Dr Emily Weber- Biology, Brains, and Becoming: A Journey in Biomedical Education, Ep. 5

In this insightful episode, Provost Joe Lane interviews Dr. Emily Weber, Shaw Assistant Professor of Biology and Coordinator of the Biomedical Science Track at North Carolina Wesleyan University. Dr. Weber shares her journey from immunology research to a passion for student-centered teaching and academic advising.

Key Highlights:

• Academic Background & Passion for Virology: Dr. Weber earned her PhD in biomedical science, focusing on immunology and viruses like HIV. Her fascination with the complexity and diversity of viruses continues to inspire her teaching.
• Focus on Student Success: Now deeply invested in educational research, Dr. Weber explores how soft skills—like time management, collaboration, and introspection—impact student performance and readiness for competitive graduate programs.
• Technology in Learning: She discusses the evolving role of AI tools like ChatGPT in education, emphasizing thoughtful use to enhance learning rather than replace critical thinking.
• Building Academic Community: Dr. Weber highlights the importance of peer support and small-group learning, noting how Wesleyan’s intimate environment fosters meaningful student connections and shared strategies for success.
• Career Guidance & Personal Fit: Drawing from her own shift from nursing to biology, she encourages students to reflect on their passions and strengths to find the right career path—whether in medicine, public health, or other science-related fields.
• Vision for the Future: Dr. Weber hopes to see students graduate not only with strong academic foundations but also with the confidence and tools to thrive in diverse professional environments.

This episode offers a compelling look at how personalized education, curiosity, and thoughtful mentorship can transform student experiences and outcomes.

Transcript

00:00:11
 Welcome to the Deep End at Wesleyan. In this podcast series, we explore the ways that faculty, teachers, scholars at North Carolina Wesleyan University bring the research and scholarly work into the classroom to enrich and enliven our students' education. My name is Joe Lane. I'm the provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at North Carolina Wesleyan. In the three years that I have led the academic program here, I've been so fortunate to have a front row view of our faculty as they are actively engaging in and leading work in their fields and sharing that work directly with their undergraduate students.

00:00:41
 I'm excited to bring their stories to our listeners. If you're an alum, trustee, or friend of Wesleyan, you should be very proud to see the work our faculty are doing. If you're a student or a prospective student, I hope you'll hear something that catches your ear or your interest. Perhaps you can find a professor whose class you would like to take or whose research team you would like to join. If you're a faculty member at Wesleyan, I hope you'll be impressed with the work your colleagues are doing and will consider coming on a future episode to tell us about what you're up to.

00:01:06
 Today we're talking with Dr. Emily Weber. Dr. Weber joined North Carolina Wesleyan University in 2022 and currently serves as the Shaw assistant professor of biology and coordinator of our biomedical science track for students who are aiming for medical school or a similar career path. Dr. Weber earned her undergraduate degree at Augustana University, a biology BS with a minor in English, and she earned her doctorate in biomedical science at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York.

00:01:33
 Before coming to North Carolina Wesleyan, Dr. Weber was an assistant professor at Fort Hays University on the windswept plains of West Kansas. It really is one of the loneliest places one can imagine on the planet, I have to say. And she's also taught at Nazareth College and St. John Fisher College. Emily, welcome to the pod. Thanks for having me. Tell us a little bit about the broad outlines of your work and how you got into studying and what you study. All right, so...

00:01:58
 My graduate degree is a little bit outside of what I do kind of currently. So, as you kind of said, my PhD was in biomedical science. Specifically, I did a lot of immunology research, so studying how your body fights against diseases. Particularly, I love viruses. You love viruses? I love viruses. Okay, we'll have to come back to that. I love figuring out about how they work, all those great details. Okay. But since entering higher ed, one thing that really motivates me now is figuring out how to best support my students in the classroom.

00:02:28
 Because as biomedical coordinator, one of my main goals is to help our students get into those competitive graduate programs, you know, like medicine, dentistry, vet school. And these programs are competitive for a reason, right? These are very high-impact professions where...

