the NIH. And my lab that I was doing that research in, I started to get collect, you know, interesting data. And I I asked the the the PI of the lab do you think that this would make a good thesis project because the NIH has these partnership programs and I could hopefully get into one and continue to do my this these studies for my thesis research, and he said yes that that would be awesome. So, that's what I ended up doing, and so my my research, my interests and and you know what I consider myself as a behavioral neuroscientist. And that's the type of research we were doing in that lab and I, you know, like I said, there are these programs set up already. So, I kind of had to choose which one would fit what I wanted to to kind of get my, you know, official PhD in, and the one at Hopkins the partnership was set up with that CMDB department, the cellular molecular developmental biology and Biophysics department. And so, I applied to that one and I and I got in. And so that's kind of how I ended up in that department kind of mostly because of logistical reasons. I I want the institute, I was working at was the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which is in Baltimore. It's at the Hopkins Bayview campus. I, you know, was kind of settling down with my partner in that area and I wanted to be at a university, at least for that first year where you're doing coursework and stuff that was close by as opposed to having to go to some place like, you know, Brown University in Providence, RI and for a year and then come back. And so, I kind of ended up in that department sort of, just by the fact that it was also in Baltimore and I wanted to stay there and I got into it and it all kind of worked out. So, what I ended up liking about that is even though I was a behavioral neuroscientist and my thesis work was all going to be, you know, with mouse behavior and studying neural circuits and all that stuff, I I got to learn tons of basic biology that I normally wouldn't have been learning in a or neuroscience focused PhD program. So, I learned all these things about sequencing and and, you know, genomics data and hardcore molecular biology and developmental biology, all those things that were are in that giant umbrella of a of a title for a department. And so, I learned got really, really, really good kind of ground level work and ground level background on biology that I then took and and ran with and applied all that stuff to the neuroscience stuff I was doing in my thesis research. So that's how I ended up in that department.

Brooklyn Arroyo

Well, OK, so I I thought I think that it's really interesting to be able to have sort of the dual program of a sort and and be working alongside not only Hopkins, but also that that other research organization and so within your work, did you have a cohort of people who were also partnered with Hopkins or was it just you researching there? And and what did that look like?

Andrew Kesner

So, the the partnership programs, the, the kind of ones that are already established, the way those work is you have several people that are in that specific GPP program with you. So, there was five other students who were in the same position as me, but we also spent the first year with our, you know, general cohort of CMDB students at Hopkins that were in that departmental PhD program. So, you know, we got the kind of you know, community, you know, we kind of were in that community of of the the 12 to 15, whatever PhD students that were in the the Hopkins department. But then the six of us that were in the the GPP program didn't do our thesis research in the department like the other students. We then kind of moved on to the NIH and did it, most of us, all of our research there. So, after the first year at Hopkins, I really only went back for things like progress reports, thesis committee meetings, all of the the you know, examinations like the GBO they call it and and and things like that. So, after that, yeah, basically from Year 2 and onwards, I wasn't on the Hopkins campus that much doing research there.

Brooklyn Arroyo

So, in the tail end of your PhD experience where you're mostly focusing on the research that you really cared about doing, your behavioral neuroscience, you were talking about, what were some of the projects that you were working on and and your end results, were they what you hoped out of your whole PhD experience? Was it profitable for you? And and and how did that look?

Andrew Kesner

Yes, so, my basic kind of the the thesis research I was doing was trying to characterize and learn more about a pathway in the brain that we thought was involved in reward seeking and so, by the end of my thesis research, and I think a lot of people kind of end up in this situation, you have a bunch of different things that were kind of working and maybe ended up with a couple of different stories and and along the way you kind of have the option of, you know, publishing maybe small chunks of it as you go, but what I ended up doing was keeping it all unpublished at at first so that I could then publish a bigger kind of more complete story at the end, and and that that did work out for me and and you know my thesis work were published in a in a in a pretty high nice journal. So, I guess yeah it overall, it ended up working out well, and and the project that I started with did end up kind of being, you know, my big thesis research in the end. And I know that's a lot of times that that doesn't necessarily work and there there are a lot of people who even you know, join a lab they have been working in thinking that it would be good thesis research, kind of like what I did, and it and it doesn't pan out that way and you kind of have to pivot along the way. But for me, yeah, I I I did end up with, I guess, satisfactory results with my starting project. So yeah.

Brooklyn Arroyo

And and so you mentioned studying reward seeking and and now you work within sort of National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. And so, do you feel that your research has really transferred to the work you're doing within that institution in the sense of abuse, substance abuse in that area?

