College Talk

Sometimes great things come from small ones. Among the smallest structures we find in almost all cells are the mitochondria. Not only are they very small (about 0.001of an inch), but they are also very numerous (some of our cells have more than 2,000 of them each). And their role in life is enormous: they generate the energy molecules we use to make our bodies work.

Pablo Peixoto studies these microscopic structures. Born in Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, he became interested in science early in life. “I was one of those annoying kids who always wanted to know the underlying mechanisms of things. And when I spoke like that, my mom would ask, ‘Who are you?’ To which I would reply that I wanted to be a scientist.”

After studying in Brazil, he went on to obtain his doctorate at the Universidad de Extremadura, Spain, and today he is an assistant professor in the Department of Natural Sciences in the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences at Baruch College of the City University of New York

One of the first things that intrigued him about mitochondria is the fact that this structure used to be a bacterium, which was engulfed by another cell back at the beginnings of life on Earth. That bacterium had the particular power of generating energy in a more efficient way than the cell surrounding it.

“I have a slide I use in my lectures that shows the first step, the footprint of man on the moon, and funny enough it looks exactly like the internal structure of mitochondria when seen with an electron microscope. I like to say that the energy that mitochondria produce allows us to go to the moon,” explains Peixoto. “That merger of the powerhouse with a new cell allowed for life to become multi-cellular, to become as complex as we are now.”

In fact, mitochondria have a DNA in themselves that is extremely similar to the one we find in bacteria. “The DNA is the recipe for making proteins for survival and for reproduction, and a lot of those proteins became unnecessary for mitochondria once they rely on the DNA of the nucleus of the cells for those recipes.”

But the importance of mitochondria goes beyond producing energy or containing DNA. “There’s evidence now that mitochondria control the gender of newborns among mammals—including humans—as well as the release of chemicals that control cell death when a cell is ill and needs to be eliminated selectively. The process is called apoptosis, which is Greek for the falling of a leaf off a tree branch.”

For Peixoto science is a very collaborative endeavor and his students are key. “I’m fortunate to have produced a good amount of research, most recently in collaboration with my students at Baruch College. Within six months after I started working here, I published a research article with an undergraduate student who in record time learned the lab techniques. Then I invited another three students and a graduate student at Baruch to write with me a review on the important role of mitochondria in regulating cancer.”

“When a cell forgets how to die, tumors happen. Mitochondria release substances in normal cells to eliminate them if they’re dysfunctional. A cancer cell is a dysfunctional cell that is insensitive to the mitochondrial programming,” said Peixoto.

Peixoto is not just a researcher but also an educator, and as such he watches how participating in scientific research transforms students. “I see that impact on my students’ views of biology, especially the students in the introductory courses who may be planning to major in accounting, finance, communication studies, or psychology. They come out of class, especially when I teach about cell death, and they go ‘hmm.’”

And nothing is more powerful than explaining science using everyday images. “I remember this student looking at her own hands and imagining that as an embryo she had membranes in between her fingers, like a duck’s feet, and those cells had to die, which allows for sculpting your body when you’re being developed. Not only that, it’s through apoptosis that we remove dying, aged cells from our skin, cells that were dying from contamination, or that we renew the intestinal floor, which happens about every other day. Those cells have to be replenished, which means replacing a dysfunctional cell with a functioning one.”

Peixoto feels passionately not only about his own research but also about the need for society to nurture more scientists. “We are running out of scientists, and our health challenges with increasing longevity need to be confronted, but we don’t have enough scientists. Government agencies such as the National Institute of Health or the National Science Foundation are waking up to the problem and they are pouring a lot of support now into scientific education, not only at the undergraduate level but also at the high school and even the elementary school levels.”

Yet he knows that people have to have an inner drive for research. “I was reading one of my students’ personal essays, and she mentioned that in childhood her parents gave her the opportunity to be exposed to all the different things that she wanted to be exposed to. I think it starts with that, with giving the opportunity for exposure, for allowing people to fall in love with something, and when that happens, then we have to nurture those experiences.”

He backs up these beliefs with action. “Right now I have nine students in my research lab and I’m trying to juggle that high number. I try to provide an opportunity instead of trying to convince people that they need to go down a particular path.”

