Dr. Andreas Fritz, an associate professor in Emory University’s Department of Biology, currently teaches developmental biology at the undergraduate level. We had a chance to sit down with Dr. Fritz and ask her a few questions about her path to healthcare.
Can you talk about your academic background and what led you to your profession?
Sure. I went to the University of Basel in Switzerland where I grew up and I have to honestly say that at the end of high school, I wasn't entirely sure what I wanted to do. But in Switzerland, it works a little bit differently. Basically, you pick your major right away. You can go to the registrar's office or the equivalent of that and they have this big book of all the things they offer like History, French, English, Law, Biology or Physics. You pick one and you get a timetable and it pretty much tells you from 8-10, you have this class or from 10 to 12, you have another. I was probably interested in science. My dad's a scientist so I ended up picking this major that was brand new called Biology 2. It was like all Modern Biology. So I took courses like genetics, cell biology, biophysics, and structural biology- no botany, no zoology. There was nothing you would classically think of as biology. Then in your last year, you work in the lab for like nine months and then you write a thesis. Once I started working in the lab, I liked that a lot. I was in a really nice lab with nice people and I got super lucky. I did some experiments and they all worked so I got to write a paper that was eventually published and the professor I was working with seemed to like me so he asked if I wanted to continue afterwards and do a PhD thesis with him. So, that was kind of my start. It wasn't really something that I knew I always wanted to do. I did my PhD and that went pretty cool. I still liked working in the lab and discovering stuff so I did a post-doc. There were some ups and downs. Some things didn't go so well but that's just how it is in science. But in the end, I decided to try and pursue an academic career. I applied for assistant professor jobs in various places and I got this job here at Emory in the Biology department. I have to honestly admit that I hadn't really thought that much about teaching before. I helped my professor as a grad student to TA some classes and then when I was a post-doc, I supervised graduate students and some undergrads. However, I hadn't really taught a class like I'm doing now
So you left Switzerland after receiving the job at Emory?
Not quite. I went to school in Switzerland and I started my Ph.D. there. A few months after I started, my professor told me he had accepted a job offer at UCLA. It took awhile but eventually, I moved to continue working with him. So that was the first time I came to the states. I didn't switch schools but I did do the last two years of my Ph.D. at UCLA. I went back to Switzerland for a little while but then I wanted to do a postdoc doing developmental biology with zebrafish, specifically. I ended up going to Oregon for a postdoc to learn about zebrafish and start working there. At the time, and it still was still one of the major places where zebrafish research was being done. This was actually the school where a scientist developed zebrafish as a model system. And so, my wife is from the United States and I like living here so when it came time to apply for jobs, I mostly applied for jobs in the United States. We ended up in Atlanta. Neither one of us had ever been to Atlanta before. The only thing I know about Atlanta was that they had the Olympics there in 1996.
Ok, so what I got from earlier is that you kind of stumbled into developmental biology, in a way. Was there any key moment that settled it for you?
Well, I kind of liked it. I found it interesting when I took classes. But at some level, it was a little bit of luck. When I started working with that professor, he worked with Xenopus laevis as a model system. He studied nucleocytoplasmic transport. He claimed he was always interested in developmental biology but at the time, there weren't really any genes known that controlled development. So, he reasoned that there had to be cytoplasmic determinants that control gene expression. These proteins are translated in the cytoplasm and then they have to enter the nucleus to work as transcription factors. So his idea was that if he learned about cytoplasmic nuclear transport and could figure out genes that were important in that, he could eventually get to these regulatory components. At that time, our lab was right next to the lab of Walter Gehring. He had a huge lab working with drosophila. He was actually one of my committee members when I was writing my thesis. Mike Levine and Phil McGinnis were actually postdocs in his lab while I was doing my undergrad thesis there. They discovered the homeobox literally next door to where I was, doing experiments to show that the homeobox sequences occurred in many different animals beyond flies. At that moment, my advisor switched completely. He started working on these homeobox genes in Xenopus. So after I finished my undergrad diploma thesis and started working in his lab as a graduate student, I began working on these HOX genes until very recently. All the characters there- Mike Levine, Phil McGinnis, and a few others- they were very entertaining and enthusiastic people and really good mentors. It was a very exciting time and something that I really enjoyed. The reason I ended up working with zebrafish was because I saw advantages in working with vertebrates. Being able to do certain types of experiments is interesting. I also saw the power of using genetics to find genes that control development. Zebrafish offered the best of both worlds that allowed various types of experiments like transplantation and genetics. That's how I ended up picking that and continued in developmental biology.
