Episode 8: Computation to Improve Therapy & Finances

In this week’s episode, we discuss how the revolution in computational science is changing what we can learn from clinical trials and biological samples to improve immunotherapy in a conversation with Dr. Peng Jiang. Then we turn to the practical matter of personal finances and taxes for graduate students and postdocs in a conversation with Dr. Emily Roberts of Personal Finances for PhDs.

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Dr. Peng Jiang started his research program at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in July 2019. His Lab focuses on developing big-data and artificial intelligence frameworks to identify biomarkers and new therapeutic approaches for cancer immunotherapies in solid tumors. Before joining NCI, he finished his postdoctoral training at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard University. During his postdoctoral research, Peng developed computational frameworks that repurposed public domain data to identify biomarkers and regulators of cancer immunotherapy resistance. Notably, his computational model TIDE revealed that cancer cells could utilize the self-protection strategy of cytotoxic lymphocytes to resist lymphocyte killing under immune checkpoint blockade. Dr. Peng finished his Ph.D. at the Department of Computer Science & Lewis Sigler Genomics Institute at Princeton University, and his undergraduate study with the highest national honors at the Department of Computer Science at Tsinghua University (GPA rank 1st in his year). He is a recipient of the NCI K99 Pathway to Independence Award, the Scholar-In-Training Award of the American Association of Cancer Research, and the Technology Innovation Award of the Cancer Research Institute.

Dr. Emily Roberts is the owner of Personal Finance for PhDs. Her mission is to inspire and empower early-career PhDs to make the most of their money by engaging with graduate students and postdocs through Personal Finance for PhDs seminars, coaching, and websites, Personal Finance for PhDs and PhD Stipends. She launched Personal Finance for PhDs shortly after her PhD defense in fall 2014.

She has been writing and teaching about personal finance since 2011. She started blogging about personal finance in 2011 (Evolving Personal Finance) and launched PhD Stipends and Grad Student Finances (the predecessor to Personal Finance for PhDs) in 2014. Dr. Roberts’ also volunteered for three years with Personal Finance @ Duke and a community-based personal finance class.

She received a PhD in biomedical engineering from Duke University in 2014 and a BS in physics from Harvey Mudd College in 2007.

Show Notes

Segment 1: Computation to Improve Therapy

Ad: NCI Rising Scholars: Cancer Research Seminar Series

Segment 2: Finances

Emily Roberts, Ph.D.
NIH Intramural Research Training Award (IRTA)
Strength Finders Assessment
Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast Apple or Spotify
PhDstipends.com
Postdocsalaries.com

Your Turn: Guest Recommendations

Episode Transcript

[UPBEAT MUSIC]

OLIVER BOGLER: Hello and welcome to Inside Cancer Careers, a podcast from the National Cancer Institute. I'm your host Oliver Bogler. I work at the NCI in the Center for Cancer Training. On Inside Cancer Careers, we explore all the different ways that people join the fight against disease and hear their stories. Today, we're talking to Dr. Peng Jiang, a computational scientist in NCI's Center for Cancer Research who is focusing on using big data to understand how cancer can become resistant to immunotherapy and overcoming it. After the break, we are speaking to Dr. Emily Roberts of Personal Financial for PhDs. She joins us to talk about how to make things work financially during grad school and post-doc years. Then stay tuned to hear recommendations for interesting things from our guests and learn how you can take your turn.

OLIVER: It's a pleasure to welcome Dr. Peng Jiang, a Stadtman Investigator in the NCI's Cancer Data Science Laboratory, where he leads the section on Computational Cancer Immunology to the show. Welcome.

PENG JIANG: Yes, thank you, Oliver, for the introduction.

OLIVER: It's a great time in the history of cancer research with the explosion of knowledge about many cancers leading to the development of a good number of new therapy approaches. But in many cases, resistance arises to these new therapies. And we're learning resistance itself may be mediated by many different mechanisms, so making it very hard to predict the response to a treatment and its durability. How can a computational scientist like yourself address this challenge?

PENG: Yes, Oliver, this is a really great question. As you know, like for almost any type of an effective therapy, in most cases -- I will say for more than 70% of cases for any therapy resistance will eventually come one day. It's really a bottle neck for the entire field. And a unique angle from our data science is that we utilized the large amount of clinical data from patients. Realize that patients' data tells us what is going on under that resistance. Like, you know, the cause for resistance could be really complicated, right? Like one clinical trial, one cohort patient may only tell you part of the story, because it's so complicated. However, if you aggregate a lot of data sites from different centers, from different studies, and really look at the behavior of tumors with developing resistance, you know, really big data mining, you can see lots of like new mechanisms as a price. This is a unique advantage of data scientists because we can utilize the big data-driven approach to aggregate lots of resources from different publications from different centers to get a holistic overview of that resistance process, and then develop some hypothesis and gather some key experimental validation. So in short, like I think our data sciences are an advantage in this process is the big data, the size.

OLIVER: So what kind of data are you analyzing, clinical data but also biological data of the tumors?

PENG: Yes, yes. So like right now, tumor sequencing is becoming cheaper and cheaper so there are lots of RNA sequencing, whole exome sequencing to tell you RNA level somatic mutations, and also epigenetic sequencing to tell you the epigenetic modifications. So we analyze all kinds of sequencing data, transcriptomic data from different studies paired with the patient’s clinical outcomes.

OLIVER: And you're focused on immunotherapy, which of course is a particularly exciting area right now. You've got check point blockades, you've got CAR-T cells now, personalized mRNA vaccines.

PENG: Yes.

OLIVER: What are the challenges of these approaches, and how does your work specifically address them?

PENG: Yes, so first of all, immunotherapy is indeed a breakthrough, but remember for most current immunotherapies, for most solid tumor types more than two-third of the patients will not respond to the treatment. So basically for the majority of the patients still immunotherapy does not bring any help to them. And if you look at the rule of nature, any mechanism you develop in biology or in the human body, must have one or two counter-mechanisms to stop that. For any kind of mechanism, including immunological processes or any kind of other process. The same for immunology. Any anti-tumor or anti-pathogen pathogen immune response process must have two or even more of a counter-mechanisms to stop that through the evolution. It basically means that the tumors have so many options to go against any immunotherapy we deliver against them, right? Because nature through evolution, there are so many things to just come up.

OLIVER: So, these counter-mechanisms they are normally -- in a healthy individual, they balance each other out to --

PENG: Yes.

OLIVER: Prevent runaway processes.

PENG: Exactly. And this is a later product of evolution, because -- right, because in evolution there is no single mechanism that can overcome all other mechanisms. There is always something that has to counter.

OLIVER: So that really strikes me as incredibly complicated, the immune system is itself complicated. But then we also recognize that the tumor is really a complex community, almost a tissue in itself or an organ in itself, right, with all kinds of cellular components in it.

PENG: Yes.

OLIVER: How do you pull and tease that apart?