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Peixoto Studies, Teaches the Powerhouses of Life

A fixture of any bookstore is the biography section. It seems that the general public has a fascination with the subject. And no matter how many times famous people have had their biographies written, there is always interest in learning more about them.

Someone who has been very successful as a biographer is Dr. Carl Rollyson. And he has an explanation for why there is such endless interest in the lives of famous people. “I think people read biographies simply to learn. I think it was (the writer Ralph Waldo) Emerson who said that biography is teaching by example. People want these examples,” he says, “and Emerson himself was a great one for talking about the lives of people.”

Rollyson is a native of Miami, Florida, who got into the biography business by accident. “I certainly didn’t start out with the idea of becoming a biographer. I wanted to be an actor and I also did a lot of scholarly work and gradually it occurred to me, although I was very interested in history that my real concern, beginning with my work on William Faulkner, was with the characters’ lives,” he says.

A professor in the Department of Journalism and the Writing Professions in the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences at Baruch College of the College University of New York, Rollyson’s first biography was about a very well known personality.

“When a former professor of mine asked me to do a biography of Marilyn Monroe for a popular culture series, I thought well, let’s try this. Let’s try writing a narrative as opposed to scholarly articles and I fell in love with it,” Rollyson recounts.

“Back in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, there had been many books on Marilyn Monroe. Those books gave you sort of a general overview of her life, but what I was really interested in, because I was trained as an actor, was what could be said specifically about her life as an actress.”

Rollyson focused on the key roles she took on, the way she prepared for her acting assignments, the kind of actors and coaches she dealt with, and the methods she pursued, because there was a method to her acting. “That was something that either the other biographers weren’t interested in, or else they weren’t equipped by training to understand that aspect of her cinema performances.”

What most impressed him while researching Monroe was her ambition. “She wanted to be a great actress and this was an overwhelming ambition. She had this in common with all ambitious people– that if you are truly ambitious, above all else, you’re never satisfied,” Rollyson said.

Among the things he discovered about Marylin that would be surprising even today: “She lifted weights and jogged at a time when no Hollywood actresses would do that. She was, in a sense, ahead of the curve in a number of different ways that are quite interesting,” explains Rollyson.

He has written dozens of biographical books and has been very successful in the field, so one wonders what the key to success is for a good biographer. “What makes a good biography above all is some kind of narrative. It doesn’t actually have to be a plot as in a novel, but there has to be a kind of driving force. The biographer has to have a very clear idea of why he or she is telling the story.”

“A biography is arranged, though it doesn’t have to be chronologically,” he added. “It, nevertheless, has to follow some kind of basic core or truth or pattern in the subject’s life. I think that’s what makes a biography. What makes a bad biography is essentially when the biographer keeps saying, ‘look at what I found.’ In other words, it becomes a kind of compendium, a kind of ragbag collection of data, which is useful for some readers but generally tends not to be very good reading.”

Contrary to a common perception, writing a biography is hard work, not just a matter of putting together what others have written about the person in question. So here is his advice for those who would like to try the genre. “Read a lot of biographies. Take a look at the acknowledgments page to see how much work it is and what biographers say about how they learn things and what was difficult about the task. They have to understand the process of writing biography,” says Rollyson.

Although he is not a historian, Rollyson–who obtained a doctorate in English from the University of Toronto in Canada–learned early on that you don’t have to be particularly concerned with the things that you can’t know or can’t get access to as long as you can tell a story.

His opinions about how people recount their own lives are clear. “The problem with autobiography, with memoirs, is that they rely a lot on memory; it’s not the same kind of research that a biographer does. I could tell you things about myself that nobody else could tell you, and that’s why some people would say, well, you can’t have a true biography because there are things the subject knows that the biographer can’t know. On the other hand, I would turn it around and say there are things that the biographer knows that the subject of the biography can’t know.”

Despite his tremendous success as an author, Rollyson is a modest man. “I’ve been very, very fortunate. I know many people who have started and couldn’t get a publishing contract, or learned (unpleasant) things about their subjects, or didn’t feel there was enough material, and so on.”