Wow, you have an impressive background in working with established scientists. It's funny because you bring them up in class but you rarely point out your relationships with them. Moreover, what excites you most about your career?
I think what I always thought was exciting was doing actual experiments. I think that was always the most significant aspect of my career. You think about problems; you think about ways you could solve these problems; you figure something out. For a short while, you may be the only person in the world that knows how something works. I think that aspect of science was the most important driver for a long part of my career. As I mentioned, when I started here as a professor in the Biology Department, I certainly was no expert in teaching by any stretch of the imagination. It made me very nervous standing in front of 60 students or even more. I taught Intro bio back then so we had classes with around 120 students. But over time, something that has also become important in my career is teaching or mentoring. Having undergraduates or graduates work in my lab, you mentor them and teach them what you know. You see them improve and some of them become better than you were yourself- that's kind of cool. Even teaching in larger classes like this one now (Biol 223), you realize there are some students that are just there because they want to take a column A class. Then there are quite a few students who probably like it. and then there's a few who come to talk to you for no particular reason. It's always nice to see them a couple of years later or maybe at a conference. They'll sometimes say "Yeah, you know I remember taking your class and it got me to do X or Y." Then you realize you can sometimes make a difference in other people's lives. That’s something that has become more important in my career more recently.
If you could start over, what would you change?
When I listen to seminars and talks from
other people that get invited to Emory or go to meetings within the field of
Biology, I find Evolution more and more interesting. I sometimes talk about EVO-
DEVO. Those two things are actually connected in many ways. If I were to do
biology again, I might lean more towards evolutionary work. These days, when I
read popular science articles, I find ancient DNA sequencing fascinating.
Sequencing a genome of a Neanderthal or some other ancient human and doing all
these comparisons to figure out how humans moved out of Africa is interesting
to me. I also find astronomy interesting since I like sci-fi. I like watching
things from NASA probes that send pictures back so you can watch on the web. I
also like computer science, more like an engineering thing.
What is the best advice you could give to someone pursuing the same track as you or pre-health students, in general?
One piece of advice is to check in with
yourself and talk with other people. Make sure you like what you are doing. My
job is very rewarding and it's cool because I am somewhat my own boss. I can do
research on whatever I want and no one can interfere with that. But if you want
to be really successful, it's a lot of work. I know people might have that
impression that university professors have it pretty cool. You have all these
semesters where you have breaks so you don't have to teach. But if you're in
science, you don't really have breakes. You just work in your lab, nonstop. So
you have to really like it in order to maintain a level of motivation. Your job
should also feel like a hobby. You should also like writing. It's something I
always struggled a little bit with but if you want to do well, maybe in the
earliest stages of your career, you can do a lot of research and bench work and
experiments and that's cool. But the more you advance, the less you will do and
other people will do it for you. Your job will become writing in one way,
shape, or form. You'll help write publications, manuscripts, and papers and get
them published. You have to write grants to secure money. So if you enjoy
writing about something that really helps. You'll end up having to do a lot of
things that you are completely unprepared and untrained for. In my case, I
never really had any exposure to teaching and pedagogy, so I kind of had to
learn it on the job. The other aspect is you might have a lab where you have 10
people working and you're responsible for them. You have to get money so you
can pay their salaries- that's scary. That's all on you. Just managing can be
scary. I was never trained as a human resource or a personnel manager. If
people had a conflict and you needed to be a mediator, you have to learn on the
job. That is very important.