PENG: Yes, you know, like the sequencing technologies nowadays are becoming so powerful, right, through like at least through whole exome sequencing you can see lots of mutations. RNA sequencing you can roughly infer what cell populations are in a tumor, and also like spatial sequencing is becoming more and more affordable. Right now you can even know the molecular spatial structure of like tumors, so which means our with the advance of our technologies understanding the tumor structure will become easier and easier. So I will say that eventually, we should be able to get a really reasonable view of the tumor structure and the underside of how the tumor counteracts against the immune response.

OLIVER: How does the structural three-dimensional composition of the tumor, how will you learn from looking at that, how the immune activities are overcome or the resistance arises?

PENG: Yes; you know, like the most conventional histopathology staining like H&E, a very conventional and commonly used approach, right? It just looks at texture, looks at morphology. You can infer what type of cells roughly through the cell morphology. This is pretty cheap, I would say, like several dollars for a tumor sample. And then if you want to know more of the sub-types of the cells in the tumor then multiplexing immunofluorescence of six or seven proteins are becoming more and more possible right now. And this could already tell you a lot. If there are some immunosuppressive cells what could they come from? What could be their lineage? Multiplexing immunofluorescence can already tell you a lot. And then here come new technologies, like spatial transcriptomics, coded spatial proteomics of 40 protein markers or maybe RNA sequencing on a genome scale. However, these technologies are still too expensive from a clinical application, right? But at least for research, they greatly help to reveal the structure of the tumor.

OLIVER: So, help me understand how this knowledge will then allow you to support therapies or to avoid resistance or overcome resistance.

PENG: Yes.

OLIVER: I imagine these three-dimensional tumors, there are immune cells in there, there are tumor cells, there are all kinds of stromal cells. Now you have detailed transcriptomic, and mutational, and epigenetic information about all these different cells. How does that then transform into something that you can do in the clinic?

PENG: So, like when a tumor is fighting a mechanism to go against, you know, immune-attack, typically, this mechanism will not happen all across the tumor. It will only happen at a certain region more frequently the border between the tumor and the immune cell section; because you only need like the soldiers to fight in the front line, right? So which means conventionally if you sequence the whole tumor, you will really dilute the signal of the key mechanism at the front line. This is why the current special technologies is very useful, because it can help you to pinpoint on the most critical region and have detailed resolution of what is going on molecularly there.

OLIVER: am I right in thinking that you are actually trying to sort of see the resistance arising in that zone that you described - the interface?

PENG: Yes - a very specific zone, and we really focus your sequencing power on the most important zone.

OLIVER: Interesting. So, you're a computer engineer, computer scientist by training. I have two questions. How did you become interested in the work that you're doing today, and how as a computer scientist and computer engineer do you approach it? Do you approach it differently do you think than if you had trained as a biologist primarily?

PENG: Yes. So, like initially when I came to the USA for graduate school study my major was computer graphics. Because Princeton University, my PhD school, has a terrific computer graphics program. But most programs -- most students who graduated from Princeton’s computer graphics program, they will join Pixar or like Snapchat, you know, like to make computer games, movies, more for entertainment. To be honest, I could be biased. I think, you know, depends on what is the utility of computer games for our young generation. And then at that time, one of my most respected people, my flute teacher died of a brain tumor.

OLIVER: Hmm.

PENG: I learned so much from him, both music and also being a good person, and you know, like I think kind of like my father kind of deal.

OLIVER: Yes.

PENG: And for such people, I deeply respect, just suddenly die of brain tumor within three months --

OLIVER: Wow.

PENG: It's really a big shock for me. Because like three months before, I had seen him. He seems to me quite normal. But suddenly, he starts to respond very slowly if I ask him a question, and then, after 90 days, he died.

OLIVER: Wow.

PENG: Like this is a really deep shock to me because some people you really respect can leave you, right? Like in a short amount of time.

OLIVER: Of course.

PENG: And but you know, at that time, I just keep an open mind. A good thing about Princeton is it does give graduate students lots of flexibility so if you suddenly become interested in some other aspect; because the school gave you -- gave everyone really a safeguard financially. So you can -- you have some free time to explore around the graduate school. And then you know, after many years, I realized that the cancer research is not about starting off, it's not only about science, it's more about human emotion. If you want to do something to allow the people you love, the people you respect to have a better life or to at least live a few months longer --

OLIVER: Yes.

PENG: To enjoy the company of family members. And gradually, I just found out that cancer research is a really mixture of enjoying scientific exploration, scientific endeavors, and also doing something to help our basic human emotions. So this is why, you know, I eventually decided to switch from computer graphics to like bioinformatics with some focus on cancer-related applications.

OLIVER: I can see that it's a deeply motivating experience. And obviously, we're excited to have people with your skill set and expertise in the world of cancer. So you bring that computer engineering expertise --

PENG: Yes, but Oliver...

OLIVER: Yes.

PENG: I also mentioned one important thing here. I enjoy a lot in this process, but also I somehow not only me, I suffered a lot in this process; because to be honest, like if you look at the industry, the computer and IT industry in the US, and you know, other parts of the world are really booming a lot.

OLIVER: Yes.

PENG: Which means if I’d stayed in computer science, joined Pixar or joined those big IT companies. The pay is so high. The pay is just so high. You know what I mean, and --

OLIVER: Yes.

PENG: To be honest, I think that it's much easier if you are getting high pay to stay computer science than going into biology and cancer research. And unfortunately, this is the truth. So like I will say that going this path compared to staying in computer science, it's not really kind of -- even if it's young people, from the financial point of view. And I'm still thinking about very hard of how to resolve this balance, this like, through some mechanism. But I think it's a major difficulty, especially at NCI, when we want to recruit computational post-docs, we are competing with Amazon close to us. They are paying something that is even comparable to my like boss, our bosses at NCI.

OLIVER: Yes.

PENG: So, then it's so hard to compete for talented young people to join our endeavor nowadays. So, I think this could call attention of our higher leadership or maybe people around us could think about some crazy solutions.

OLIVER: Yes, thank you for bringing that up. I think that is a real challenge, because we need people with that talent, but we are competing with --

PENG: Yes.

OLIVER: A very active private sector.

PENG: Exactly.

OLIVER: Yes. So as a computer scientist, how do you think your approach to the biological problem of cancer is perhaps different from that of someone like myself who trained as a biologist?

PENG: Yes. This is really a personal viewpoint, in my just a personal case, I think a key difference is the way we develop hypotheses, right? Because fundamentally, biology is a hypothesis driven science. We need to find a hypothesis first. Like as computer scientists, we have a little bit of luxury to look at lots of data from human clinics and see clinically what are our biggest correlatives of our patients’ clinical outcomes, adverse events, through some more complicated like models what are potential regulators. So this means that, I think that we do have a big advantage about developing some more -- some better hypotheses through large -- through analyzing a larger amount of human genetic data. However, our disadvantage, our biggest disadvantage is because we are trained as computer scientists sometimes, we may not really know the biology deep enough, so we may focus on something, which may not be really useful at the very beginning. This is why personally, I started reading biology studies since the fourth year of my PhD studies. I spent years to catch up with biology knowledge. So I will say a computer scientist, if you want to do cancer research, should take a considerable amount of time to learn biology. Otherwise, we may put our focus on something not so useful.

