From bush to academic lab to Fogarty: Q&A with Flora Katz, PhD
November/December 2024 | Volume 23 Number 6
Photo courtesy of Mariah Felipe-VelasquezDr. Flora Katz
Dr. Flora Katz, who joined Fogarty in 2001, will resign her position as director of Fogarty’s
Division of Training and Research (DITR) in January 2025. Katz received her Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in cell and molecular biology and trained in neurobiology at Columbia University and genetics at the University of California, San Francisco. She was a faculty member and directed a laboratory in developmental biology and neurogenetics for 15 years at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and Texas A&M University. She’s also conducted research on wildlife conservation and biology in Malawi, Zambia, Israel, and Indonesia.
Why and how did you become a scientist?
I've always been interested in animals, and I really enjoyed my biology courses in high school. Then in college, I wanted to be a writer so I thought “English literature,” but it seemed to me you can always read, you don't really need to go to a class for that. I wanted to do something that involved an apprenticeship, so I switched my major from classics and English literature to biology.
In college, I’d just had one course in molecular biology—it was a really new field back then—and I was fascinated by it. After college, I did wildlife biology for a while, yet when I was wandering around in the bush following animals, it occurred to me that I might need something a little more intellectually stimulating. I decided to go back to graduate school.
What was MIT like at that time?
It's a great institution. I worked in Harvey Lodish's laboratory on how proteins get through membranes. Very basic cell biology. There was an imbalance of women in the undergraduate classes and also in the biology department faculty at that time, but the graduate class in biology was about 50% women. The faculty treated their graduate students like peers. They had none of the arrogance you'd expect of these absolutely world-class scientists, so it was a very positive, nurturing place. I made some of the best friends I've ever had, and they are still my close friends. MIT was a very egalitarian place. It was a wonderful place to do science.
Tell us about conducting research in Israel, Zambia and Malawi.
After college, I got a fellowship called the
Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. Your only obligation as a fellow was to stay out of the U.S. for one year. They didn’t organize anything for you, they only gave you a little letter, a physical letter that said you had this fellowship from the Thomas J. Watson Foundation—he was the chairman and CEO of IBM during its formative years, so the name had some resonance. Then you would hand this to government officers to make yourself look more official.
As a fellow, I ended up working for a while in Israel on migrating birds and then in Zambia on migrating birds in a huge floodplain that they were about to dam. The government wanted to know: What's going to happen when we dam it? Hundreds of thousands of birds arrived every day from South Africa on the way North. I was not trained in wildlife biology, so I read a lot to try to catch up. I lived in a tent on the floodplain by myself and was visited some nights by a female hyena. I refused to carry a weapon, so I planned to hit her over the head with my flashlight if she tried to get in. She didn’t.
Each time I’d go to a new government, I’d hand them my little letter, which was getting more and more wrinkled, and I’d say, “What would be useful for me to study?”
When I went to Malawi, they said, “Others are culling their elephant population, and we don't know if we should cull ours.” That's a really serious thing for a 21-year-old with no training to study. Nonetheless, I said, “Let me look into it.” I worked with a wonderful local tracker for almost a year, who taught me how to locate and follow herds. We even got chased, on purpose, a few times by getting upwind (he thought this was amusing) …their feet are padded, so even a thundering herd is pretty quiet. He also taught me how elephants warn us with mock charges when we get in their space, to give us time to withdraw before they charge in earnest. I’m sure that saved my life multiple times. It was an amazing year. My data contributed to the assessment of their populations, which were in fact quite young and healthy.
Did you also conduct research in Indonesia?
After graduate school, although I really enjoyed working in the lab, I missed being out in nature, so I thought there must be some way to fuse my two interests: the molecular interest and the wildlife interest. I got a fellowship from the
Henry Luce Foundation. They were placing young professionals in Asia to work for a year and contribute to diplomacy by being a bright young person who wanted to solve problems for the country. I got a placement in Indonesia and did a number of projects. I worked with the staff at the National Biological Institute there on ethnomedicine and traditional uses of natural products. Then I spent some time in Borneo (Kalimantan Tengah) working on a sign language project with feral orangutans at Birute Galdikas' research site. That was fascinating, but I missed the intellectual rigor of the lab. The research on language got me interested in neurobiology so I came back to do a postdoc and move more straightforwardly through my career.
Any highlights from your time in academia?
When I got back from Indonesia, I first worked with
Eric Kandel at Columbia University, who subsequently won the Nobel Prize for his research on learning and memory in Aplysia (a type of sea slug), and then with
Yuh Nung and
Lily Jan at UCSF, to study neurodevelopment in fruit flies. When I set up my own laboratory, I worked on a project that was difficult, but absolutely fascinating: How do the cells in the eye hook up with the brain during development so that an organism can see? It's still an incompletely solved problem.
So, why did I leave? I was well-funded, it wasn’t that. You get very focused on one project, but there's a million interesting things. You hope you might solve some major problem or cure cancer, but doing something with a broader scope, with more ability to make an impact on the world, also has an appeal. A lot of people who leave academia to come to government want this bigger scope and more impact. I find it extremely satisfying and I’m glad I made that transition.
Why did you decide to focus on global health at Fogarty?
I wasn't actually looking for global health specifically. I wanted to be in Washington for a year for personal reasons. I applied for the
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) fellowship with no idea exactly what kind of jobs would be available, I just wanted to apply my scientific knowledge to the government. I interviewed for a number of positions, but I didn't think there was enough science in any of them, so I decided against them.
Then I got a call from Josh Rosenthal; he said the person they’d selected to work with him on Fogarty’s
International Cooperative Biodiversity Groups (ICBG) program had turned down the offer. Going back through the list, they thought I’d be a good match. I said, “I'm ready!” And he said, “What?”
The AAAS candidate who’d turned down the position had already told me everything about this placement during interview week, and I’d thought, then, it would be perfect for me. With the ICBG I knew I’d work on drug discovery for many scourges ravaging the world and at the same time, I’d work on biodiversity conservation, my long-time passion. I had a molecular biology and cell biology background to apply to drug discovery, plus a lot of experience with wildlife biology, ethnomedicine and conservation. All of the things I'd spent years focusing on came together in one package at NIH, a candy store for science… amazing! So I came to Fogarty for the AAAS year and, when they offered me a position, immediately shut down my lab in Texas and moved. It has been my dream job for the past 23 years!
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Updated December 10, 2024
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