Hello and thanks for taking the time to learn a little more about me… Who am I? A creative, passionate scientist. A father. I am also a painter, a rock climber, and a deep thinker. This post is an attempt to highlight some non-technical aspects of myself, such as the reasoning behind my educational and career path. If you are interested in code I have written and related things, take a look at my overview page. It has links to various other posts.
Well, here goes:
A bird’s eye view of Rafael would show my intellectual approach to life is tempered by a desire to positively affect the world. I am driven to analyze the world (there’s the deep thinking), yet also to experience it and to make it a better place (passion). These aspects of my self drive my career and my hobbies. The differences between them also give rise to my deepest weakness: I am constantly having to choose what to focus on from among the many things I love. I must constantly expend energy to stay on track to achieve big things in a specific field rather than superficial milestones in many areas.
Climbing:
Ten years ago I went to Yosemite for my first time as a climber. From an overlook on the road I saw an imposing 800 foot pillar of grey and orange granite. When I expressed my interest in climbing it, my climbing partner informed me “That’s the Rostrum. It’s a really serious climb, man.” The Rostrum immediately become my goal, an unsurprising event given my propensity to fixate on interesting yet challenging things and ideas. In the ten years since I have not let go of that dream and today I am closer than I’ve ever been. I’ve been training specifically for the Rostrum for over two years now. Having a big goal helps me do that extra pushup, or make it do the climbing gym even when I’m feeling tired.
I also enjoy leading group climbing expeditions, especially when I can impart a bit of my joy for climbing to a newbie. Of course, this comes with a huge responsibility to teach safety on the rock, and awareness of the impact of climbing on the environment and on the experience of non-climbers.
Leading groups entails much more than teaching. Good communication between team members is vital. Everyone needs to be tuned in to whats going on in the group to prevent dangerous mistakes. Furthermore, on long mountain climbs it is often up to the more experienced climbers to make potentially life saving decisions, such as whether to turn around before weather gets bad. Making the choice to retreat without summiting a mountain is very difficult. But, what good is the glory of being on top of the mountain if you don’t make it down with all of your fingers and toes. When decisions are made, sometimes other team members need to be convinced, which often requires yet more positive persuasion techniques. Managing risk, even when not on an alpine peak, is a vital part of being on a climbing team, as is effective listening skills, both for leaders and team members.
While I could easily fill many more paragraphs with thoughts on climbing, I’ll switch the topic now to…
Science:
My scientific journey began in the forest of Northern California while foraging for mushrooms. I became fascinated with how fungi could be used to help the world. So, I went to community college to learn about fungal systems for bioremediation and biofuels. I bought a couple books about the subjects, and I quickly realized that my mind gravitated toward understanding the chemical mechanisms underlying complex biological behavior. UC Berkeley’s reputation for strong chemistry made transferring to a chemistry major at Cal my goal. I made it into the chemical biology major in the Berkeley College of Chemistry (~19% transfer admittance rate to that major that year). I also kept my focus on fungi, and did my undergraduate research on biofuel in a mycology lab.
After my BS I went to UC Santa Cruz for a chemistry PhD. I took a variety of grad level classes: materials chemistry; quantum mechanics; statistical mechanics; and bio-organic chemistry to name a few. I ended up splitting the difference, and gluing together all the science words. Thus, my diploma has biophysical chemistry written on it. (Not by my kid in crayon haha but maybe she should scrawl some more terms just for fun).
My first projects in grad school involved building and using spectroscopic devices. I’ve built instrumentation (see next picture) from components, including nanosecond time resolved UV-visible devices to measure protein dynamics. I ended up showing that UV-vis and infrared spectra weren’t sufficient to disprove the existence of a radical (unpaired electron) intermediate within a protein. This led me to learn computational chemistry where I modeled the structure and dynamics of proteins, and put to rest a few bad hypotheses.
Like I do with everything that captures my attention, I went all in and taught myself how to use a variety of computer tools. In addition to the computational chemistry programs I learned Python, R, and shell scripting, all outside of the classroom.
Unsurprisingly, I combined spectroscopic data with computational chemistry in my dissertation, “Examination of the hydrophobicity of the LOV (Light-Oxygen-Voltage) protein active site, using computational chemistry and Raman spectroscopy.” I named it that because what dissertation is worth writing if it’s title doesn’t take up at least a full line of words.
Toward the end of grad school I began doing analytical chemistry and business development for a startup. I really liked the creativity and freedom the position entailed, and I met some very interesting people through the company.
Since then, I’ve been a visiting scholar at UC Santa Cruz, helping a new grad learn molecular biology and working on finishing a paper based on some of my grad school work. I’ve also worked on several data science project with a mentor.
And, starting in 2019 I have been in a leadership role at 2 different manufacturing startups working on a variety of analytical chem, QA/QC, process optimization, materials characterization and other projects.
So, what would be my ideal job? I’m interested in work environments that foster creativity and open communication. I do well with ambiguity, and I love working with other people. For many reasons I do my best work in collaborative efforts. For example, I think feedback is a great way to improve my ideas, so in grad school I often would recruit the other students (both PhD and undergrads) to talk through my plans. Having other people around who gave candid opinions enabled me to successfully confront my biggest weakness, working on too many projects.
I hope to find work environments where I can grow as a person as well as technically. Continuing to work on my weakest points is important, as is developing my strong suits, creativity and analytical thinking. I love coding, chemistry and protein biophysics. The exact project that I am working on is not very important to me, since there are so many things that I can get very interested in. Rather, it is the work environment, team, and positive impact that are the primary things I look for in a job.
Conclusion:
Humans are complex creatures, and I am no exception. There are many other facets I would be happy to share in a conversation.
I’ll close this post with a quote from one of my favorite authors. In Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust describes his thoughts solidifying after waking up in a strange room…
“Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them. “
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