OLIVER: Yes, and you continued your journey after Princeton at Dana Farber in the Harvard School of Public Health, right? So --

PENG: Yes.

OLIVER: Presumably, that -- you were steeped there in cancer biology. Why the Harvard School of Public Health? Did you do public health research?

PENG: Oh, it's just a name issue because like the Dana Farber Cancer Institute is an affiliate of Harvard University. And our department is affiliated under the School of Public Health.

OLIVER: Ah.

PENG: But all other departments are affiliated under the medical school, but it's not really related to the public health. It's just an affiliation issue.

OLIVER: I understand. So you focused there then on the kind of detailed molecular analysis of cancers that you're now combining with your computation?

PENG: Yes. Yes. Yes.

OLIVER: And you -- I believe you were using AI, of course, in your work as well, right? I mean, AI is exploding all around us even --

PENG: Yes.

OLIVER: Non-computational people myself can't avoid noticing it these days. How are you using it?

PENG: Yes; so like in biology, lots of data does not really have obvious dimensions, right? For example, for gene titres, it’s easy. – you can look at the readout of different genes. But for other data types, like histopathology images, or protein or spatial transcriptomic what you get then is both the molecular marker and the spatial structure information. It's just impossible for human eyes to analyze those kinds of data. This is why you have to use AI to somehow model this data in a more dimensional space to analyze what is the differential feature. So like I will say that for unidimensional data and spatially structured data, that lots of new biology technologies are generating right now, AI is a tool you have to utilize.

OLIVER: So, you received the K99/R00 award while you were a post-doc, right?

PENG: Yes.

OLIVER: And how did that impact your next step? You came to the NCI, obviously, so.

PENG: Yes. Yes, so I gave up the K99 because if I want to join NCI, I have to give up the K99, right --

OLIVER: Yes.

PENG: Like at NIH. I think the advantage is after I got the K99, lots of schools invited me to go for a faculty interview. So, you know, and also for like a free flight, and dinner, and talking with lots of people. It's really kind of an enjoyment, even though eventually I did not really use the K99. I do think the K99 did a really good thing indirectly. The main thing is that I got a lot of invited talks and publicized my research profile. Otherwise, as a young faculty or as young people, it should take some time for me to really get lots of invitations.

OLIVER: Right. So you came to NCI. What made you decide that the NCI's Intramural Research Program was the right place for you?

PENG: It's about people. I remember I met with my current boss Eytan Ruppin -- or I will say current mentors, like my Lab Chief, at the AACR conference in 2018. After talking with Eytan for ten minutes, I immediately decided that he is the one I want to work with. I want him to be my mentor and my boss in the future. So it's more about like the charisma and also the dynamic feeling when I talked with my current mentor, Eytan Ruppin, is the number one reason. The second reason is that I interviewed at NCI. I talked with so many people here. I really love my scientific discussions with NCI people and NIH people. The third reason, and also a very important reason, is the possibility of scientific research. If I stay in the medical school, I need to probably write grants all day long. How can I focus on research idea? But it's a little bit more time, right? So, for example, at Princeton, Andrew Wiles could spend a decade of years to focus on proving Fermat’s conjecture because he had financial stability and safety. The counterpart in biology, the only place I find this is NCI. So, this institute just gave me some safety so that I can take a risk and work on some long range things. Otherwise, you know, in other private institutions who are also very great. I cannot really probably afford to focus on some long-term projects without just keep writing grants.

OLIVER: Yes, the NCI's -- or NIH's program, intramural program, is designed exactly for that, right?

PENG: Yes.

OLIVER: Longer-term --Higher-risk projects with less cycle. That's fantastic. So, what was it like to start your own research group?

PENG: Yes, like to be honest, at the very beginning, it's not so much different from being a post-doc; like maybe I actually became a super post-doc doing the research by myself because at the very beginning I was just by myself. And then COVID-19 came, right? You know, it's very hard for me to recruit people, because for me, as a young PI, mostly I still recruit people from China; you know from my Chinese background. But then when the COVID hit with the travel ban, I cannot recruit people from China, so just by myself still as a single post-doc. And gradually, I have a post-doc and one student, so I mentored them, but, you know, I still need to do quite a portion of the programming work by myself, but also mentor them to somehow do the work together, basically. It's not really like my post-doc mentor. She can somehow more depend on us to closely work with my usual trainees. They are my colleagues, my bench mate, you know, this kind of work. And until recently, like after the COVID is gone, I can kind of get more people in the lab. Then gradually my focus switched from programming and working like a close -- like a colleague more to the mentor and maybe manager, actually how to manage people; but this only happened recently.

OLIVER: Yes, and then you were recruited as part of the Stadtman program.

PENG: Yes.

OLIVER: What is that program?

PENG: Yes, this program is -- like I guess, you know, like it's like an NIH institution-wide kind of umbrella program to -- recruit promising young faculties, give a kind of a guarantee of research resources, making sure we can totally focus on scientific research without worrying about the money issue. So, like basically I think this is a really unique setting, at least, of what I could find in the US that could really give young people total scientific budget safety to focus on some long-term things, even from the very beginning.

OLIVER: So, help us understand what the next months or years for your research program look like. What are you excited about?

PENG: Yes, so currently I'm really excited about using big data approach to find new secreted proteins underlying cancer immunotherapy resistance. Because like recently like we have collected lots of human clinical data from different clinical trials that other people published, and also from our collaborators. And we mathematically examined this large body of human clinical outcome data from cancer immunotherapy trials. We really found out that a group of secreted proteins with really less-known functions are really top indicators of either bad or good immunotherapy outcome. And also traditionally, secretion proteins studies is a blind spot for a genetic screening approach; because genetic screening cannot study secretion proteins. All neighbor cells are still sending other signals. So mutagenesis on one cell will tell you nothing in the microenvironment. In fact, this is why I was so excited about this blind spot of traditional genetics approach, but really gave a computational data driven approach some unique advantage. So currently, we are doing data integration, computational modeling and also mouse models to study the -- to identify new secreted proteins driving the cancer immunotherapy response. And we have some -- quite promising initial results; found of some new secreted proteins that are -- have really unknown functions but that really have a dramatic effect in driving cancer immunotherapy results.

OLIVER: So those proteins might be points of future intervention.

PENG: Yes, because any secreted proteins could be a drug by itself, based on kind of engineering, right?

OLIVER: Interesting.

PENG: Yes.

OLIVER: What's the advice you're giving to early career scientists, maybe even computation scientists like yourself who might be interested in cancer? What advice are you giving them?

