By Rick Vacek | June 14, 2024
Every year, the Office of the Provost honors two faculty members for their excellence in showing students how to conduct research.
But their enthusiasm also deserves recognition.
“It is not just a job, it’s a passion,” said Dr. Shalini Prasad, winner of the 2024 Provost’s Award for Faculty Excellence in Graduate Research Mentoring. “The reason I am in academics is, one, these students, and, two, the opportunity to truly explore anything.”
Dr. Benedict Kolber, who earned the 2024 Provost’s Award for Faculty Excellence in Undergraduate Research Mentoring, said it’s one thing to learn about a technique or scientific phenomenon in a textbook, “but actually doing it in the laboratory – mixing the chemicals, manipulating the system, testing hypotheses – there’s nothing like it in the classroom.”
Those sentiments are typical at The University of Texas at Dallas, classified as a Carnegie R1 doctoral institution of very high research activity.
The designation is based largely on the aggregate quantity of an institution’s research, and the University has the numbers to justify that stature. Its research expenditures nearly tripled between 2007 and 2022, from $46.5 million to $140 million.
“This is a major focus for us,” said Dr. Inga Musselman, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost. “We have the know-how. We have the facilities. Most importantly, we have the faculty.”
Such as Prasad and Kolber. They have a lot to say about the lure of the laboratory, and it doesn’t take much probing to discover their dedication to students.
Out of all the Provost’s Award winners in the April 26 ceremony, Prasad was among the most openly ecstatic. The department head and professor of bioengineering in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science has been nominated for the award three times, but this is the first time she has won.
“The reason I am faculty in an institution like ours is the impact we can have with PhD students when they graduate,” she said. “To me, this matters a lot. Any other award is for personal glory, if you will, but this one speaks to what we have done for the students. That’s why I was super happy.”
Prasad loves the symmetry of winning now. She has graduated 20 PhD students as the supervising professor, and she has been in academia and has run her own lab for 20 years. “Twenty is a nice number,” she said, beaming.
Prasad was only 24 when she became a faculty member. Her teaching assistants (TAs) all were older; so were most of her students. She remembers how, in her first class, a student asked why she was the instructor rather than the TA sitting in back.
“The reason I am faculty in an institution like ours is the impact we can have with PhD students when they graduate.”
DR. SHALINI PRASAD
“That day was so scary for me,” she said. “I already was doubting myself.”
When the semester was over, however, that same student signed up for her next class. It was an early indication that her approachable leadership style works, with an open-door policy, weekly meetings … and kindness.
“If you’re not kind yourself, why should you expect others to be kind to you?” she said.
She invites students to question her. More often, they listen to her advice.
“PhD training is unique in many ways because it is a one-on-one experience and you have to find the unique intersection between that particular student and the way you’re thinking to what is moving an idea,” she said.
“In a sense, it’s like the student first starts in a kiddie pool. You are the swim instructor – you’re teaching the kid to swim, so you’re teaching them how to see various ideas that are not necessarily all integrated. It’s like a fuzzy picture of what the PhD could be.
“By the time they get to the third year, they need to be able to swim pretty strongly by themselves. That’s when you start seeing their individual success – their publications, patent applications, confidence, presentations, all of this coming into play.
“The third to the fifth year is generally the inflection point where they really start performing. It’s kind of incubating between year one and year three. You have to find what guides each student, and that’s why PhD work is exciting, because the impact is almost immediate depending on what job they get right after they graduate.”
No wonder she was so ecstatic that day.
“I feel like my body of work is what this award is for,” she said. “It’s not for one year. I really care about doing good work. The impact will be felt in time.”
Kolber, associate professor of neuroscience in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, sees great value in learning from experiments that don’t work. “For students to get that experience is super, super critical,” he said, citing a failure rate in his lab of about 90%.
“I think the frustrating part comes when the experiment doesn’t work for technical reasons,” he added. “Honestly, a lot of what we do is troubleshooting. But when the data fails to support our hypotheses, that’s beautiful – that’s what science is.”
Here’s how he goes about it:
“I tell my students that their job is to find evidence for the opposite thing that I’m saying. When I hypothesize that this drug will improve pain, I want them to try to find the opposite. Because if they try to find the opposite and they still find support for my hypothesis, that suggests that there wasn’t any sort of unconscious bias or other sort of confounding factors that influence the results.
“The research facilities are great here. It’s nice that we have newer facilities, newer buildings that are designed for modern biology and modern neuroscience.”
DR. BENEDICT KOLBER
“I want to know what is happening in nature, not what I think is happening in nature. I always tell people the reason that my job is exciting is, a lot of the time, even when technically the experiments work and we fail to find support for the hypothesis, there still is the potential that every single day I come in to work I can find something that no human has ever found before.
“Does it happen every day? Of course not. But the potential is to make a discovery – and not even a groundbreaking discovery, even small discoveries, little, subtle phenomena in nature and biology. Being able to see that for the first time is pretty powerful.”
This News Center story typifies the research in Kolber’s Bioengineering and Sciences Building lab, which focuses on trying to understand acute to chronic pain transition – fibromyalgia, muscular skeletal pain, bladder pain, etc. – and the kinesiophobia (fear of movement) it causes.
“It’s very difficult to treat these people,” he said. “There are very few therapies and almost no drugs. We’re trying to understand what causes that so that we can, on the flip side, develop some treatments for it.”
For example, he found that a combination of mindfulness, meditation and exercise worked well in treating lower back pain. That sort of breakthrough doesn’t usually happen at a university without a major commitment to research.
“I think it’s an area of a lot of growth on this campus,” he said. “Even in the last four years, I’ve seen the opportunities expand. There’s more money, there’s more support for these programs, especially programs in the summer. I think those are really, really important because the students aren’t taking classes, so they have more time to dedicate.
“The research facilities are great here. It’s nice that we have newer facilities, newer buildings that are designed for modern biology and modern neuroscience.”
But they aren’t specialized to the point where students from other disciplines can’t participate. Kolber has had students with a variety of majors, even as different as psychology, among the 20 people working in his lab.
“From a teaching and mentoring perspective, research provides opportunities for our students,” he said. “It provides an opportunity to have hands-on learning.”
The enthusiasm goes hand in hand.