Nerd Corner, March 11, 2010
Dr. Zen Faulkes is in my corner this week…
Dr. Zen is a neurophysiologist at the University of Texas – Pan American. A Canadian living in the USA with a whole lot to say about his adventures as a biologist and educator!
CB: Describe your research interests in a nutshell (think filbert rather than brazil).
ZF: I think about how behaviour and nervous systems change over evolutionary time. How do species get new behaviours, or lose old ones? And how does the nervous system change to cause those behavioural changes?
Also, world conquest. (Hey, with a name like Dr. Zen, people have certain expectations. I am a bona fide supervillian in game fiction.)
CB: No Kidding! Your parents were definitely setting you up for success!
CB: You work mostly with Decapod Crustaceans (a group very close to my heart!). Is this due to their beautifully large neurons?
ZF: Originally, it had more to do with their hard exoskeletons. As an undergraduate, I worked with Jennifer Mather (University of Lethbridge) on octopus behaviour. Trying to analyze the movements of something with eight legs of nigh infinite flexibility was a bit of a baptism by fire. After that, animals with distinct joints, all visible on the outside, and that you could easily attach things to, was appealing.
So while the large neurons weren’t the initial attraction, but that crustaceans do have such big cells is extremely handy!
CB: You’ve done some ground-breaking work on lab-culturing your marbled crayfish. Do you ever get out to the field or are you mostly indoors?
ZF: Most of my work is more lab-based, but I was on the beach on South Padre Island last week, looking for sand crabs (Lepidopa benedicti). I didn’t find any; they’ve been elusive for the last few months.
CB: What is your most recent publication?
ZF: My most recent thing is a short letter to the editor in Science about how credit is given for scientific papers. PDF
The last paper with actual data is the paper you mentioned about raising Marmorkrebs, the all-female crayfish, for research purposes. Incidentally, that’s an open access paper, so anyone can read it. Quite a few people keep crayfish as pets, so it might interest pet owners. PDF
CB: Any advice to budding biologists?
ZF: There’s the idea of doing biology, and then there’s actually doing biology. From a distance, as a student, biology looks cool and interesting – which it is – but you don’t see the slogging.
For instance, I mentioned that I was on the beach at South Padre Island, collecting animals. Now, South Padre Island is a major tourist destination – people pay good money to go there. And I get to work there! On the face of it, it sounds just a little glamorous. But when you’re out there in summer, it’s freakin’ hot (over 40°C a lot of the time), your back is sore, your hands might be starting to blister, you’ve gone through sixty metres of overturned sand, and haven’t found a single one of what you were looking for… Yeah, not so glam as you might think at first.
(This isn’t peculiar to biology. People always tend to romanticize careers. I remember reading an interview with Duran Duran’s Simon LeBon who talked about how badly he and his friends wanted to be pop stars – and then they realized this meant they had to learn how to play instruments.)
At the end of the day, being a biologist is a job, and you need to be ready to work hard.
CB: Do you have any special non-biological talents?
ZF: I think I have a little more skill with graphics and design than average for a scientist. I’ve got positive feedback for my poster presentation blog project (betterposters.blogspot.com), and I’ve lettered comics and done cartooning.
CB: You are quite involved in several aspects of social media, but generally I don’t see many scientists using them with the finesse that you have. Do you think that most scientists are ‘afraid’ of such platforms?
ZF: It’s not fear. It’s that they don’t see value in it.
People who are not in science, particularly academic science, often don’t entirely grasp how many different tasks you are given, and how many demands there are on your time. You’re supposed to teach, be a mentor, have office hours, serve on committees, and more. Scientists are almost going out of their minds trying to stay on top of what they’re already expected to do.
Blogging, twittering, and all the other social media stuff takes time. It’s completely logical that scientists will look at something that is time-consuming and ask, “Is this going to help me do science?” And right now, the answer for social media is “No,” or “Maybe eventually down the road.”
CB: If you could have 3 guests for dinner…alive or dead, who would they be?
ZF: I prefer live guests, as the dead ones are not the best conversationalists. I meet with scientists enough, so I’d go for some people who do other kinds of things.
Designer Nancy Duarte, who wrote Slide:ology; writer Neil Gaiman, who I’ve been a fan of since Sandman #1; and performer Amanda Palmer.
Limiting it to three is tough! And if you asked me again tomorrow, it’d be a totally different list.
CB: What would you eat?
ZF: If they were guests for dinner, that would mean I’d be cooking. So nothing fancy, I daresay. There’d probably be home-baked bread, as I have a recipe for that that I’m quite fond of.
CB: Your PhD supervisor (Dorothy Paul) was actually on my MSc defense committee! Small world! I loved attending the University of Victoria. You’ve worked in several universities all over the world; do you have a favorite?
ZF: Yes, I saw you worked with Louise Page, who I also know quite well! That there’s only one degree of separation between us shows yet again how small scientific communities really are.
CB: Indeed! Kevin Bacon eat your heart out 
To get to the question, I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to work at the University of Melbourne for a couple of years, which was fantastic. It exposed me to the most new experiences, both personally and professionally. Travel really does broaden the mind.
Living overseas made me a great believer in the notion that everyone should live in another country for at least a year. Rent an apartment. Go through the seasons. Feel what the place is like. You can’t really get that feel on a two week vacation.
CB: What’s it like to be a Canadian in Texas?
ZF: It’s a bit warm here.
I do have a bit of fun playing the “outsider.” I can often feign ignorance (“Is that some sort of American thing?”). I also like getting to be a bit of an ambassador, whether it’s telling people that the last letter of the alphabet is “zed,” or that behaviour has a “u” in it, or trying to explain curling.
But I do miss Canada a lot, and look forward to my next chance to return home.
CB: Dr. Zen, it’s been an honor! Thanks so much for visiting
Find out more about Dr. Zen Faulkes on his website:
Follow Dr. Zen on twitter:
Great interview! Loved the links – and his article on authorship.
Thanks Vince! Glad you stopped by to visit!