PENG: Yes, maybe my advice is more specific to computational scientists. Like the first advice, only do science if you are really enthusiastic about it. Otherwise, for computational scientists, just don't do it. Most of the time, you will probably -- for people who are not really sure about science, what you'll end up is that they do maybe one or two years science research then just go to industry. Because for the industry market is booming so much. So I think that otherwise, you know, like one or two years, then why bother just to do that at the very beginning, right, and also for the PIs it’s unfair to waste the PI’s one or two years of funding and then see the postdoc just leave to industry. And then if you are really enthusiastic about science and you really want to use your knowledge to change people's life, to make sure that your beloved people, or other people’s beloved people who have a few more months of survival time to enjoy family time, or eventually have the disease cured. But if this is your inner drive, then do cancer research with your computational expertise. But for people who don't really have this inner drive to serve for the human beings, the emotion, like I didn't consider about it -- maybe like the industry sector is a really good option. And then, you know, like for people who decide to do the research, my second advice is just to slow down; you know, like don't be too eager to publish or gather papers or scientific publications. Scientific research is not easy. Ninety-nine percent we are getting failures or imperfect results. You really need to slow down to somehow have a kind of a smooth mood-- to somehow enjoy the process of doing scientific research with your colleagues. And then under this mode maybe it's even quicker in the long run to get a good research work published and then establish your signature work in the field.

OLIVER: Well, thank you so much for telling us about your work and your story, and sharing this advice with us. Thank you.

PENG: Yes, thank you, Oliver.

[UPBEAT MUSIC]

OLIVER: The NCI recently launched a new online seminar series. Here to tell us more is Nas Zahir, Director of the Cancer Training Branch.

NAS ZAHIR: Yes, we launched the NCI Rising Scholars Cancer Research Seminar Series in January to highlight the research and contributions made by NCI-supported postdoctoral fellows, and early career investigators at NCI laboratories and NCI-funded institutions nationwide. The talks are every month on the third Thursday, and you can see them and register for them on the NCI website. There will be a link in the show notes, or you can search for “NCI Rising Scholars”.

OLIVER: That sounds great! What kind of topics are the speakers covering?

NAS: We have a broad range of topics – pretty much any kind of cancer research. We have had basic science topics, clinical research, health disparities, cancer prevention, immunology, and many more. Each talk is related to a recent publication by the presenter and there is plenty of time for Q&A.

OLIVER: What if you missed a talk?

NAS: We post a recording of the presentation a few days after the talk, along with a transcript and captions so you can always catch the talks at your convenience.

OLIVER: Thanks, Nas –check out NCI’s Rising Scholars seminar series if you are interested in some great research that’s increasing knowledge right now.

It's a pleasure to welcome Dr. Emily Roberts. Dr. Roberts obtained her doctorate in biomedical engineering from Duke University in 2014, but now she's focused on providing financial advice to early career scientists. Welcome.

EMILY ROBERTS: Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be with you.

OLIVER: Emily, I'm interested. How did you first get the science bug?

EMILY: I -- tough one. So I remember when I was in, let's say, middle school even into high school, I always was a good academic performer, across a lot of subject areas. So I was, you know, on an advanced math track for example, probably like many of your listeners, but I also really loved reading and writing and so forth, and I had the opportunity in high school to attend a magnet high school that was science and technology focused, and I remember that was actually a tough decision for me. I mean, I ended up going there, but my alternative if I hadn't gone there was an international baccalaureate program at my base high school, and so I was like, oh, torn between these two worlds, you know? But I decided to go kind of the science and tech track, and it was in high school that I fell in love with physics, which is what I ended up majoring in, in college, and so it was really, I think, during high school, sort of, I got, you know, a little bit pushed in that direction by the environment that I was in, and I really loved astronomy and astrophysics, and so forth. And I actually decided to go to Harvey Mudd College for my undergraduate degree, which if your listeners are not familiar with it, its tagline is the liberal arts college of engineering. So it's a liberal arts education, but the only majors that are offered are engineering and sciences. And so I thought that was a great balance for me of like, still being able to have like, these different elements in my life, still being able to pursue some humanities studies, social sciences, and so forth, as well as being able to major in physics at an excellent institution. So yeah, that's kind of -- I've always had sort of a foot or an interest in all kinds of different academic subject areas.

OLIVER BOGLER: Interesting, and then you chose biomedical engineering for your PhD.

EMILY ROBERTS: Yeah, so this might speak to like, I've never settled in one area for very long. So yes, I did physics in my undergraduate. And I liked biology, but I hadn't had a really good biology background in high school, and so it wasn't till I got to college, that I got more biology classes and decided oh, I'm really interested in this too, and so I kind of shifted from physics to biophysics, and then into biomedical engineering. And honestly, I actually ended up picking biomedical engineering. I was very torn again. My passion would have been to study astrobiology for my graduate degree, not an area I know a ton about, but I was reading books about it. I tried to take some courses at the undergraduate level. And I was just oh, this is my passion. But I was also very practical, and I realized that it would be difficult to get funding in that area, and it'd be difficult -- you know, the career options are very limited, and so I ended up choosing biomedical engineering, which I was also very interested in, but because the career prospects on the other side of that degree were much more solid. And yeah, so I don't necessarily like, you know, regret doing my PhD or whatever, but there's always that path not taken of like the subject matter I didn't end up studying.

OLIVER BOGLER: Yeah, for sure. I mean, there's so many areas of interest. It's always difficult to choose. But then I understand that you chose not to stay in science primarily, but you pivoted to a new career. Tell us about that, and how did that happen?

EMILY ROBERTS: Yeah, absolutely. I -- well, I should mention that in between my undergraduate and graduate degrees, I did a one-year postdoc fellowship at the NIH --

OLIVER BOGLER: Oh.

EMILY ROBERTS: I was in IRTA for a year.

OLIVER BOGLER: Okay.

EMILY ROBERTS: Great experience. And then when I started graduate school, like I'm sure so many others, I was very optimistic, wide-eyed, and a couple of years into that, I was getting pretty burned out on the research track, was not enjoying myself as much as I had been in the earlier years, and I did a big kind of career reevaluation sort of in my third year, I would say, of my PhD, and was really trying to decide, should I just leave with a master's? Should I finish? What are my career options? What am I really wanting to pursue here? And I decided that I did have a few career options I was quite interested in that were -- you know, it depends on what term you use, right, alternative careers, outside of academia, these kinds of things. I knew I didn't want to stay in academia, but there were some things I was interested in, in terms of other careers that still required the PhD or the PhD would be very useful as a credential, and so I decided to finish the PhD kind of for that reason. And then, as we'll talk about in a minute, ended up pivoting completely in my subject matter again, but I still find the PhD credential and experience that I had to be very useful in my current career, even though I'm not using my specific research area.

OLIVER BOGLER: Yeah, no, for sure. I mean, the PhD, you learn a lot about how to research things in depth, how to assemble information, study data, and all those kinds of things. I'd like to go -- dig a little deeper in what you just told us. So, you spent some time kind of doing a survey of what you could do in your career. How did you tackle that?

