Chile Warms to UCSF Science: A Conversation with Graduate Student Monica Rodrigo-Brenni

Monica Rodrigo-Brenni loves science, especially those moments when, after tagging proteins, she destroys them. It's not as violent as it sounds. Proteins have power, but they don't have feelings. And tracking what happens inside a cell when certain proteins are out of the mix is standard stuff in laboratories around the world.

That world includes the laboratory of UCSF cell biologist David Morgan, PhD, where Rodrigo-Brenni is a fourth-year graduate student researching the secrets of cell cycle control. She is very happy to be there. "I like the fact that here at UCSF, the top scientists and the graduate students are more like colleagues," she says. "I feel OK going up to any professor and asking them a question."

Questions are currency in her world. They signal an eager mind — one that enjoys discovery, one that yearns for it.

But to what end, you might ask?

Rodrigo-Brenni doesn't hesitate before answering. "I want to be a principal investigator someday, have my own lab, study cell biology, teach, do the whole academic thing." She pauses, then laughs. "I don't like working on whole organisms so much, although when I was growing up, I always liked playing with bugs. I still do."

Curiosity, of course, marks every scientist. For some, like Rodrigo-Brenni, it also makes them. Orphaned as a teenager in Chile, she came to nearby Albany, California, to live with relatives and finish high school. She then attended Diablo Valley Community College before transferring to UC Davis, where she majored in biochemistry. "I loved my chemistry classes at community college. But since I also loved biology, I decided to put the two together."

Rodrigo-Brenni uses the word "love" a lot. It reflects her enthusiasm for the world of wonder that she has had the good fortune — and the drive — to study. It's no surprise, then, that as this National Science Foundation Fellow ponders her postdoc career ("I might study virology — viruses have such neat ways to co-opt cells and get them to do what they want"), she also wants to share her love of science with others.

And UCSF's Science & Health Education Partnership (SEP) makes that easy to do. Founded in 1987 and housed in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, SEP is a collaboration between UCSF scientists and the San Francisco Unified School District. Its goal: to bring both scientists and educators together in the classroom to support quality education for K-12 students.

Rodrigo-Brenni, an experienced tutor, was an eager recruit. Being bilingual also made her the logical choice to help teach four classes on cells and systems to fourth- and fifth-graders in one of San Francisco's bilingual elementary schools. While the science classes happened to be taught in English during her stint, many of the students were more proficient in Spanish. "Sometimes I needed to explain concepts in Spanish one-to-one with students," she explains.

The session on respiration, which required that students build their own models of lungs, learning about air exchange and diffusion in the process, closed with a bang. Rodrigo-Brenni and her UCSF colleague Chantilly Munson brought actual lung specimens to the classroom — both healthy and diseased — and let the students both see and touch them. The smoker's lung left an impression that needed no translation. "The kids said, 'Boy, I'm going to exercise now,'" she recalls with a smile.

Other sessions on the cardiac system and yeast ("we showed how if you feed yeast cells a sugary substance, they produce carbon dioxide") were also big hits. But the biggest thrill, says Rodrigo-Brenni, was knowing that she had penetrated the brain matter of fifth-graders. "We had to explain fairly complex topics, and when they then asked us insightful questions that were right on the money, we knew that they had understood and could carry on with the knowledge themselves. That was the best part. They were excited about the science."

But is it possible to duplicate that success elsewhere — in another country, perhaps? How about Chile? Chile, you ask. Why there?

True, Rodrigo-Brenni was born in South America, but that would be a plus, not a cause. The real reason stems from the life and work of famed Chilean scientist Pablo Valenzuela, PhD. Valenzuela trained as a postdoc in the UCSF lab of William Rutter, PhD, in the 1970s. After co-founding Chiron with Rutter in 1981, he served as its research director, overseeing the development of the recombinant hepatitis B vaccine, the sequencing of the AIDS virus and the discovery of the hepatitis C virus. With Chiron successful and growing, Valenzuela ultimately went home to found a nonprofit organization, Fundación Ciencia para la Vida, and a biotechnology company, Bios Chile, which has had its own string of successes.

He did not forget about his UCSF experience, though, and as he pondered ways for building bridges to American universities, Valenzuela found a human connection in UCSF biochemistry and biophysics graduate student Sebastián Bernales. Bernales was raised in Chile, where he attended Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile before moving to the United States to work at Chiron and eventually enrolling in the UCSF Tetrad Program. He now works in the laboratory of Peter Walter, PhD.

Bernales knows Rodrigo-Brenni, and on a second trip to Chile in fall 2006 (the first took place in 2005), Rodrigo-Brenni joined a group of 22 fellow UCSF graduate students and three members of the UCSF faculty (Regis Kelly, PhD, Marc Shuman, MD, and Joe DeRisi, PhD) for a scientific exchange program that included an SEP module at a school in one of Santiago's poorer neighborhoods. The teaching session, which followed last year's discussion of science outreach to disadvantaged schools, was sponsored by Bernardita Méndez, PhD, at Fundación Ciencia para la Vida and by the Inquiry-Based Science Education Program of Chile's Ministry of Education. It was also supported by Patricia Caldera, PhD, SEP's academic coordinator.

Despite the distance between San Francisco and Santiago, the eighth-grade Chilean students were equally revved about the science experiments. This time around, Rodrigo-Brenni and six other UCSF students showed them how to extract DNA from strawberries (strawberries have millions of cells), using simple tools from dish soap to coffee filters. "The 45 students in Santiago were a little more afraid to ask questions at the start. I don't think the class was inquiry-based."

Rodrigo-Brenni soon won them over. "I kept asking them for feedback and somebody raised their hand, and then other people starting asking questions. Everyone got into it in the end."

Proving once again that science has no boundaries, and that love for what you do has no substitute.

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Related Links

Science & Health Education Partnership

UCSF Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics

Fundación Ciencia para la Vida

Bios Chile

UCSF Tetrad Program

Morgan Lab

Tell us your story: UCSF and Chile

UCSF Today, December 21, 2005

Chilean children learn science the practical way

SciDev.net, July 26, 2005

Walter Lab