Andrew Kesner

Yeah, totally. So, when you're going on from your PhD work and you want to stay in academia, which is kind of my my career path that I that I was focused on, a lot of the next step for most people is a postdoc. And so, there’re kind of like two, there's there's more than two, but kind of the two main things that you could do as a postdoc is really kind of continue on the same theme using the same tools that you know and and maybe expand upon them a little bit or focus on a slightly different, you know, topic using those tools and things like that or you can really branch out and and try to get training in something completely new. So, I kind of did a little bit of both of that where I was staying in the you know, overall field of substance use disorders and shifting from National Institute on Drug abuse to a different institute at the NIH, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism or NIAAA. And I could have probably just continued using the same techniques and and doing the the things I was doing, but you know kind of a different maybe overall question or maybe on a different kind of drug that you were studying, something like that. So I did a bit of that, but then I also branched out into learning about sleep research at the preclinical level. So, sleep research using mice, I learned how to conduct those studies. And I found myself being able to wed substance use disorder research and sleep research. And there's a whole kind of emerging exciting subfield of that on in terms of how substances of abuse affect sleep and vice versa how sleep and sleep disorders can sort of exacerbate substance use problems. And you know, I think that that's worked out pretty well in terms of, you know, taking what I knew and building off of it and adding kind of some new flavor, because overall what you kind of want to end up doing is carving a niche for yourself. If you want to end up, you know, running an independent lab, it's good advice to start thinking a little bit differently than maybe what your mentors are are doing and try to find something that that is your kind of niche your your topic that you're doing, and so that's that's what I ended up doing for my postdoc research.

Brooklyn Arroyo

Wow. So, within that experience, do you feel that because the area of substance abuse is oftentimes a very personal, it's something that's intimate for a lot of people to to view, and you were looking at it from a very scientific standpoint within your research did you ever have moments where you were able to see your research’s impact on people or hear about it?

Andrew Kesner

So that's a huge, you know, thing that we always try to, I always try to do and and and you know I think good, good basic, you know preclinical scientists try to do is is view your science you know from a translational point of view and try to keep it grounded in the fact that you're you're hoping to help people in the end, right? You know, my my interest is in how the brain works, just on a basic basic level, I'm interested in why we're motivated to do what we do and avoid what we avoid and and and things like that. You know, so, my focus is understanding that, but when conducting studies and and thinking about the implications of them, you know it's good to have the lens of that people are suffering from these disorders and and we try to, you know, keep keep that in mind as we're doing our research. One of the nice things about being at a place like Hopkins or a place like the NIH, which are these major, you know, research institutes, is that there are clinical populations there. And and researchers doing studies in the clinic with patients that are suffering from these psychiatric illnesses. And so, one of the the nice things that I was able to do at the NIH is be part of this consortium called the Center for Compulsive Behaviors or the CCB. And that is a fellowship that you can do as a postdoc that you're you kind of get to build this or you get to be part of this bigger community of people studying at the clinical level, you know, patients and preclinical and really translationally focused scientists. So, we you do have the opportunity at these type of big institutes to meet and work and speak with clinicians and and hear, you know, what are the things that patients are reporting to them? You know, can we model that well in the animals and do the things we're doing with the animals have sort of face validity to what humans are experiencing? So, so yeah, I mean we, I I always try to think about that as I'm designing experiments and interpreting data and things like that.

Brooklyn Arroyo

And I think that you bring up a good point that we would hope most researchers, or whether, clinical or not, are putting into their research is just keeping in mind the the why it's important and the impact it would have on people. And so, within your research and within your work, have there been any major surprises to whether it be the research that you're doing or the logistical side that you didn't necessarily feel that your PhD prepared you for?

Andrew Kesner

So, one thing, I think that a lot of people when you ask them that question that are in my position will, will, will kind of talk about is the the PhD programs themselves don't give too much training in thing in in you know, things like managing a lab or maybe even just broadly like leadership, things like that. So, once you get past the graduate student point where you're doing your PhD research where you really should just be focused on learning how to design experiments and interpret data and you know to potentially publish that data like that's that's what I think your PhD research or your PhD program should really be training you on. And that's what most do, but once you get beyond that then you start to bring in things like I have students that I need to train and you know I have budgets to, you know, keep track of and balance and and things like that and so one thing that I kind of recommend that folks do is while they're in a PhD program, if they do want to continue on to, to academia or even in industry or any other job that they see themselves having kind of a a manager or managerial type position or a leadership type position where they have people under them is to try to see if you can mentor some undergraduate students or summer students, and even just having one person under your wing, it'll train you a lot on keeping track of what they're doing and what you're doing, and you know, reagents that are running out. So, you kind of find that once you have a couple people that you have to pay attention to, you start to learn how to organize those things. But yeah, overall, I think it would be good for PhD programs to maybe have some sort of training in in that a little bit more officially.

Brooklyn Arroyo

And I think it's good, even not if you don't plan on having those sort of leadership roles within your career to just have some form of mentorship experience for other people. There's a lot that can go into learning about how you work within an environment, work with other people when you're supervising them, and like you said, taking care of what am I doing and what are they doing? So, what have been some of the biggest challenges for, aside from stepping into a space where you weren't necessarily completely prepared for what it was like to have that team setting and work within the lab, what have been the bigger challenges you've faced?