EMILY ROBERTS: So, I was really, really fortunate that the university I attended (Duke) has a really robust support area in terms of professional development and career services and so forth. I don't actually know right now, but it did at that time, and I think it was really kind of one of the forerunners in providing those kinds of services to the PhD population, not just, you know, the undergraduates and the master's students and so forth. So, I really utilized the services and the exercises and the programs that they were offering. Like, I was one of those, like frequent fliers, you know, at those, like professional development events. So, I did that a lot in about my third year of graduate school, and I, you know, did like the strengths inventory and did those tests and all these things, and was just trying to figure out what I wanted. I did identify, as I said, a few careers that I was interested in. The main one that I actually worked in for a tiny bit after my PhD, was science policy.

OLIVER BOGLER: Interesting, so I think you're referring to the Strength Finders methodology, which kind of takes a look at your abilities and interests and tries to match you to domains of work, I guess, is one way of putting it. Interesting. So, I think a lot of our listeners probably have similar resources on their -- at their institutions, and I guess engaging with them is a good thing. All right, so where did you end up, and why specifically there?

EMILY ROBERTS: Yes. Okay, so now we have to go back again to this period of time, right after I finished undergrad, when I was doing my postbac and then when I started graduate school. So, I -- no shade to my parents, but I was never really explicitly taught anything about money. And when I was growing up, I mean, we all absorb things about money from our environments, you know, the attitudes and so forth about it, but they were not overtly teaching me anything like about budgeting or credit cards or retirement accounts or any of those kinds of things. And so once I graduated from college and I started this post-bac, I knew I was going to be receiving a stipend. If I remember correctly, was about $24,000 a year. This was like 2007, and I was living, you know, right outside DC. And so this, I knew, because I'm actually from the DC area from the Virginia side, I knew that this is a high-cost of living area, and that $24,000 per year was going to be challenging, and so I sort of started to undertake a self-study in personal finance just to figure out, well, how am I going to survive on this level of income in this certain, you know, cost of living area? And then further than that, like, how do I thrive? Like, what are the adulting things that I am supposed to be doing with my money? And can I manage to do any of those things as a post-bac fellow, and then as a graduate student? So, what started off in around 2007, 2008, as like reading books about personal finance turned into -- if you remember this time period, we're into the Great Recession --, into like reading blogs about personal finance. There was a huge boom in the personal finance blogosphere, and so I was consuming a lot of that content. And then about midway through graduate school, I realized that nobody was like -- not nobody, but there was very little content in terms of these blogs that were being produced about the graduate student experience, like graduate student on stipend experience in terms of the finances. And so I started blogging about my own finances, and in that, was also from time to time discussing kind of grad student-specific issues, like, can I use a Roth IRA, or like what's going on with my taxes? And like these sort of weird technical things, and I realized after a few years of doing this sort of toward the end of graduate school, that I was looking at, you know, the search traffic that my blog got (I had a very small blog) but like the search traffic that it would get, these posts that I was writing about grad student-specific issues were getting all this search traffic in comparison to my other stuff, and I was like, oh, wow, like this content is needed, and there's not really anyone like teaching or talking about this, at least at a national level. And so that was one of the early clues for me that I was interested in this area, but also that it was an area of need among my peer group.

OLIVER: So how did that need manifest? What information were your early readers of your blog looking for?

EMILY: Yeah, as I said, my post, I think it was titled: “The bane of the graduate student's Roth IRA”. That was definitely the top post that was getting traffic on that particular blog. So, at that time, you could not contribute non-W2 fellowship income to an IRA that was not considered taxable compensation. That law has since changed, but this was an area that was not well understood, and a lot of people were contributing to IRAs without realizing that they didn't have the proper income to be able to do so. And so my, you know, writing about that and just reading the text and like interpreting what the tax code is saying was helpful to them in understanding, you know, maybe if their brokerage firm or, you know, the IRS sent something back that said, "Oh, actually this is not proper. You can't do this," whenever, they found some information, and then I was hoping to kind of explain and interpret that to them. So that crossover, actually, of like investing and taxes, those are like my two favorite personal finance subject areas, so I actually love that it was the crossover point between those two.

OLIVER: Yeah, you clearly have a passion for this stuff. So just to be the acronym police, IRA is?

EMILY: Ah, Individual Retirement Arrangement. So, an IRA is the type of tax-advantaged retirement account that you can open independent of your workplace. So like your workplace might offer -- well, not as a graduate student, but later on it might offer a 401(k) or 403(b) or a 457. We've probably all heard these kinds of acronyms floating around. But the one that you can get that's independent that does not depend on your university or your employer or whatever is the IRA, the Individual Retirement Arrangement.

OLIVER: And the Roth is a subtype of that, correct?

EMILY: Yes, there's two flavors of IRAs, the traditional (the type that came first) and the Roth, and without necessarily going into details, the Roth is generally preferred by people with lower incomes, like graduate students and postdocs.

OLIVER: Yeah, I'm not asking you to give tax advice here on the podcast, but just trying to make sure our listeners sort of understand what you're sharing with them. So okay, so you had this experience. You were -- let me get this right -- you were still in graduate school, but you were developing this interest and passion, and you were blogging about that, is that correct?

EMILY: That's correct. I started my first blog in about 2011. That's about midway through my PhD. The other thing that happened that sort of made me realize that this information was needed actually is a good faith effort that was undertaken by Duke, which is that they had put on some seminars. One was maybe about investing. There were a couple on taxes. I actually, ultimately, as through a volunteer position, became involved in like setting up these kinds of events with like, local, you know, CPAs and like Wealth Advisors, and so forth, but what I was realizing is that despite our best efforts from the university side, bringing in these licensed, credentialed very capable professionals to do these kinds of teaching events was not a great fit, because the clients that they typically served were totally out of step with the current reality of the graduate students and postdocs that they were speaking to. And so they, you know, maybe like on the tax side, they might be accustomed to preparing the tax returns of, you know, high-income earning parents of college students, and so then they think they know something about grad student taxes, which are kind of a whole different beast, so they knew a little bit, but not quite enough to make the material tailored and fit the best for that particular audience. On the investment side, they were talking about 401(k)s and I was like, "Um, like, I have a Roth IRA over here. Like, what do I do with that?" You know, so I just realized that, you know, because of the client mismatch, those were not the best kinds of people to be teaching this material. And, frankly, someone from their own peer group (me) with that self-knowledge and that, you know, reading and so forth I was doing was quite capable of teaching this material.

OLIVER: So, a real gap, I guess, in what was being offered and what was being talked about, despite Duke's best efforts here.

