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iTunes | Google Play | Spotify | Stitcher | Length: 34 minutes | Published: April 22, 2020
Resonance is a student-run podcast aimed at showcasing the science at Baylor through the eyes of young professionals. Each episode is written and recorded by students who have a passion for research and the medical community. Guests on the show include both clinical and basic science research faculty who are experts in their fields.
Dr. Melanie Samuel discusses her research on neuron mapping and her experience advocating for scientific funding from the government.
Seeing the Light | Transcript
Roundtable Discussion
Erik: And we’re here.
Brandon: We are here.
Jenny: We’re here.
Erik: This is the Baylor College of Medicine Resonance Podcast. I am one of your Hosts, Erick Anderson.
Brandon: And I am another host, Brandon Garcia.
Jenny: And I am, you guessed it, another host, Jennifer Deger
Brandon: Whoa
Erik: Wow. And we are as I said, the Baylor College of Medicine Resonance Podcast. Today we are going to be Talking with Dr. Melanie Samuel about her work on Neurotal mapping using the retina as a model system as well as some of her work advocating for scientific research.
Jenny: Yeah, so I gathered some information about her research in her lab and one of the things that came to my mind was the saying or the question can you teach an old dog new tricks?
Brandon: People go to college all the time in the 40’s and 50’s and change career paths and things like that so there has to be some way to learn and generate new skill sets.
Jenny: Yeah otherwise we would stop learning when we were, ya know, 20 and that would be really bad for medical school. So, I think the answer is yes, if those dogs are neurons and Dr. Samuel’s lab looks at that how neurons choose new synaptic partners and how they wire up with each other. Ya know, why would they choose one neuron verses another neuron is kind of a big mystery right now. So, as Erik said she is using a mouse retina as the model to look at that because the retina if you, ya know, look at one of those diagrams that has so many layers in it it’s pretty uh…
Brandon: It’s like an ogre
Jenny: Yeah like an ogre with the onion yeah.
Erik: Or a parfait.
Jenny: She of course when she looks at synaptic mapping, she’s also looking at aging and why do we kinda ya know you can still learn into old age but obviously it slows down a lot. So, it’s like why does this happen why do neurons kind of slow down a little bit the older that we get? And I also read an interesting paper by Samuel Etal that kind explains or proposes a hypothesis for why our visual acuity might decline as we age aside from, you know, glaucoma and macular degeneration and all those things and cataracts plenty of things can go wrong but she found that retinal neurons exhibited age related quantitative alterations but they’re qualitative features were largely preserved which is interesting so quantitative alterations include like the areas of dendritic and axonal arbors so stuff that you can actually count and assign a number to. And the qualitative features which were largely preserved were like the molecular identity and the laminar specificity of the neurons. So, it’s pretty interesting when you think about how we age is not as simple as we might think. At least in the retina.
Erik: Yeah. Well and she also does some interesting work on, as already said, of getting more scientific funding kind of promoting that.
Brandon: Oh yeah, her advocacy work is very interesting just talking with her and talking with other scientists there is definitely a movement of idea of that in order for science to become better funded and more of a forefront in society, scientists have to figure out a way to talk about it and Dr. Samuel has definitely taken that to heart she works with The Society of Neuroscience to do these things called Capitol Hill Days. She’ll talk about this in the episode to scope and scale but basically they try to do everything they can to help our representatives at Capitol Hill and Washington DC really get to know what scientific funding is and they’ve had some success some pretty good success that she talks about that I’m really, really impressed with and I think it’s a good idea and something that we need to understand as listeners and people who are wanting to get into the sciences that talking to other people about science and helping them find a way to understand it is key to helping us move science forward.
Erik: Yeah and she also had a pretty I think very important point that she made that for anybody going into research is that the writing aspect is incredibly important for that people, myself included, don’t realize how much writing is a factor for becoming like a PI or ya know doing any sort of scientific research and I think that’s another important point that she makes.
Brandon: Oh yeah, I mean we can talk about it all day about how like television shows show scientists being all test tubes and lab coats but really, it’s a lot a lot a lot of writing.
Jenny: You have to constantly persuade people. You have to persuade them to ya know fund your research. You have to persuade them to publish your paper and yeah to do that you need some pretty good rhetorical skills.
Erik: Well and so that’s a good lead into our introduction and our interview with Dr. Samuel. So, Dr. Samuel received a Bachelor’s of Science and Art from the University of Idaho majoring in both Biochemistry and Microbiology as well as English so on the back of that writing comment she’s got a strong background in English. And so, she went on to do her PhD at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis Missouri and she did Postdoctoral training at Harvard and so she is now here at Baylor College of Medicine and we’re really excited to talk with her. Here is our interview with Dr. Samuel.
Interview
Brandon: Dr. Samuel thank you so much for being with us today and thank you for being with us today and being on our podcast. Before we get started with some of the questions, do you mind telling us a little bit about yourself and how your research interests have evolved over time.
