About Me
Hello! I’m Zac. I’m currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Rennison Lab at University of California - San Diego and a Lecturer at the University of San Diego. I am a broadly trained biologist with particular interest in understanding how organisms, particularly those in aquatic habitats, rapidly adapt to novel environmental and ecological conditions. Over the years I have investigated this question and related themes in a variety of study systems, ranging from tiny estuarine crabs and their barnacle parasites, a globally invasive marine tunicate, and the inimitable threespine stickleback. My research takes a holistic perspective by integrating across levels of biological organization – from molecular pathways to physiological function to ecosystem-level processes. This approach gives me the fantastic opportunity conduct fieldwork in breathtaking locations, perform molecular magic in the laboratory, and make sense of oodles of sequence data at the helm of a supercomputer. Please see my Research page if you interested in learning more.
In addition to research, my winding academic career has involved numerous teaching and mentoring experiences, culminating most recently as a part-time lecturer at University of San Diego and instructor of Summer Session coursework at UCSD. Spending time with students is an immense privilege, one that I take seriously but while bringing levity, enthusiasm, and fun to classroom. At UCSD I teach lecture-based courses, whereas at University of San Diego I lead a laboratory section. Teaching these different styles of courses, not to mention with vastly different levels of enrollment, has allowed me to try to bring the best of both methods together, using active-learning approaches in the lecture hall and fostering content mastery in the lab. Further developing my dual professional identity, of researcher and educator, is a primary focus. Please see my Teaching page if you are interested in learning more.
Below I have a bit more about my life’s path through academia if you are interested in knowing more about where I’ve been. You can also just see my CV if you’d rather skip the long story.
Academic Path
I always leaned toward the natural sciences, but it wasn’t until the the summer after my junior year of undergrad that I had the chance to get involved with research. Through an REU program at Scripps Institution of Oceanography I joined the lab of Dr. Jules Jaffe. My main focus was training an image classification software to correctly identify plankton from photos collcted by an Underwater Vision Profiler (UVP) instrument. This was combined with various tinkering projects on underwater instrumentation platforms and culminated with a five-day research cruise in the Southern California Bight. After this experience I was hooked on research and resolved to get a position in a research lab when I returned to Lewis & Clark College for my final year.
Cold emailing works, folks! I got in touch with a new professor starting in the Biology Department, Prof. Tamily Weissman-Unni, to ask about joining her lab. After our first in-person meeting upon returning to campus my fate was sealed. I’d be starting volunteering in setting up the lab, followed by a independent study project for credit, and then a full-time lab technician position upon graduation! In Tamily’s lab we studied the development of the larval zebrafish brain using fluorescence imaging techniques, namely, Brainbow. This ingenious approach that Tamily co-developed combines the expression of three fluorscent proteins with different spectral properties (i.e. colors) to create a dazzling mosaic of rainbow cells, using the same principle behind color TV (see RGB, CMYK, etc). Brainbow was pioneered as an approach in connectomics; because neighboring neurons can be easily distinguished through their unique color, fine processes like dendrites and axons could be traced. However, because we could essentially “switch on” the color blending by driving the expression the Cre recombinase with an inducible promoter, this could be carefully timed to label populations of progenitor cells in unique colors. These colors would be inherited by daughter cells and maintained through multiple mitoses, allowing for detailed mapping of cell fate. We also regularly collaborated with Prof. Vivek Unni at Oregon Health and Sciences University on developing zebrafish as a Parkinson’s disease model, focusing specifically on the protein alpha-synuclein, the main component of Lewy bodies, the pathological hallmark of the neurodegenerative disease.
In the lab I was responsible not only for the maintenance of our zebrafish colony and lab inventories, but also the fun stuff like creating new constructs for driving the Brainbow cassette in different cell-types (PCR, plasmid design, cloning, E. coli work, etc), generating transgenic lines of zebrafish (microinjections, genetic crosses, etc.), immunohistochemistry for labeling biomarkers of Parkinson’s, and, best of all, confocal imaging! Zebrafish are so cool because they are (mostly) transparent during early development, so you could actually image their genetically modified rainbow brains in vivo. Keeping a zebrafish larvae alive under the microscope for hours and hours is hard, so there was some tweaking to be done. At times we would take hours-long time lapses, being able to track individual divisions of neural progenitors, or we would return to the same spot in the same fish day after day, monitoring the expansion of cell lineages in the hindbrain.
Thankfully about half-way through my three years as a lab tech Tamily and the department were successful in securing an NSF Major Research Instrumentation award to purchase a laser-scanning confocal microscope. Part of this award was hiring a part-time Microscopy Coordinator to oversee the microscope’s use. There I was! Now I’d be spending a quarter of my time managing the microscopy suite (which included several wide-field fluorescence scopes), training users, and eventually also a sweet macrophotography system.
MORE CONTENT HERE. TAing NEUROBIOLOGY AND MENTORING UNDERGRADS
Outside of Work
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