EMILY: Yeah, and again, like, I want to commend Duke for even trying to do anything in that area, because so many universities don't and didn't at that time, but, you know, I could do a little better, and so actually, I again, like thank you, them, for giving me the opportunity to give my first speaking engagement on this subject, which was after I defended, I was sticking around Durham because my husband, who also defended at the same time was transitioning to a postdoc position in his same PhD advisor's lab, but my advisor had left the university and I was like, "Whoops, I don't have a job anymore." And so I was kind of kicking around, not sure what I was doing and, you know, looking for some work opportunities, and in that time, I was like, hey, why don't I just like, develop a seminar on everything I think a graduate student, you know, on a stipend needs know about personal finance? And I gave that as a, you know, a volunteer thing through the group that I had been working with for a couple of years there at Duke, and I just loved it. Like I had so much fun developing the material, delivering the engagement, answering people's questions, and I was like, how do I make that my job? Like, that was so much fun, and so that was kind of what launched the business, Personal Finance for PhDs out of, you know, the sort of side hustle hobby-type of pursuits that I had been doing earlier.

OLIVER: Yeah, so you had a really good chance to kind of market test what you were offering, but I would guess that it would have still taken some courage to take that leap into, okay, I'm now going to start my own consulting business, if that's the right way to put it. Is that true? Did you feel courageous or was it -- did it just seem obvious to you?

EMILY: Mm, so I am not really a risk taker, so this was a big risk to be doing with my career. And so there are a couple of things that contributed to me being able to take that risk at that time. By the way, I don't call what I do consulting or advice giving.

OLIVER: Oh.

EMILY: I call it financial education --

OLIVER: Okay.

EMILY: -- because I don't have a CPA. I'm not a CFP. No, it's totally fine. Like, everybody gets confused about this, so I just wanted to -- people are always like, "Oh, you're a consultant, right?" I'm like, well, the business is similar to a consultancy, but what I do is not consulting.

OLIVER: Got it.

EMILY: So anyway. But yes, there were of couple things at that time. So one was that, as I mentioned, my husband had a job, and we had joint finances and so, you know, while not lovely living, you know, two people on a postdoc salary, it was okay, and I was also -- I had a side hustle. Like, I was bringing in some degree of income, right? And so that was okay, at that time for a little while because the other part of this picture is that my husband and I, we got married about halfway through graduate school. We were both kind of aligned on this, and so we were both working on our personal finances. I mentioned earlier, I was doing a lot of learning about it, but I was also doing a lot of application, right, you know, saving up the emergency fund, starting to use investments like in Roth IRAs, so forth, these kinds of things, paying off debt. And so because we had been doing that for this seven years, right, between when we both graduated from college in 2007, and then, you know, 2014, we had quite a decent nest egg built up by that time. And so that gave us both some confidence that it was okay to take some risk in our careers that we might not have been able to do had we not had that kind of financial safety net in place. So not only did I eventually start my business, which certainly at first did not earn what I would have been earning if I had gotten a standard-type job, but my husband, also not a career risk taker, but he was able to go to a startup. That actually was a really, really great fit for his PhD work, and he would not have considered a job like that if we didn't have that financial security that we had generated, you know, on our personal balance sheets, because we obviously, were not necessarily thinking it was going to come from our, in my case, myself, my own employer. In his case, a, you know, 12-person company that he went to in I guess it would have been like about 2015.

OLIVER: Interesting. So now, we're almost 10 years later, and you've obviously not only continued in this work, but expanded it significantly is my understanding, so what is the state of your activities now?

EMILY: It's so varied. I'm really grateful that so at the beginning, I was sort of billing myself as like, a professional public speaker on this topic of personal finance for this particular audience of graduate students and postdocs. And that has remained something that I continue to do, but now and, you know, things change with the pandemic, obviously. I was traveling, you know, some before then, and then that was not an option anymore, so the business has had to shift a bit over time. So I've added a lot of different types of offerings. Right now, what I'm really excited about, so I still do the live speaking, you know, whether it's webinars, in person, but what I'm really excited about now is more of like a flipped classroom-type model of content that I've developed. So I pre-recorded a lot of the various areas that I teach, chiefly taxes, but also in some other areas, and so what I do, I'll just give an example for the tax workshops that I offer during tax season, which we're recording this in April, so it just ended. It's heavy on my mind. So I pre-record all this teaching about how to generate your tax return correctly as a graduate student or postdoc. This year, I actually expanded to offering it to nonresidents as well as US citizens and residents. So I pre-record all these videos, I give the slides, I give the text. It's like maybe two hours of content, something like that, if you were to watch it straight through, also worksheets to help people keep things straight. So they have all this pre-recorded content. I like this because they can access it at any point during tax season, right? Like some people want to file in January. Some people want to file in April. And then I pair that with periodic live Q&A sessions. So I really love this because I get to spend my time creating the teaching material, like creating the slide deck, writing the script, doing it once or, you know, doing it well. And then I just get to answer people's questions as like the thing that I show up live for, which is so much more fun and exciting to me than presenting, you know, the same material over and over again. I get to present it once, as I said, do it right, and then just answer people's questions. I love that interaction with people as like part of my job, answering questions, hearing stories from them, hearing how the material has helped them or, you know, what area they're moving into next. So I have that for the tax area of my business, but also several other areas, and so that's what I'm really excited about. It's just like, me getting more face time, like, answering people's questions instead of just people listening to me talk live.

OLIVER: Makes sense. What's the business model?

EMILY: I don't know. That's one thing about solopreneurship that is so fun is like you don't have to write a business plan at the beginning of this. You just kind of feel out how it goes, but yeah, I --

OLIVER: Are people paying a subscription to your content, or?

EMILY: Okay, so my main revenue comes from universities.

OLIVER: Ah, okay.

EMILY: So, I really love it when I can get this material in front of graduate students and postdocs without them having to pay for it, so I really want the universities ideally to pay for it on their behalf and offer it as like a free benefit. That's not always possible, and so I do have for example for the tax workshops I just mentioned, there is a way for individuals to purchase those through my website, but the vast majority of the revenue comes from the university clients.

OLIVER: And I think you mentioned that you had given this presentation or this workshop at the NIH this past year, is that correct?

EMILY: Yeah, so NIH was a new client this year. Thank you so much to the Office of Intramural Training and Education. Yeah, so this tax season, so again, we're in April 2023, so for the 2022 tax year, OITE offered all four versions of my tax return workshop, so one for post-bacs, one for grad students, one for postdocs, all US citizens or residents, and then one for nonresidents, all those groups together, and so it was awesome to have them as a first-time client this year. I was so glad to be able to work with them.

OLIVER: That is fantastic. I know it's something that our post-bacs, postdocs and grad students continues to ask for is help us with taxes, so it's great that that happened. So sort of taking a slight pivot, you speak to a lot of folks in their early careers. What are the biggest challenges that grad students, postdocs, are facing at the moment in 2023, in terms of the financial issues?

EMILY: Hm, it's got to be income versus cost of living, no question. I mean, we've seen this, you know, I don't want to say unprecedented, that's not the right word, but not precedented in a long-time degree of inflation going on in our, you know, economy generally, and that has really obviously squeezed people's budgets. And these stipends, and salaries have not -- you know, some of them have budged, but not enough of them and not enough movement, right, to really keep up with all of the levels of inflation, so again, like great job to those universities and institutes and programs and so forth that have significantly raised the stipends and salaries, but it needs to be more across the board for sure. So, I would say, income is the main challenge.