00:02:45
 Unfortunately, the entry rate for some of these schools are pretty low. So we want to make sure our students are, first off, well-prepared and the best applicants they can be, right? So part of my research that I'm kind of focusing on now, though, is looking into how do we make students the best they can be? So with that, a little bit of my research now focuses on study skills. So another word for these are soft skills.

00:03:11
 Are you able to do time management? Can you do things like collaborate with other people? These kind of things we think about not necessarily being the hard facts of science, but all those skills you need to be able to be successful in careers.

00:03:26
 So a lot of your work actually ties directly into your role as an academic advisor and the students you're working with. How did you come to decide this was something that really needed more exploration and concentration? Was it something that you realized when you started teaching or did you know that as an undergraduate?

00:03:44
 Well, definitely not as an undergraduate. It's actually kind of emerged my last year of graduate school. So when I was in graduate school, I had a great opportunity to do this fellowship, which I worked with the Rochester Teaching and Learning Center. And this, I had a mentor that did educational research, and he, Dr. Kyle Trenshaw, he really opened up my eyes to kind of

00:04:05
 The importance of thinking about very logically, what are the best teaching practices? And every role since then, I've kind of leaned this more and more about thinking about how I can become the best teacher I can for my students and to encourage them to be their best academic self.

00:04:23
 Wonderful, wonderful. So talk a little bit about how you do that when you start out with a group of students who say they want to go to medical school and they come to college, they're 18 years old, they're very, very excited, but they're also probably a little bit underprepared for the type of work they're going to be asked to do. How do you work them through that process of becoming the best learners they can be?

00:04:49
 Well, I think that's a great question and one that we're still kind of working through in the field ourselves, right? This is why educational research is so huge, because there is, like you said, definitely some students are unprepared, but also realize there's a wide variety of students we have entering all colleges, right? Different levels of preparedness, backgrounds, just their kind of familiarity with the subjects and how to study. So we have this, right, trying to think about these best applied practices that we can do for this wide range of students

00:05:17
 That's going to hit a lot of students and help them be their best, but you're having that great variation. So kind of what I'm focusing on right now is thinking about what are the skills our students really need to focus on? What are we not doing so great at? Then also the flip side of that, what are our students really great at? What can we celebrate? What can we encourage? What can we ask them to lean into?

00:05:40
 So I think that's kind of the first step, is you have to do a little bit of self-realization and perspective. And this is just good general advice for life, right? Not even for college, but for any stage. So the first time you're doing any big transition, there can be a lot of difficulties. And this is something you've probably seen a lot, right? I see it occasionally, yes. Right? Students, they struggle a little bit, and some of the struggle is not necessarily something that's bad. That means that you're learning, you're growing,

00:06:08
 But one thing you have to think about, though, is that you can't let yourself fall into the same patterns, the same mistakes again and again. So with this, you're kind of asking students, you know, if you had some setbacks and struggles, what do you think went wrong? What are some skills that you think you can improve on? What are some habits you can form? What are some tasks you can do to kind of help pull yourself forward and become an even better student?

00:06:30
 And what do you get back from students when you ask them to ask these questions of themselves, when you ask for that kind of introspection on their learning? How do they respond to that? See, I think this is what's fascinating. I'm beginning to kind of realize and see is that there's going to be a lot of variation, a lot of differences depending on student to student. There's a couple of themes that are very common to see. So if you see things that are like...

00:06:52
 Time management in regards particularly to spending time studying for classes and focusing on the effort that you're giving for your classes, that's a major theme.

00:07:04
 But from there, there can be a lot of wide variety of issues that kind of when you're asking students like, what's going on in your life, what's happening, because everyone has these different struggles they're dealing with outside of their life too, right? So not only is it just kind of that personal introspective, but also what's going on in their outside life they need to handle with as well.

00:07:26
 Do you find that part of what you have to discuss with students is their relationship with technology? So in thinking about some of the teaching learning literature that you shared with me, a lot of it is about when technology helps and when technology hurts our ability to learn.

