Posted by

It's Time for a Wee PhD

Hi friends,

It's been a minute.

I'm writing from cloudy London. In September, I started a PhD. If I forgot to mention it, it's because I almost forgot about it myself. It didn't feel real until I stepped out of the "Museums" exit of the London Underground and walked along the misty paths of the Natural History Museum's tree-fern forest. As I headed toward the staff entrance, it hit me: I work here?

The Natural History Museum, where a bronze dinosaur skeletons graze next to 2.7-billion-year old Lewisian gneiss, the oldest rock in the UK.

I'd been dreaming, wondering, scheming about a PhD for at least fourteen years.

When I was in high school, an ultimate player I looked up to, Jeremy Cram, defended his doctoral thesis on the aquatic ecology of Chinook salmon. (In a fun twist, his ultimate team was Seattle Sockeye, another species of Pacific salmon.) I didn't know what it meant to defend a thesis, but I remember my mom speaking to him.

"You're done?" she'd asked him, amazed. "What an accomplishment!"

I was intrigued. What was this thing that takes years of focus and is a huge relief to finish?

After undergrad, I kept thinking about a PhD, but how could I commit to just one topic for four, five, even six years? Whenever I almost stepped over the threshold to start, some other opportunity drew me in a different direction.

One of those opportunities was my job. As the Health In Harmony research manager, I work alongside Indigenous peoples and local communities living in rainforests. Together, we study the carbon, biodiversity, and well-being impacts of investing in their communities. I couldn't imagine leaving to start a PhD.

I also remembered the words of my political ecology professor at Whitman, Aaron Bobrow-Strain: "Don't do a PhD until you have to." (Aaron is the author of an illuminating book, The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez, highly recommended.) What he meant -- at least, what I think he meant -- was that you shouldn't do a PhD just because. You should wait until you've reached the limit of your career, or the ceiling of your ability to think through problems, and study for a reason.

Many of my friends started, survived, and eventually finished PhDs. The one lesson they all shared was that the most important consideration is your supervisor. I'd heard horror stories ranging from absent supervisors all the way to cases of sexual harassment. From the biochemists to the political theorists, my friends all said that an engaged, aligned supervisor is worth their weight in gold.

A stained glass window in the basement snail lab at the Natural History Museum, showing my study organism, Schistosoma blood flukes...

... and their obligate hosts, freshwater snails in the genera Biomphalaria, Bulinus, and Oncomelania.

And this gorgeous bacteriophage, a virus that infects bacteria. Which I don't study. But we can still appreciate its beauty.

Finally, in the year I turned thirty, it's time. Much credit and appreciation goes to my manager and mentor at Health In Harmony, Sakib Burza, for helping me imagine a way to keep working while I study. To the OneZoo Center for Doctoral Training for funding and support. And to my team of not one but three engaged, aligned supervisors:
  • Laura Braun, environmental engineer turned water-sanitation-hygiene specialist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM)
  • Aidan Emory, snail and schistosome man at the Natural History Museum
  • Andy Hardy, remote sensing, mapping, and geographical information systems wizard at Aberystwyth University in Wales

My locker at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, decorated with microbial, animal, and ecosystem depictions ranging from 34,000 years ago to today.

For the next three and a half years, I'll be working with rice farmers of Manombo, Madagascar to study the relationship between land use and schistosomiasis, a water-borne parasitic disease. If we get enough funding, I hope we can also test out the farming communities' solution of adding ducks and fish to the rice paddies to produce animal protein, boost rice yields, and prey on the snails and mosquito larvae that carry disease.

I'm deeply thankful to be able to keep working with Health In Harmony as I pursue this project, and to continue to be guided by and in solidarity with the people of Manombo, who have been designing programs with Health In Harmony since 2019.

More to come on the actual science later. As a teaser, I'll leave you with this photo of a Biomphalaria pfeifferi shell that I took through a microscope in the LSHTM lab. Next stop: meeting this snail in its home, the flooded rice paddies and forest streams of Manombo, Madagascar.