Q&A WITH EDUARDO MACAGNO, FOUNDING DEAN, DIVISION OF BIOLOGICAL STUDIES

Nearly 50 years after leaving Argentina with his family to emigrate to the United States, Eduardo Macagno is UCSD’s first Latino academic dean and a national pioneer in boosting cultural diversity in science and engineering. Named among the “50 Most Important Hispanics in Business and Technology” in 2004 by Hispanic Engineer and Information Technology, Macagno is a bona fide interdisciplinary scholar. He received a doctorate in physics from Columbia University but became interested in neurobiology as a postdoctoral researcher and switched fields. In this interview, Macagno, who holds the Richard C. Atkinson Chair in Biological Sciences, talks about the challenges of starting up a new division, interacting with industry leaders in a global biotech mecca, and exploring the intersection of neuroscience and architecture.

Q. Why did your family choose to emigrate to the United States?

Macagno: My father, who was trained as a physicist and engineer, was recruited by the University of Iowa in 1956. When he was earning his Ph.D. in France, he met Hunter Rouse, then director of Iowa’s Hydraulics Laboratory in the UI School of Engineering, which was considered one of the finest in the world. My father and mother, who was trained in mathematics, both taught at Iowa until they retired, and they still live in Iowa City. I was 13 when we emigrated, and it was a complicated transition for me, because I knew very little English when we moved, and I was just starting to look at the other gender as more than just friends.

Q. How did you first become interested in science?

Macagno: It runs in the family; perhaps it’s in the genes. My father loved to teach, and in Argentina he had a little shop behind the garage where he devised experiments to use in class, so he began trying them out with my sister and me, even though we were little, to see if we would understand. I decided very early that I liked scientific exploration. Also, my parents, being university people, knew a lot of mathematicians. One theory that was popular then was that it was just as easy to teach arithmetic to a child as Boolean algebra or more abstract concepts. I was the guinea pig, and I early acquired a liking for theory and experiment.

Q. Why haven’t more women and minorities entered the fields of science and engineering?

Macagno: When we talk about this issue, let’s keep in mind that we’re talking about this country and not the rest of the world. In many other countries, what we here call “minorities” are in the majority, and many women take up physics, mathematics, and engineering and have successful careers. Why we have failed to attract women and minorities to science in America is of serious concern, as we are falling behind our competitors in training a sufficient scientific and technological workforce to remain at the vanguard for much longer. The lack of role models has been a significant problem, but I think that currently a very significant problem is the absence of parental advice to children to pursue careers in science and technology, particularly among some growing groups within our society. Parents are missing a sense of the opportunities their children will find in science, technology, and innovation, as opposed to the clearer path to financial success offered by medicine, law, and business. In those careers, barring other kinds of prejudice, you’ll find higher representations of women, Latinos, and other underrepresented groups than in the natural sciences or engineering. In biology, we have a somewhat different problem with respect to women: as many or more than men pursue the career through the Ph.D. and postdoc, but a high percentage do not continue for reasons that are complex but need to be resolved.

Q. How are you trying to lure more Latinos into science?

Macagno: I would say that the core of our efforts is more exposure to science at various levels. This is a slow but critical road, requiring a lot of perseverance. We may not see positive results today from exposing Latino children to more science, but I believe that persisting tomorrow and the day after, we will eventually succeed. We’re trying to help teachers enhance science exposure in K-12 schools – I think we need to concentrate particularly in middle schools, where I believe children form lasting impressions. Some of our faculty have visited local schools to do demonstrations and talk about the excitement of being a scientist. Some faculty are creating special programs.

We also create materials for high school teachers to use in lectures in their science classes based on public lecture series we produce. And we have established a mentoring program in which UCSD undergraduates work with Preuss School students on science projects. We’d like to expand that to local inner-city schools, but we will first have to work out transportation and insurance logistics. We also have a series of science talks geared toward the general public that are later shown on UCSD-TV, and whenever possible, we translate those into Spanish. Spanish translation is important not because schoolchildren can’t understand English but because very often their parents can’t, and if we want to reach the children, we have to reach the parents. The university has programs that give teachers the opportunity to work in university laboratories during the summer, so they can become more excited and up-to-date about science and can communicate that excitement to their students.