Andrew Kesner

Well, I I mean with with that any type of research you're doing, you always run into, you know things don't work. And I I always, I always do this thing where you know when you're describing something new that you're gonna do, you're always like oh, yeah, it you know that should work. And I always try to now put that in like air quotes. That “should” work, you just can't see what I'm doing, but you know, because probably 70% of the time, even if you're copying what someone else is doing it, it doesn't work right right away. And you gotta you gotta do troubleshooting and figure out what's going wrong. But I but I like doing that. And and I know that that's kind of part of the that's part of the game here. So, you know, it's always a challenge, but developing that type of mindset, you know, kind of that growth mindset of like I've never done this before and I need to, I'm going to figure out how to do it, whether it works the first time or you know the 10th time or something like that, so. We say it should work, and we never say it will work until it actually does work. So yeah, probably that's that's one of the major kind of challenges that we run into a lot, setting up something new and trying to get it to to work consistently like you think it should.

Brooklyn Arroyo

And that really is the backbone of a lot of research, just it might work. There's no absolutes to anything really in that that growth mindset.

Andrew Kesner

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know that's that's one of the fun things I think about doing research is it's almost there's almost like a sense of sort of like gambling a little bit. You're you're I think you're in a good position if you if you, you know, can't wait to open up the Excel file and see you know what, whether what you did actually looks like what you think it should look like. And if you get, if you get jazzed up about, you know, finally being able to look at your data after running an experiment for a couple of weeks. And and that thrill doesn't ever sort of fade away. Then you're probably, you know, doing something right. You're in the right place for, for, for yourself.

Brooklyn Arroyo

Definitely, and the the inspiration of when you open it up and it is what you thought it was going to be or prove something or it's something completely new and different that leads you down a different path. So, our grand finale of all of these episodes is the same question and I I really am interested in what your answer will be and that is what is your inspiration right now?

Andrew Kesner

Yeah, that is, that's that's a great final question because it's kind of and I like that it's right now because that's always, you know, has the potential for changing as you progress through your career. So, I I think I have kind of two, two main kind of inspirations right now. The first one and and you'll you can get a taste of this if you look at, I guess it's going to be in some exhibits the we were asked to provide you with like 2 pictures that were meaningful to us about, you know, our career path and something along those lines. And so, one of them is a picture of me with my at that point about six- or seven-month year old daughter, who and we're sitting at the computer, looking over the kind of final draft of my dissertation, my thesis work, and in the in that description of that picture I I I wrote all this. But you know, my daughter was born really premature. So, she was born at 28 and a half weeks, which is basically a little bit, you know, a week or two into the third trimester. So that's really premature. It's not ultra premature. There are, you know, lots of babies who are born 24-25-26 weeks yhat that do go on and survive and thrive. But this was still really, really premature and we spent a lot of time in the NICU because, you know, the babies when they're born that early, they have to be in an incubator for a while and under constant supervision and they have trouble eating because they haven't developed, you know, the suckle reflex just yet and there are other complications that can happen. Luckily, my daughter was was fairly healthy for where she should be at that point. So, she really just kind of needed to grow and continue to develop in the in the incubator, in the, in the NICU. And so, one of the things that inspires me now is thinking back on that and seeing, you know, I have a 1-year-old now too, and this this baby that that baby is now 4 years old. So, looking at them and and in particular my my older one that was in the NICU and seeing her and thinking about all of the stuff that was going on in the NICU, all of the equipment, and all of the things the the NICU nurses that were doing to, you know, basically keep my baby alive and growing and remembering that all of that started in some, you know, preclinical lab probably with cell lines at first and then mice and rats, maybe other animals, before being able to be applied to human babies and and here now my daughter keeping her alive. So, thinking back on that and thinking, you know, about the scientists that were in the lab developing those things and being thankful for that and and and again going back to my research and maybe not being sure exactly how this pathway that I'm studying at this moment, you know, may make its way into helping humans in the future, but keeping in mind that, you know, hopefully one day it will. The other thing that inspires me now is now that I'm a bit more senior after graduating from my PhD program, I actually have an independent position now at the NIAAA where I'm the chief of a unit and I have, you know, my own students now and this, that position started about two years ago. And so, my first group of students that are these postbac research at the NIH, they are moving on to their own next career steps. So, they're, one of them is getting into medical school and two of them are getting into PhD programs and seeing them kind of go through that process and mentoring them through that and you know, realizing now that I'm past or I'm now part of their story and that the things that I do with them and the mentorship I give them are going to go on for the rest of their careers and then they're going to mentor their own students and so, kind of seeing the the bigger picture of not only is my science important and you know can leave a mark on, you know, the the bettering of humanity, so to speak, but they, you know, they hopefully will do their own thing and they'll continue that and and so I'm kind of seeing my my reach start to broaden and so trying to do a good and impactful job as a mentor is also something that is inspiring me quite a bit right now.

Brooklyn Arroyo

Definitely the the the possibilities of both our research and of just who we are as as people is is really inspiring and and the work you've been doing specifically is is really inspiring. So, thank you for coming to the PHutures Podcast and and speaking with us today and sharing your journey. It was great.

Andrew Kesner

Yeah. Thank you again so much for having me. And I think that this is a a really great concept and a great program you all are putting together and and thank you everyone for listening.