Student Research at Duke

This week, I had the opportunity to get to know my mentor, Dr. Nijhout, further. Through the seminar he gave on metabolic systems, I became more aware of the various other projects he’s been, and is currently involved with. Some pretty neat things I must say—the whole diagram of the folate cycle was very daunting. Now I really appreciate the cooperative aspect of scientific research and publication of results so that the community can piece together the bits of knowledge together to get a more encompassing picture.

What inspired me the most after my very informal interview with Dr. Nijhout was his fascination with his work. “I get paid to do my hobby,” he said. Why he does research? Because he enjoys solving “the puzzle.” I think we just have to be daring in our pursuits; ask the questions, but then try to solve the mystery behind it. Dr. Nijhout admitted that securing money to conduct the research is rather frustrating, especially considering the high risk nature of his interests. Half of the time, the projects that he start out with just don’t work or cannot be carried out during that specific time for whatever reason. But he typically juggles four or five projects simultaneously so there’s always something to work on.

Dr. Nijhout’s work mostly involves Lepidopterans, but he actually started off with marine invertebrates. He spent his high school years living on an island off the coast of Venezuela, where he scuba dived and such. He even had the thrill of discovering his own shrimp species (although he didn’t get to name). Dr. Nijhout didn’t like the idea of spending 90% of the time trying to keep marine invertebrates alive and having only 10% of the time to actually work with them. And besides, insects just seemed way cooler to him (after listening to a talk at Harvard on them) and are much easier to raise, so Dr, Nijhout switched organisms. He’s been working at Duke for his entire career, mentoring plenty of PhD students.

Besides being a scientist, Dr. Nijhout paints—some of his abstract pieces hang in his office. For about 15 years now, he’s been doing Raku-style pottery. He experiments with coloring the clay on the Bunsen burner at the lab. He showed me some brilliant colors—gold, purple, almost iridescent.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 15th, 2007 at 6:40 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.