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- So welcome Marsha. Great to have you here.
- Thank you very much for invitation.
- So you've had a really interesting
path in science, and I'm wondering if you could
share that with us a little bit and tell us how
you actually ended up doing research in systems biology.
- Well, I asked myself every day, this question.
So I started to say chemist and I really loved chemistry,
and I did my undergrad in chemistry.
But during that, I found out how much I love physics.
And I decided to try physics for my PhD and be
a little bit more on theoretical side of the board.
So doing this and doing some models,
I still couldn't decide what I want to do and decided
to try something new.
And that's how I end up already in biology and
in systems biology.
So it's always was trying to try something new and try to
see the life from different points. I get, I guess,
chemistry, physics, biology.
- It seems like you have been
sticking with systems biology for a little bit.
And so what does that really mean to you,
somebody who comes from a very kind of diverse academic
background, having interacted in a
variety of different fields?
- Yes.
You already mentioned that interaction of different fields
and different disciplines is very important and that's how
I actual understand systems biology; looking at the biology,
but from different point of view,
from more math statistical point of view,
I would say so all this experience helps me.
And it's very interesting way actually, to look at life
from trying to use equations to understand it.
- So what are you using
your equations to understand currently?
What are you working on in the lab?
- It turns out that there
are such a cells or stem cells that
can give rise to different types of the cells in the body
like kidney and kidneys, lungs.
And there is a blood stem cell that gives rise to all blood
cells that we have in our bodies.
So red blood cells that are responsible for
red color of our blood.
It's a cells that are responsible for clotting, it's
cells responsible for fighting infections.
So we study how the cells make the decision to become
specific cell and when they make the decision.
And how can we tell if the decision is already made.
- Really interesting.
And so can you tell us a bit more about how
then this relates to cancer?
- Such blood cancer as leukemia
is basically a failure of cells to differentiate or
failure of cells to become specific types of cells.
They just do not become what they should be and
understanding the process and why it fails,
can help to understand how we can help the real people.
- So you had mentioned that you
use very quantitative skills,
you know, mathematics statistics.
And so I know one of the things that you do is build
mathematical models as part of your research.
So I'm wondering if you can tell us a little bit about what
that actually means, how do you build such a model?
- Thank you for the question.
So I was lucky now that have a possibility to work with the
experimentalists very close.
So we actually look at the human blood cells that
can become red blood cells and the cells, Megakaryocytes,
that are responsible for clotting,
and we'll look through the microscope during a week or two,
we make an image every two hour,
and at the end we have a stack of these images.
Then we kind of make a movie of how cells behave,
how they divide, how they become the new types of cells.
And looking at this, we try,
we can extract some really quantitative characteristics
of the cells, like how fast they divide or how they move,
or what was the shape of the cell is the moment.
And having this numbers,
having this already quantitative characteristics,
we can build some statistical models and say, oh,
if the cell divided already this fast,
or if it's this shape, we can say that this
is already probably red blood cell and et cetera.
- Thanks so much for your time,
and we look forward to hearing more about your research in
the future.
- Thank you very much for the invitation.
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