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Rollyson Explains the Art of Biography 

For many, the history of art is a recounting of names and dates. For Dr. Gail Levin, it is about the human stories behind great pieces of art. “I became interested in art because my mother had gone to art school and her parents made her drop out, because they thought art was sinful,” says this native of Atlanta, Georgia. The reason was that, as orthodox Jewish immigrants, her grandparents became alarmed when her mother began winning prizes for painting male nudes.

Levin not only defied her grandparents’ traditions but took her studies very seriously, thanks to her mother who taught her how to paint “almost as soon as I could walk,” she says.

Levin pursued an academic career that allowed her to obtain a doctorate in art history from Rutgers University in New Jersey and ultimately to become a Distinguished Professor of Art History in the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences at Baruch College of the City University of New York.

Like any art historian, Levin studied the Renaissance classics but soon showed an interest in twentieth-century artists. While studying for her master’s degree at Tufts University, she became interested in the British sculptor Henry Moore and in the influence of the Italian Renaissance on this artist and on modern British sculpture in general.

“I wrote him for an interview and he didn’t write back, so I took a student flight to London. I called everyone who had published on Henry Moore and this wonderful critic told me, ‘Oh, he never answers his mail. Send him a telegram.’Well he responded to mine, and I had my interview, and that was pretty magical.”

She also became interested in the life and work of the American realist painter Edward Hopper, on whom she has written several books. She is considered the world’s leading authority on this artist.

“He was born and raised in Nyack, New York in 1882, but by 1913 he had moved into Washington Square. Today that building is the New York University (NYU) School of Social Work, but in those days, it was owned by Sailors Snug Harbor, a kind of mariners’ union. It’s been landmarked now with a plaque by the city,” says Levin. Despite his fame, he was almost evicted from his study.

“For years NYU tried to evict the Hoppers to take over the space, and then some years ago, the very wonderful dean of the School of Social Work decided that the Hoppers’ studio space and one of the offices which was their bedroom had to be preserved, so the old floor boards are gone, the whole building has been renovated, the stairwells have been taken out, but the space that was the Hoppers’ is preserved.”

Another artist Levin has studied is Theresa Bernstein, a Polish-born American artist and a contemporary of Hopper’s. Levin knew about her through her work on Hopper and realized that this painter needed to be researched. “She had been a friend of Hopper’s, and they were shown together at an artist-selected group at the MacDowell Club Gallery in New York in 1918,” recounts Levin. “And all of a sudden it’s the mid 1980’s, and Theresa Bernstein is having a show at the New York Historical Society, and she’s being interviewed, and I go, ‘Oh my God, she’s alive’,” exclaimed Levin.

Hopper had been dead since 1967, so Levin “immediately got an appointment to interview Bernstein. She was already in her mid 90’s, and she seemed so old to me, but you know that was the mid 80’s.” She died in 2002, two weeks short of her 112th birthday, but Levin got to know her quite well. “Visiting her was like going on a trip in a time machine. She had a vivid memory, and she could talk about going to the Armory show. She wasn’t in it, but she went in 1913, and she could tell you how the paintings were hung. It was amazing. I learned a lot from her.”

Levin was intrigued not only by Bernstein’s works but also by her personal life. “Typical of that generation, she would have never called herself a feminist, but she was campaigning for suffrage, for women’s right to vote and she’s one of the rare artists who depicted the women’s campaign for the right to vote. She painted an outdoor suffrage meeting in 1914-1915. She painted suffrage parades at the same time.”

Levin’s passion for this artist is being passed on to others. “One of my doctoral students who worked on this project with me, Elsie Yung, is just finishing her dissertation on images of women’s suffrage in the fine arts, and Theresa’s in it. So I’m so pleased to be passing on that torch to the younger generation,” says Levin.

Levin has also studied other twentieth century artists who may be unknown to many but whose works have been significant in the history of modern art. One of them is Wassily Kandinsky, a Russian painter who later moved to France and who is credited with painting some of the first pieces of abstract art.

“His first abstracts are filled with symbolism, especially apocalyptic symbolism from the Bible. So Russian Orthodox Christianity is embedded in those early paintings.” And Levin adds, “He certainly knew about that, and he certainly knew Russian icons and was very influenced by the icons of eastern orthodox Christianity.”