00:07:44
 I think, I love this question. So this is kind of something that's been on my mind and I think our school of mind as well. Beginning of the, I think it was this semester, we had a book club that read the attention span and try to think about what goes along with us focusing with technology. I think now we're kind of entering, we've been entering this phase for a while, right? We've always had this technology, but especially with AI becoming so more powerful,

00:08:10
 In the past recent years and becoming actually available to us, we can start thinking about, so we have these issues. How can we use technology to help us with these versus are we maybe using technology as almost sort of a crutch sometimes to circumvent the real issues that we're dealing with here?

00:08:30
 Gotcha. Gotcha. So, and when you talk to your students about how they use technology to study and to better understand things, do you find that they have reasonable strategies or unreasonable strategies for that type of work?

00:08:45
 So I think this is something that's really exciting because we're entering this kind of new stage, especially with things like ChatGPT, where students are learning how to use these tools oftentimes for the first time in their careers along with me myself. Yeah, right. We're all students too. Right? So we're trying to navigate the best uses of these tools. And there's definitely some things where I can say, okay, when you use ChatGPT to write your whole entire essay,

00:09:13
 That's really a waste, right? Because a big part of the writing process is thinking and learning and developing these critical skills to kind of help analyze arguments and make strong reasoning. Where if you have a chat bot do that, it's just predicting text, right? And it's not really doing that process of getting your mind to think about it.

00:09:35
 On the flip side of that though, there are some uses I've seen where students have used these tools in really creative ways. So for example, I was talking to a student the other day that used ChatGPT and fed them topics into and asked them to generate multiple choice questions to help quiz themselves, right? So these are an excellent idea where you're kind of thinking, this is a tool that is going to help give creative solutions, maybe not creative solutions, but new questions that you may not have thought of yourself.

00:10:03
 Right. Especially I think a lot of times when students are learning something new, and they're just trying to kind of grasp those basic concepts, these can be really beneficial things.

00:10:13
 Fantastic. And of course, this year you had a group of biomedical science students together in a course at the beginning of the year where you're helping them make the transition to university. Did you see value in them having those conversations among themselves about how they were going to learn or when they were struggling, how they were struggling? What did you kind of see there?

00:10:36
 I think trying to build that community up with students, right? And getting them to the place where they're able to talk to each other. That's a real strength of a place like Wesleyan, right? Because think about these huge schools with tens of thousands of students. You're going to have a classroom full of hundreds of people. You kind of lose those easy connections, right? Where this cohort, we had about 20 or so students entering. They're able to meet with each other, talk to each other, and chat about, hey...

00:11:01
 You're struggling with this? I'm struggling with this too. What have you used, right? So I think what's kind of hit me though with a little bit with this is that a lot of times the solutions they used maybe aren't necessarily so much technologically based. So one example is the classic time management, right? Especially for your, this is a first year section. You're trying to figure out what's going on in your life. How do you manage all these new responsibilities?

00:11:26
 One tool I saw them starting to use was actually just the old-fashioned planner, right? Do you ever use a planner? I do. See, I'm all on digital booking on that. Entirely digital. So I was shocked that some of them went out and they got a planner and they started writing everything in by hand. That's how they felt like they were able to

00:11:46
 Welcome to my lecture.

00:12:05
 It's one of these new, again, a big word with this is that it's very student by student. What's going to work best for one person might be just having it all on their phone, on their calendar, so they can flip through it any time and add stuff. Other people are going to need to have that planned out. And I think what's great is the more students you talk to and you have these conversations, you can get more ideas what other people are doing to see what actually works for you.

00:12:30
 Gotcha. Well, I mean, clearly one of the things that really animates you is that opportunity to work with students on a very personal, one-on-one, small group type of setting. Does that come from your own background, having been at Augustana, a similar institution in certain respects to North Carolina Wesleyan, in your own undergraduate career?

00:12:50
 Oh, absolutely. So for those of you who are not aware, August County University is a liberal arts school in the middle of South Dakota. Also fairly rural, even though it's in Sioux Falls, the biggest city in South Dakota. The biggest city in South Dakota. So pretty big deal. There's a corn palace, I understand.

00:13:08
 That's actually in a different city. I'm going to go like 20 minutes north or something. Okay, not in Sioux Falls, but outskirts of Sioux Falls. Okay, but go ahead. So anyway, at Augie, I had those opportunities, right, to talk to my professors and get to know them and have really those great conversations one-on-one where I was able to explore the topics more.

