Am I a Microbiologist?: Alicia Reigel Presents at ASM
I’m Alicia Reigel, a 5th year Ph.D. candidate in the College of Biological Sciences here at LSU. If you’re a loyal reader of the The Pursuit —now Science Next—you may remember me from two previous blog posts I’ve written about my research: From the Caribbean to LSU, Alicia Reigel Dives for Science and All Hands on Deck: Alicia Reigel Sails in Search of Corals…and Microbes!. You may have also heard about some of my research during my LSU College of Science Instagram takeover in summer 2018 for my research trip to Gray’s Reef National Marine Sanctuary. This time I’m back to write a blog post that’s a little different.
But first, let me start with a bit of background about me in case you’re new to the blog and haven’t seen my previous work.
Many people aren’t aware that just like humans, corals play host to a suite of microbes—microorganisms, like bacteria, germs, etc.— that help them complete functions or tasks that are key to their survival such as delivering energy, cycling nutrients and even providing antibiotic properties. However, corals host just as many microbes that have potentially pathogenic properties and may induce disease or cause mortality in their host.
My project explores the types of microbes, their abundance, and their function within a coral host when the host is exposed to a degraded reef habitat. Much of this degradation is due to human activity on land or in the water near the reefs. While I spend a lot of my time thinking about and working with microbes, I’m definitely not a microbiologist, am I?
If you create a project focused on microbes, you’re always thinking about microbes, and you work with data related to microbes every day, but you’re not a microbiologist…then what IS a microbiologist?
Good question! And to be honest, it’s one that I thought I knew the answer to:
Microbiologist (my definition): A scientist whose research solely focuses on microscopic organisms, specifically growing and identifying them in the lab.
This is where many of you might start imagining a cliché white lab coat and a small tube of bubbling liquid that may or may not contain scary, pathogenic bacteria (like this guy to the right). And let’s be clear… until I spent five days attending and presenting my research at the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) Microbe meeting in June, that was my vision of a microbiologist too. But, let me tell you, I could not have been more wrong!
The ASM meeting is huge. There are over 5,000 attendees, hundreds of exhibitors and thousands of research presentations. It was an overwhelming number of researchers and experts in microbial topics. The prospect of presenting to so many microbiologists had me nervous, and one thought kept plaguing me: “They’re all microbiologists, and you’re not. You’re an imposter, and they’re going to know that you don’t belong there.” It was a harsh thought, but I couldn’t let it go. I was a coral biologist who knew something about microbes that lived in coral, but I didn’t meet my defined version of a microbiologist.
Amazingly, when I attended the very first poster session of ASM-Microbe, I started to see things more clearly. This poster session had hundreds of posters from researchers across the world, and as I looked them over, I realized something: Many of the researchers weren’t just growing microbes in the lab and many of them weren’t even working at universities! They were working for government agencies, for pharmaceutical companies, for research supply companies, for non-profit organizations and for environmental consulting agencies. They were studying everything from fecal bacteria in farm animals and its effects on nearby water ways, to the oral microbiome of bats, to the spread of pathogenic bacteria in humans across the world. There was so much diversity, and many researchers weren’t just interested in the bacteria themselves. They were interested in the how the bacteria react with their biotic and abiotic environments—just like me! Not only was I impressed day after day with the huge variety of work going on, I also started to feel like my work with coral microbes was worthy of being at the conference.
The day of my poster presentation I was nervous and still feeling that imposter syndrome, but it was all for nothing. Every person who stopped by my poster to hear about my work was interested, a few said they were impressed, and several even wanted my advice on techniques! I left that day feeling triumphant. So, maybe I’m not a traditional microbiologist and maybe that will always be a title I’m wary of giving myself, but the ASM conference proved to me that a microbiologist is so much more than someone who grows microbes in a lab.
The career opportunities in microbiology are seemingly endless and the research topics even more so. Microbiology as a scientific field is only growing, and the technology is increasing at such a rapid rate that new discoveries are happening in the field every day. Below is a list of only some of the potential microbiology career paths that I saw represented at the ASM Microbe conference:
University positions (professor, graduate student, lab tech, etc.)
Infectious disease doctors
Government researchers (CDC, EPA, NOAA, USDA, U.S. Forest Service)
Pharmaceutical companies
DNA sequencing companies (Joint Genome Institute, Argonne National Laboratory, Illumina)
Research supply companies (Zymo, Qiagen, Fisher Scientific, etc.)
Medical facilities (doctors, full-time researchers, lab technicians)
Non-profits (World Health Organization)
My take-away message from this post is made up of two simple things:
Microbiologists come in so many different “versions.” The possibilities for jobs in this field are endless. You don’t have to spend your life growing bacteria in a lab (unless you want to!). Bacteria are everywhere and thus, researching microbiomes in different hosts and environments is just as important as growing bacterial cultures in the lab for physiological experiments.
Try not to underestimate yourself. It’s very easy to feel like an imposter, but just know that your hard work will show, and likely others will be impressed with your knowledge!