OLIVER: So, you described a moment ago about your own journey, and that, together with your husband, how you focused a lot of your energy on improving your own financial health with I'm going to characterize it as just disciplined measures of paying down debt and savings and things like that. Is that an area you also offer advice into to grad students and postdocs?

EMILY: For sure. So, it's interesting for me, like when I have to think about speaking engagements that I do, I have to serve two groups of people, right? I have to serve the people who are paying for me to be there, which is the universities, the clients, and I have to serve the people in the audience, the graduate students and the postdocs. And so I'm probably not talking enough about fixing the income side of the equation as I would like to be, in those settings. So tune in to my podcast, Personal Finance for PhDs, if you want to hear more about, you know, the income side of the equation, because in those settings, I do talk more about the financial management side of things. So for sure, you know, we talk about budgeting. I have like a really budgeting sort of tactic that I used when I was in graduate school that I found really helpful that my audiences are always asking, like, follow-up questions about. They're so interested in it when I teach it. But also, yes, the debt management, the saving, the emergency funds, and just cashflows, how to use credit cards, like all those kinds of things, for sure, but I really find that, okay, let's set aside the income problem, which is a major, major problem right now, especially. I do find that my audiences are quite interested in the topic of taxes (I already talked about that so much) and investing, again, my two favorite topics. So even though maybe a graduate student or a postdoc, you know, some of them are ready to start investing while they're in graduate school, but even if they're not ready, they're still quite interested in learning because they know when they get to that, you know, post-PhD post-postdoc career job, that they -- that investing is going to be part of their lives. They're savvy enough that they already realize they're going to be starting that as soon as possible, because they feel this pressure of having lost, you know, sometime during their PhD training. So, of course, if you can get started investing now, that's awesome, but if you can't right now, then, you know, there's some steps you can take to be ready to do so once you have the income to support it. So I love talking about that area. And the audiences are quite interested in there, yeah.

OLIVER: Yeah, I mean, investment is -- it's very time driven, so the earlier you start, the better you start, and but I'm guessing your observation is that no matter how financially disciplined someone is, right now the just the income is not sufficient in most parts of the United States, I would guess.

EMILY: It's so hard to generalize here, you know, because we hear so many anecdotes, and I would love to have more data around this. I actually have a database website called PhDstipends.com that people can go to report their -- you know, what they're earning in their graduate positions. There's also a sister website postdocsalaries.com for the postdoc, you know, population. So, you can get some idea of what people are being paid and compare those to, you know, your local cost of living kind of things, but that's not like a scientifically generated, you know, survey group, so I would love to see more studies around this, because certainly, some people are dramatically underpaid. They're in very precarious positions in graduate school or in their postdocs, whether that's because the income is too low, whether it's because, you know, they have academic-year-only income but not summer income, or maybe they have only guaranteed income for five years, but the degree is going to take seven, all kinds of different reasons that this can happen. Yet, there are others who think that they're being paid fine, well enough, that they might, you know, want to do things like investing and paying down debt while they're in graduate school, and of course, a lot of people in the middle who are kind of making it, they're not too stressed, but they're certainly not able to reach any financial goals, and so it's really a kind of a heterogeneous group. And so on my podcast, for example, kind of because I -- people volunteer to come on. So generally speaking, people volunteer to be interviewed who are doing pretty okay with their finances, because they feel good about talking about it, and so I have a lot of like, success stories on the podcast, but those are not representative of what's going on generally with the entire, you know, PhD population, and so, like I said, it's just really heterogeneous. And of course, I'm only talking about the income versus cost-of-living side of things right now. There’re also different family situations, right? So, some people may have dependents to support whether those are children, whether that is, you know, an aging parent, whether they're sending, you know, remittent -- is that the right word -- remittances back to their home countries to support, you know, someone there. So, like, you know, we kind of maybe assume like an avatar of a graduate student who's like a single young person, but that's definitely not everybody, and some people have other financial responsibilities. And so, yeah, it's, it's kind of all over the map, but I would really, really love to see those people who are being paid the least brought up out of this really poverty-level, you know, income, that they have to be able to have more financial security, because, frankly, how can we be expected to perform well and succeed with our research, with finishing our degrees with, you know, publishing the papers, when we're not receiving sufficient financial support? You know, when you have that stress of money on your mind, how can you be expected to perform well? And so it's really, I think, in the best interest of the universities to support people better, because they're going to get better work out of them in the meantime, and it's also the humane thing to do. Yeah.

OLIVER: Yeah. Thank you very much for that feedback. You've mentioned the podcast a couple of times. So, you're in your 14th season. That's impressive.

EMILY: Not 14 years, just 14 seasons --

OLIVER: Sure.

EMILY: -- because we do about three per year.

OLIVER: Three seasons per year. But give us a sort of overview of what kind of topics. You've mentioned you have guests come on -- coming on and who talk about their own financial journeys. What else do you cover in the podcast?

EMILY: The vast majority of the episodes are interviews with, as I said, volunteers. So hey, if you're a podcast lover, you know, come on my podcast and talk about your finances. So that could be talking about like the overall financial journey that they've had, let's say entirely through graduate school, or it could be on more specific topics. Like I recently had a fantastic interview be published from a first-year graduate student who talked about, you know, how she selected the graduate schools that she was going to apply to partially based on the stipends that they offered, how she, you know, valuated those offers. So it's sort of talking about, like the process of getting into graduate school. Other times, I'll have kind of like professionals on, so I've interviewed a few, for instance, financial planners, people who do legally give advice on these kinds of things. So I've had some financial planners on. If they, you know, focus on academics or on PhDs as part of their like core client population, they talk about how those clients are similar or dissimilar from general financial planning clients that they might have. And then from time to time, I also do solo episodes where there's a certain area that I really want to teach on for free for everybody. They don't have to come to one of my seminars, just listen to the podcast. So, you know, I mentioned earlier, for example, there was a law change that allowed fellowship income not reported on W2s to be considered taxable compensation and contributed to an individual retirement arrangement, and so when that -- when the Secure Act passed, and that was one of the changes that happened with that law I devoted an episode, for example, to explaining what was going on with that. So from time to time, there'll be me teaching on things. I teach about taxes sometimes, so yeah, it's a little bit of a mix, but as I said, mostly volunteer driven, so I'm really always pleased when people decide to come on and open up this part of their, you know, this part of their lives that's kind of taboo to talk about still.

OLIVER: Yeah, no, I think that's fantastic, and that's a great way to learn is from hearing other people's experiences and stories, so that's fantastic. Two questions I have to finish up with, so since you provide your services primarily through universities, if we have someone listening who cannot access your expertise and your teaching through their institution, how can they advocate for their dean or, you know, to consider engaging you?