Q. What were some of your early challenges in launching the Division of Biological Sciences?

Macagno: One of the biggest challenges was to ensure that we achieve one coherent division, keeping its four sections connected and sufficiently involved with each other. That was partly accomplished by having one graduate program and one undergraduate program, but cross-disciplinary initiatives will be the key to some coherence in the research arena. An ongoing challenge is to bring in new areas of front-line biology like systems and synthetic biology, computational biology and informatics, areas that will really gather speed in the next few years. In fact, a lot of growth in important areas of biology has occurred in engineering, in physics, and in chemistry. That’s not to the detriment of our division, but it means that, in order to build a coherent program in the life sciences, we have to cooperate extensively with other divisions. Another serious challenge is that our limited research space will make recruiting in new areas difficult, not to mention the prohibitive cost of housing in San Diego.

Q. Not many biology deans can say they operate in one of the world’s leading biotechnology hubs. What are you hearing from local industry leaders about their needs and priorities?

Macagno: We’re hearing that their need for a highly trained workforce is critical. They want to see better trained college graduates. We’ve done very well in providing Ph.D.s, but we have had to modify our undergraduate programs to train students better in things like laboratory techniques. We should keep in mind the recent experience of Ireland, which has gone from one of the poorest countries in Europe to one of the richest in a single generation. The one area that has allowed Ireland to catapult forward has been education. The population has been pushed to become highly trained, and university educations are free. As a result, a lot of companies have gone to Ireland to set up facilities for discovery, innovation and production.

Aside from the workforce issue, industry leaders value being in the vicinity of a top-notch research university because it creates a very fertile atmosphere for innovation. This raises another issue that industry leaders are concerned about, which is the process through which new knowledge generated by our faculty is transferred to the for-profit sector, especially in areas like biotechnology and information technology. There is something of a discordance there. Industry would like that knowledge to be freely given; we would like them to pay something in return.

Q. What distinguishes the biological sciences at UCSD from counterparts at other leading universities?

Macagno: We are as good as the best; in terms of the quality of our research and education, UCSD operates at the level of Berkeley, Stanford, Harvard, or Columbia, for example. One thing that does distinguish us is our collaborative and strongly interactive culture. We’re not smarter or better, but we achieve more by being more open across the board. Our division works very well with the School of Engineering, the School of Medicine, and the Division of Physical Sciences here on campus, and are building more ties with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. We have tremendous collaboration with the Salk Institute in particular, but also with the Burnham Institute and the Scripps Research Institute. And, increasingly, we are seeking collaborations with biotechnology companies.

Q. As a neurobiologist, which topics in your field intrigue you most?

Macagno: I have a strong affinity for developmental problems, for example, how do you assemble a functioning nervous system from component parts, and how do neurons recognize which other neurons they will make connections with and which muscles they will cause to contract? In terms of basic science, that’s what I think about most of the time. More generally, I’m very intrigued by how the human brain works, and there are many different ways of getting some inkling about that. One of them is by trying to connect how we process sensory information about our environment, say by our visual or auditory systems, with the nature of the spaces we create to live in, to die in, to get well in, to worship in, or to listen to music in. There is a new effort, which culminated recently in the creation of the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture, to bring together contemporary knowledge of human brain function with architectural design. A dialogue between neuroscientists and architects is trying to determine how architects might use, for example, knowledge about how the developing brains of children respond to external stimuli in designing school rooms that are age-appropriate.

Q. Do you still find time to conduct research and teach?

Macagno: I try to spend as much time as I can in my lab exploring how the nervous system of a simple invertebrate, the medicinal leech, is assembled. And for the past few years, I have been teaching a freshman seminar on subjects that have to do with neuroscience. One seminar focused on nature, nurture, and the human brain. Another seminar, which I taught with an architect, looked at neuroscience and architecture, and it sought to understand how what we know about our brains might tell us something about the spaces we build. What I find interesting about teaching freshman seminars is how I can use them to expand my own knowledge by picking a subject I want to know more about. It’s been my experience since I moved from physics to neuroscience that the best way to learn something is to teach it to a bunch of very smart (and smart-alecky) undergraduates who will put me on the spot whenever they can.

Q. What do you do to unwind?

Macagno: I try to spend as much time as possible with my family. My wife, who is also a scientist, works for the technology transfer office here at the university. We have a 10-year-old son and a 7-year-old daughter. I play sports with them; I have coached their soccer teams and gone to innumerable baseball games. My son is a chess player and a great fan of model railroading. We spent several hours yesterday in Balboa Park running trains at the Model Railroad Museum. The fun part of being a parent is to find things that are exciting to your children and to you.

Both of my children like science, and particularly “doing experiments.” One of their favorite places to go is my lab. Perhaps they will be scientists, but even if not, they are getting a taste of what fun science can be from their parents. I think parents have tremendous influence on their children, which is why I was saying earlier that we need to reach out to minority parents. If the parents can understand science and if they think science is interesting, their children will follow their lead and become motivated to learn more about it.