00:13:29
 Actually, when I entered college, I was a nursing major. I thought nursing was a career for me because I always loved learning how the body works. I thought it was fascinating and a great way to apply it. But it wasn't until my sophomore year I actually kind of shadowed a nurse and got my foot in the door where I realized

00:13:45
 I couldn't handle like the smells, the blood, all that, right? But because I had these great connections with my biology professors, I had these great experiences, I realized I still love science and that going into this field of biology would be a great fit for me and my interest. So I think that's something that's great about this one-on-one kind of care that now I get to have with students is that I can kind of see them and say, you know what?

00:14:09
 You're kind of thinking about these different career options. Here are some other things to think about, I can see, based off your personality and your interests and what you've kind of talked about in class a little bit. Yeah. But I suspect, and having had conversations like this with students, I've seen sometimes, you know, the students who think of themselves as...

00:14:27
 Pre-medicine sometimes really takes some umbrage at the idea that this isn't really where they belong. How do you navigate those kind of interpersonal conversations when you have to talk about, you know, very directly, students struggling, students trying to figure out where their skill set's going to fit? Does your English minor background kind of come in there some as you have those conversations?

00:14:51
 So I think those conversations, right, are always interesting because it goes back to kind of our first thing of introspection, right? You're thinking about, what am I looking for in this career and why do I want to enter it? So that's always kind of the first thing I ask students when they come to my office is, why do you want to go into medicine? Why do you want to be a doctor? Why not anything else in the healthcare field, right?

00:15:15
 And for me, thinking back to my own personal career, I wanted to be a nurse because that's one of the main things I knew about. I didn't know that I could study immune cells in a lab somewhere and learn about viruses, right? Like I knew it was kind of out there, but it wasn't necessarily directly on my radar. So when students kind of enter, one thing that's always great to talk to them about is what

00:15:36
 It's the stem of their passion, right? So are they interested in how the body works? Is that why they want to go into medicine? Do they really just want to help people? Because there's a lot of great careers and a lot of great majors here at Wesleyan you can use to help people, right? Right. And then also kind of thinking about

00:15:52
 Your strengths, you know, what do you find yourself feeling joy when you're doing, right? If you are dreading learning about all the biology concepts and topics, maybe pursuing medicine is not going to be the best for you because there's a lot of biology in it, right? But if you find yourself really invigorated by the concept of how the healthcare field works and kind of spreading that message about how to become your best, healthiest self,

00:16:19
 Maybe public health might be a better fit for you and your passions. So I think that's one of the things that I encourage students to think about. Not just, you know, when they're trying to choose a major, but after they've chosen a major, when they're every year, just think about, are my passions, my interests still aligned with my major and my career track?

00:16:40
 Very good. Has there been like one kind of defining Wesleyan moment when you kind of felt like, oh, I really connected with the student and helped them find a way that maybe they didn't see forward, whether they stayed in their original field or moved to something else? So when we think about the Wesleyan moments, the ones that I always kind of think back on that really make me...

00:17:02
 Just Love My Job are not so much like these huge moments where you're like, oh, this student was able to get into this program, or they got this award. But it's the everyday classroom conversations that I find myself reflecting on in Just Loving. So for example, one of one class, Biology 101, our intro class,

00:17:21
 When we get done talking about a topic such as the history of mankind, starting from when Earth was a hot volcano mess going all the way through the evolution of different species. When we get to the end and a student raises their hand and they're like,

00:17:37
 What would happen if other species also had, you know, bigger brains that had more complex thoughts? How would that change things? And then we can get into some really cool conversations, right, about competition, about what does it mean to be a biological fit individual, not necessarily strength, but also, you know, other features that help you survive. So the things that energize me the most about, Wesley, and my favorite moments here are

00:18:01
 Or honestly, just the everyday classes I get to teach. When I get to work with students who are just curious about these same things that I'm curious about, we just get to talk about cool stuff. So that's a little bit strained from the biomedical side, but...