EMILY: Hm, thank you so much for asking that. Let's see. Mostly my university hosts are in like, professional development kind of areas, so that'd be the right kind of person to work with, usually at the graduate school level. I work with a lot of graduate schools or medical schools, not so much with -- I should say medical schools that offer PhDs -- not so much with like individual departments, although that does happen sometimes. So one kind of person to approach would be like a professional development-type person. It's always great when you have a group of people, not just a single person, say, hey, we really want to learn more about this and, you know, here's a particular resource, that would be me. Thank you very much. And so, you know, offering that to that person, as a group or individually from separate people would be great. Another great group to approach is the Graduate Student Governments or Graduate Student Association. Sometimes they don't have a great deal of discretionary funding, but if they do, then they could be able to host an event with me or like, you know, purchase a set of tax workshops, for example. So I have a lot of clients from the student-driven side of things as well. And then kind of same thing on the postdoc side, right? Like the postdoc offices or the postdoc associations are great people to approach about that, but yeah, I would say just, you know, request it. Send them my website. I have pages on there that explain kind of the different speaking things that I offer, the different workshops, yeah.

OLIVER: Fantastic. I'm not going to ask you to give financial advice, because that's your day job, but I do want another kind of advice, wonder if you'd be willing to give it. So coming -- pivoting back to the career question, you were in graduate school. You took a turn to a very interesting and compelling area that you're very passionate about. What's your advice to our listeners who are maybe themselves in graduate schools or early in postdoc and they’re, you know, thinking about what else they could be doing? What's your advice to them?

EMILY: Yes, the advice is, try things. Don't get so overly spending too much time at the bench or at your primary research area. Of course, you want to put in sufficient time. You want to do your 40 hours, 45, whatever it is, but don't get so carried away with that, that you forget that there are other areas of your life that need to flourish as well, and one of those is preparing for your future career, which is -- could be in research, but is frankly very unlikely to be in academia, at least in the long term, and so I would just say try things. So like, for me, my example, what I was trying was blogging, and that gave me some feedback. I mean, I wasn't making money from that, but it was giving me some feedback about what other people, you know, wanted and needed. And so some of the things you can try is like, you know, getting an internship. It doesn't have to be like an official, you know, summer internship you do full time, although that is possible in many fields. It could be a part-time internship that you do, you know, a few hours a week. It could be freelancing on the side. I'm mentioning things that you're probably going to get paid to do, but it's certainly okay to do volunteer work as well to just -- yeah, just get some experience outside of the academy. See how workplaces operate. See what people are interested in outside of your immediate context of, you know, your lab or the research that you're doing. So yeah, just try some things and do it all through your PhD, all through your postdoc. Don't leave this for just the last year when you're trying to transition out.

OLIVER: Emily, thank you so much for all your advice and all that you do for our biomedical early career scientists.

EMILY: Well, thank you so much for having me. It was really a pleasure to be here and thank you so much for giving me the opportunity.

OLIVER: Now it's time for a segment we call "Your Turn", because it's a chance for our listeners to send in a recommendation that they would like to share. If you're listening, then you're invited to take your turn. Send us a tip for a book, a video, a podcast, or a talk, or anything that you found inspirational, or amusing, or interesting. You can send these to us at nciicc@nih.gov. If you record a voice memo and send it along, we may just play it on an upcoming episode. Now, I'd like to invite our guests to take their turn. Let's start with you, Dr. Jiang.

PENG: Yes. Yes, so my favorite book is a book called "Life is About Giving Up".

OLIVER: Okay.

PENG: It's a book written by a very famous like Buddhist or monk in China called "The Master Nebula” like, you know, this a book that is a book about having the importance of learning to give up in your life. Like because for managing the important things in your life, if you want to achieve more, you need to give up a lot at the very beginning. However, the most important thing is to decide when to give up and when not to give up. This is a very hard thing in life. Like so this whole book is about how to adjust your expectation for life, how to accept failures, and give up smartly to avoid basically more resource in your life. And eventually like I think this -- after reading this book, I've become much happier instead of lots of false pretense. And I think that those -- like actually giving up will only somehow make your life much better and maybe even more in the long run. So this is why I recommend this book, it's about life is giving up.

OLIVER: Thank you very much. That sounds like a really good read. Appreciate it.

PENG: Yes.

OLIVER: And how about your recommendation Emily, Dr. Roberts?

EMILY: My recommendation is a book I read in about the past year that really shook me and it's kind of a personal finance book but it's kind of a life book and it's called "Die With Zero", the author is Bill Perkins. And one of the main concepts that he teaches is that as you exit different phases of your life, the ‘you’ that existed in that phase dies, so we have a high school you, that person is dead and gone, we have a college you, that person is dead and gone, the grad school you, et cetera, et cetera. So, the basic idea behind this is to encourage you to have experiences in the phase of life that you're in and not either, you know, put them off too much for the future or think that they're, you know, just basically match the experiences that you want to have to the phase of life that you're in. And so now that I'm like, you know, I have a couple of kids, like I'm in a certain phase of life right now, I'm in the little kid phase of life and the grad school me is gone. And so there are some things I wish I had done during graduate school, some opportunities I wish I'd taken and some I'm really glad that I took. And so just realize that you are, whatever phase you're in right now, it's a special phase of life, it's not going to be around forever and please do, you know, pursue the opportunities that you have that are unique to that phase while you have the chance to do so.

OLIVER: That's a great recommendation, good advice. Thank you very much. And I'd like to make a recommendation as well. It's for the stand-up comic Tig Notaro and specifically her set from about 8 years ago when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. This original set is just remarkable and its candor and in her descriptions of the experience of receiving a diagnosis, just her ability to digest this very difficult time in her life and see the humor in it and bring it to an audience. We'll post a link to the recording and actually since then she's continued to shed light on this topic and related issues. She's pursued her goals in life and she shares much of her journey in documentaries and on social media and YouTube and other places, so you can find all that online. I have to say I find her work always helps me regain perspective and strength.

That’s all we have time for on today’s episode of Inside Cancer Careers! Thank you for joining us and thank you to our guests. We want to hear from you – your stories, your ideas and your feedback are always welcome. And you are invited to take your turn to make a recommendation we can share with our listeners. You can reach us at NCIICC@nih.gov. Inside Cancer Careers is a collaboration between NCI’s Office of Communications and Public Liaison and the Center for Cancer Training. It is produced by Angela Jones and Astrid Masfar and Edited by Janette Goeser. A special thanks to Lakshmi Grama and Sabrina Islam-Rahman. Join us every first and third Thursday of the month when new episodes can be found wherever you listen – subscribe so you won’t miss an episode. I'm your host Oliver Bogler from the National Cancer Institute and I look forward to sharing your stories here on Inside Cancer Careers. If you have questions about cancer or comments about this podcast, email us at NCIinfo@nih.gov or call us at 800-422-6237. And please be sure to mention Inside Cancer Careers in your query. We are a production of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health, National Cancer Institute. Thanks for listening.