When talking about these and many other artists she has studied, Levin says, “I think that combining biography with my interest in art history has led me to look at research as a kind of detective work.”

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Levin Analyzes the Life, Work of Artists

Immigration is, and always has been, a hot issue. And it’s gotten even hotter in the last few years, both in Europe and in the U.S. More times than not, this topic seems to be discussed in emotional rather than rational terms. That is why we need scholars who look closely at the facts and tell us what we really need to know.

One of those scholars is Dr. Els de Graauw. An assistant professor in the Department of Political Science in the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences at Baruch College, de Graauw has an interesting personal story to tell. While growing up in her native Rotterdam in the Netherlands, she grew fascinated with American politics, “not that I liked everything that happens here, but I had a fascination with the things that I liked and the things that I didn’t like.”

Her fascination soon became a passion for learning more about the U.S. “When I was seventeen, I wanted to go on an exchange to the United States, which is what I did. I lived with a host family for a year in Minneapolis, I went to high school there, I got my high school diploma, and then I went back to the Netherlands knowing that I wanted to return and learn more about the U.S.”

At that time only a few universities in the Netherlands had American studies programs. “I went to the one in Nijmegen, and ever since then, I’ve been kind of hooked. I’ve always been interested in the history of the United States, and more and more I became focused on immigration issues, political issues, so here we are.”

Knowing that to really understand her subject she needed to live in the country she was studying, she moved to Berkeley, where she obtained both a master’s and a doctoral degree in Political Science from the University of California.

In her latest book, entitled Making Immigrant Rights Real: Nonprofits and the Politics of Integration in San Francisco, she looked at the role of non-profits in that city, trying to answer the question of what kind of obstacles these small, community-based organizations face in supporting immigrant communities.

“They’re often small organizations with limited budgets. Because they are incorporated as non-profits, they have restrictions on the amount and type of advocacy that they can do,” says de Graauw, “and they operate against this kind of national background of concerns about extending too many rights, particularly to those who are undocumented.”

Her book is a window on how these nonprofits do what they do and details their successes in promoting language access legislation, creating municipal ID card programs, and fighting for fair labor rights for immigrant and other low wage workers.

It is clear to her that, although the U.S. is a country of immigrants, “we don’t a have a national or coherent integration program. It’s kind of ironic, but we don’t have a program, like, say, Canada to then integrate these newcomers into our economy, into our social fabric, into our political system.”

This is very important for the U.S., since our foreign-born population is about 42 million, of which about 11 million are undocumented.

Integration of immigrants is both an economic and a political issue. Study after study has shown that immigration helps to energize local economies, yet it is also a very sensitive matter. “In uncertain times for the economy, immigrants become easy scapegoats, which is also part of what’s happening in Europe,” says she.

In the last few years, the issue of immigration has defied many of the ideals of the European Union and was one of the contributing factors to Brexit. “The immigrants that they are receiving and responding to in Europe are different from those here in the United States. So there’s a different dynamic there, but there’s some consistency in how this is being expressed by the public and by policy makers who may build a campaign around those issues.”

In her studies of nonprofit organizations that support immigrant integration, she was particularly struck by their resolve. “What I most admire about the organizations I studied is that they’re so persistent and tenacious. The U.S. political system makes it hard to create policy change and social change, particularly for vulnerable populations like immigrants who don’t have the right to vote, who often struggle with language issues, who work multiple jobs to provide for themselves and their families.”

De Graauw, thinks that governments at different levels are starting to show more interest in the issue of integration. “It’s really been kind of what we call from the grassroots, and I think that’s now kind of percolating up to the state level and up to the federal level. New York is doing fabulous work; we have a mayor’s office of immigrant affairs that is in the forefront of this; we have a city council that is supportive of this, a mayor who’s supportive of this.”

Another thing she has been noticing is that immigration is not only a matter of governmental concern in the typical American gateway cities such as New York, San Francisco, or Los Angeles, but something that is happening elsewhere in the U.S., particularly in the Midwest.

Her upcoming book will deal with the growing number of city and state immigrant affairs offices and focus on how they provide inclusive response to immigrants, not just the undocumented but all immigrants, regardless of their level of skills. “What are they doing and what impact are they having on questions of immigrant integration and representation?” she is asking.