00:18:16
 Well, no. I mean, it happens in the biomedical classroom or the religion classroom or the political science classroom. You have a lot of those different conversations, I think, that they can come across. But that's wonderful to hear. And I wouldn't want to let you get away without an opportunity for you to elaborate on your love of viruses, because I think that's something that really calls for attention. What is it about work in virology that you think is so interesting and intellectually stimulating?

00:18:46
 Well, I think it's for me, the fact that viruses are so diverse amongst themselves. So when I was doing my PhD, I was studying HIV, which is a retrovirus, which means most organisms have DNA in their cells that encodes all the instructions on what that cell needs to do.

00:19:04
 HIV is unique because it has RNA. And RNA actually, when HIV infects your cells, it has to be reverse transcribed, or it gets actually turned into DNA, and then it gets integrated into the host DNA, and then it starts making more RNA and all these proteins.

00:19:23
 And just the fact that viruses have all these crazy complex processes they do, and that's going to be much different than our average influenza virus and stuff like that. So just kind of the diversity of all these unique mechanisms and ways that viruses are able to

00:19:41
 Welcome to my lecture. Welcome to my lecture.

00:19:58
 What's the right way to put this? That we're able to replicate cells and other types of molecules into different forms that thrive in different places. How do you bring that kind of wonder into your classroom on a regular basis?

00:20:19
 Man, that's a great question because I think that the material itself is full of diversity and wonder, right? Like, I'm sure as you talk to every professor here, they're going to say, oh, my subject's the best. But I really think my subject is the best. I think biology has so many cool things that are within it and just kind of lend itself to that diversity. And I think you kind of struck the chord, right? That's kind of a theme of my passion, even with my educational research, right? It's realizing all these diverse strategies we can use to help the diverse set of students we have in front of us.

00:20:48
 And same thing kind of with viruses. We have all these diverse strategies to try to combat and treat all these diverse viral infections that we have. And I think that's something that just really makes me excited every day to think about in either

00:21:03
 Welcome to my lecture. Welcome to my lecture. Welcome to my lecture. Welcome to my lecture. Welcome to my lecture.

00:21:22
 We have all these different tools we can use, whether we're talking about how to fight viruses or how to help students, and it's about kind of realizing which ones are the right job. Right, kind of making that connection. Now, do you have any hope of being able to continue your virological research, or is it all hazard level two and not possible to do outside of a medical setting? No.

00:21:43
 Not right now. So kind of what you said is that a lot of the research that I was doing was a little bit too hazardous for some of the facilities we have here right now. Right. But do you see students who get excited about some of the similar questions you did as they start to think about their own graduate study and where they might go from here? Oh, that's a good question.

00:22:05
 So thinking about like students and kind of their interest, saying like what their passion is kind of for the next step, well unfortunately I haven't had quite the opportunity to instill the love of viruses into anybody at the grad school, but maybe the next set of students. Okay, we need a first year seminar on the love of viruses, for the love of viruses. I can imagine a lot of people would sign up for that one.

00:22:31
 When you think about in the big picture kind of how we do the sciences at North Carolina Wesleyan and even beyond our own institution, higher ed in general, what are some of the things you'd like to see us think about changing or approaching somewhat differently?

00:22:46
 So when I think about, I don't think about in terms of maybe just science, but the whole entire academic programs in general. I think we're already making great strides, so I want to say that we already do a lot of these things, but doing them even more, even better, is kind of what I think our school is pushing ourselves to do right now. And a lot of this is going to be student support services, so we already have student tutors, and I know a lot of them, they've been in my classrooms, they're great tutors,

00:23:13
 But encouraging them to maybe, encouraging our own students to go to them even more, right? And take advantage of all these resources you have for tutoring. Make it even better, right? We have a lot of workshops that our Student Success Center does over various study skills such as time management, things like that. And encourage our students to go to them even more, right? Lean into these tools and resources you have to become even better. So I think that's, we're already doing a lot of great things, but just kind of amplifying and ramping it up.