Her work promises to be enlightening, especially for those who want to be informed before drawing conclusions of any kind about the topic of immigration.

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De Graauw Studies the Role of Nonprofits on Immigration

The ocean waters are full of creatures that produce light, from microscopic organisms to sharks and marine turtles. Sometimes human vision is not prepared to detect it, but that does not mean such phenomena, known as bioluminescence and biofluorescence, are unimportant.

“There’s so many different ways in which life perceives light, and trying to get inside these animals, to get behind their eyes, is almost like walking in someone else’s shoes,” says Dr. David Gruber, an associate professor of biology at Baruch College in New York City. “It’s like being someone else for a day.”

A native of Paterson, New Jersey, Gruber has been interested in understanding nature since he was a child. “I think all children are inherently inquisitive. You know they have to be, they have to understand the world around them, but I think [that’s] what makes scientists, and actually some journalists, because journalists are also very inquisitive people.”

An industrial town in inland New Jersey does not seem like a typical place for a child interested in marine biology to grow up. “It started as just looking at the animals around my house in New Jersey, and it expanded out as I saw more of the world, and now I’m incredibly fortunate to be an explorer with National Geographic and to have travelled to many of the furthest ends of the Earth, looking at interesting, unique animals and strange facets of biology,” says Gruber.

But his work has been more than just exploration. As a professional scientist, he has concentrated much of his research attention on why and how marine animals use light. “I’ve done that now with sharks and I’m doing that with turtles: trying to gain a perspective from their point of view, and using bioluminescence, biofluorescence is one way to do that.”As the recipient of millions of dollars in research grants, Gruber has always tried to answer the most important question in science: why? “When you drop into the ocean, especially the deep ocean where it’s dark, nine out of ten animals have this feature, so it’s used as a form of communication in a world where it’s completely dark all the time and they can signal, they can find each other, they can scare away predators, so there’s lots of different reasons.”

As he talks, you can see in Gruber’s eyes his own inner light, that of someone who is passionate for discovery and for discoveries, not only with his colleagues but also with the general public.

In addition to his doctorate in biological oceanography from Rutgers University in New Jersey, he also has a master’s degree sharing those in journalism from Columbia University. “A journalist should be able to write a story on anything, whether it be a crime beat or a community board or a guitar festival. They all have similar things in common, so I think journalists should be able to cover a diverse array of stories, and scientists should be able to think about a diverse array of questions.”

Despite his immense experience, Gruber knows that public support for science is essential and sees it as part of his responsibilities to communicate with the general public what he and his colleagues discover. “I think it’s very important, and that’s why I put so much of my energy and my resources towards communicating science. It’s because, inherently, we are servants. As scientists, we are a small group of people who have the luxury of spending all day, all night answering science questions. The knowledge that is gained is meant for the rest of the people.”

He may be humble, but he is also hungry. The author of dozens of scientific publications, Gruber has a research lab in the soon-to-be-renovated Lawrence and Eris Field Building at 17 Lexington Avenue as well as a NASA-like control room in the Newman Vertical Campus at Baruch. He considers the natural world part of his lab. “I adore the South Pacific and the Coral Triangle as well. It’s this area for marine creatures that’s really the hot spot of marine biodiversity. There’s just more species there than almost anywhere on this planet.”

Because he has to face many complex issues in his research, he usually partners with others to achieve his goals of discovery. “By teaming up with engineers, we can start asking questions; we can even start finding ways to capture something as delicate as a jellyfish and be able to study it in the deep sea and then let it go without harming it.”

But beyond just being a scientist and a communicator, Gruber sees the underwater world with a passion reminiscent of an artist. “I think one reason why I first got interested in marine bioluminescence was that it’s almost like artwork. It’s like living artwork to see a bioluminescent animal.”

Far from being your typical naturalist, Gruber is the kind of scientist who is always looking forward to discovering things that can be used for the betterment of humanity. “I have several projects in the making right now. We recently identified a new class of fluorescent proteins for marine eels, so we’re beginning to study them and see if there’s any medical applications for those proteins. I’m also working with neuroscientists to find out about the pathway of bioluminescence and see if that can help us to understand the human brain.”

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Gruber Explores the Living Lights of the Oceans