00:23:42
 And really encourage your students to take advantage of it earlier rather than later. It's going to be key. Do you think there's a challenge there just in the sense that students today, and we all fall a little bit into that trap of, you know, this generation, and I know I am the epitome of the old professor, but nevertheless, are a little bit less likely to seek out helps that involve other people. They kind of want the app or the...

00:24:11
 The technological fix that they can do on their own. All right. And I think that that's an excellent question, right? So again, it goes back to kind of each student trying to figure out what's going to work best for them. So for some students, I think the apps that they can use, right, those online resources, using flashcards, like those online flashcards, online quiz websites, those are going to be great resources for some students. Mm-hmm.

00:24:38
 And I think part of it, though, is when you're doing it on your own, going back to the idea of, is this technology helping me learn? Or is it kind of making my, for lack of better words, my brain not work as hard to figure out what's really going on? It's kind of a shortcut. So I think these tools that students can use online can be really beneficial and useful.

00:25:00
 But to a certain point, you have to make sure you're using the tool correctly. And when you actually have a person kind of helping you, whether it's that peer tutor student or the Student Success Center, it can become a little bit easier because they can kind of help guide you and say, hey, we've worked with a bunch of students in your exact situation before. Here's what's worked best for them. Here's these practices to actually implement that are more likely to probably give you success. So I think...

00:25:26
 Getting back to the new generation, it's figuring out what's going to work best for you. Is it going to be using this app that could be good, or is it going to be trying to seek out that person, that mentor, that advice to help you along? Yeah, so it's a very person-centered approach to education that you're advocating for and that you feel like works well.

00:25:48
 Well, here at Wesleyan, it's hard not to, right? When you get to know all of your students and you see them three times a week, you greet them each morning as they walk in the classroom, right? You get to know kind of other personalities and you can really see the differences that every student has.

00:26:04
 So what do you think success looks like in the big project of helping students become more effective at learning in the sciences and going on to do meaningful work beyond here? Where would you like to see that project in four or five years? Where are you trying to get to? So my main goal is always if we can prepare our students to enter the fields, their careers that are going to enrich their lives.

00:26:31
 I'm not going to have a specific list of, oh, I want X number of students to enter this field or that field. I just want our students to kind of explore and figure out what area is going to bring joy to them. That's my first goal. And second goal is to kind of help them be prepared when they enter that. So do they have the tools, the researches, the experiences that they can use when they enter that field, whether it's graduate school, whether it's going directly into a job, whether they're going into industry or pharmacy.

00:26:59
 Do they feel like they can succeed and that their education has prepared them to be ready for this challenge? I think that's actually a great idea of the lesson that I love is that not only with a liberal arts education, right, do you kind of get trained in the concepts, the meat of your major,

00:27:17
 But you have all these other courses, you're taking different fields that help you become a well-rounded person that's actually ready for that field, right? If we think about a medical doctor, not only do you need to understand the basics of the human body, but you need to communicate that to your patients every day, right? You're going to need to have a little bit of ability to think

00:27:38
 Today we're going to talk critically about a person's history and have that information to be applied to their present. So that's a little bit of history right there, right? You're going to have to be able to a lot of times do formal reports, but be able to also switch your language so you can communicate to

00:27:55
 The person that's sitting in front of you that may not know a single thing about how the body works. And I think that's one of the things I get most excited about. It's not only, you know, all students have my class which will prepare them in all these ways, but hopefully after their education at Wesleyan,

00:28:12
 They're ready to enter these fields and really tackle all these problems. Because it kind of goes back to viruses too, right? A little bit. You know, like we have all these diverse issues that are facing us, and especially with medicine. We're going to need really creative solutions for it. So hopefully after their education here at Wesleyan, they'll be prepared to tackle some of those.

00:28:33
 Fantastic. Well, we're glad we have you here to help us connect to those creative solutions. So thank you, Dr. Weber, for joining us on The Deep End today. Many thanks to Shane Thompson, our Director of Undergraduate Research, who helps us schedule and plan these interviews and who will be taking on a more active role in conducting interviews.

00:28:51
 Thanks to our listeners. We hope you'll follow us in future episodes as we explore the fascinating work being done by faculty members here at North Carolina Wesleyan. Thank you, Dr. Weber.