Dr. Samuel: Sure. So, first thanks very much for having me. I think this is really great and I’m really thrilled to be here. Let’s see so I started in research as an undergraduate as many scientists I grew up in Idaho, actually in the foothills around Boise. So, I went to the University of Idaho where I started research as a major in microbiology and English actually and worked in a virology lab. I really became fascinated by how a virus that has as little as 5 proteins can make people sick. And so I studied that question for a number of years including how viruses evolved to cause disease first choosing a bacteria phage and then moving to human centric viruses. So, I carried that interest forward into graduate school. I went to the University of Washing in St. Louis and I worked with a person named Mike Diamond who was really a forefront of studying how West Nile virus, you may remember that it was a virus that emerged in the US in the early 2000’s, and so that’s perfect timing for us because we were really interesting in understanding how the virus can spread, how it can cause disease and one of the unique features of West Nile virus and other members of that family is that it can infect the nervous system. So, I really got fascinated with the question of how viruses can have different tropism, the ability to effect different neurons in the brain, and that was one of the key things that I studied as a graduate student and the different path ways that are involved with fighting off viruses and neurons. So then as I graduated I had the choice to kind of stay in virology and stay in immunology or switch to neuroscience and for a number of reasons that I’m happy to talk about I decided to switch to neuroscience and really go and try to understand the nervous system more fundamentally and get some training in that so for my post doc I worked with Josh Hanes at Harvard to study different aspects of neuron survival and the context of disease and aging with the idea that at this phase of my career I could kind of bring back those fundamental interests in immunology and virology and my now background in neuroscience.
Jenny: Cool. So why did you switch to neuroscience?
Dr. Samuel: Yeah, so I think there were like three driving forces. One was that I felt with all of my training up to that point had been probably about ten years that I had been working in virology and I had a pretty good understanding of the way those types of experiments were done but I didn’t really understand the nervous system or really how to study it very well. So, one was just to kind of increase my skill set and kind of develop a unique way of perhaps thinking about the nervous system infection and disease and the other is that I feel that nervous system is one of the last remaining kind of biologic frontiers. Right? I think that if we understand our nervous system, we will understand ourselves and what makes us human. So, it was partly kind of looking towards the future and what are the big unsolved problems that face us.
Brandon: When you made that jump, were you nervous like how did you feel about that?
Dr. Samuel: Yeah, it’s always a little scary when you switch fields and I think yeah that’s true for everybody. On the other hand there is a lot of power I think in trying to get a diverse training set and you do have to accept a lot of responsibility for obviously for coming up to speed and in a new field but it’s really fun and it exposes you to a whole other realm of clients and people and ideas that I hadn’t been exposed to before.
Erik: Did you get any pushback?
Dr. Samuel: Yes and no. I mean one of that, just as you guys are training in medical school, one of the things about sort of scientific training is that you learn how to think like a scientist and it doesn’t often matter so much exactly what problem you’re focused on but rather kind of developing the skills to understand how to think about it, identify important problems and then go after them. So, if you have sort of a training in that, although you need some background information, you can apply those skills to almost any field. And actually, a lot of people switch areas throughout their careers. It’s not that uncommon.
Brandon: Oh okay. I didn’t realize that. I kinda thought you get started in one field and you kinda stay there.
Jenny: You just have to pick one when you’re like 20.
Dr. Samuel: Yeah. You can. Yeah but ya know often things change. Right? The science may change. You may think you’re a neuroscience and then have a really cool discovery in liver that you just can’t ignore, and you need to go then after it. So, you have to be adaptable and flexible and the funding landscape changes and so sometimes you have to be responsive to that.
Jenny: Dose your virology background help at all in neuroscience?
Dr. Samuel: Yeah, I think so. Ya know, there is practical ways so often we use viruses as tools to visualize neurons, to see their structure by enabling them to express things like green florescent protein and then you can light up the neuron and really see it and better understand it. But also, kind of in thinking about how different neurons may become more resilient or susceptible to disease that idea was planted in my mind through my work in virology.
Jenny: Cool.
Brandon: Wow, that’s awesome. So you, correct me if I’m wrong, you do research looking at synaptic wiring and you use the retina as a model, correct?
Dr. Samuel: Mhmm, that’s right. Yep.
Brandon: What are the advantages and disadvantages of using that optical system for synaptic wiring in the brain?
Dr. Samuel: Yeah, so one of the really interesting things about neuroscience is that we are still in our infancy in understanding how the brain works and what the fundamental units are that allow it to work and those are neurons and their synapses. So, in the retina we have fifty plus years of research trying to understand what these neuron-types are and how they’re connected together so we have a really solid base of information that we can work from. The brain is still in its’ early days of trying to understand that, so we don’t really know very much about the individual neuron types that reside there and even less about the ways in which they wire up. So that makes it really hard to study synaptic wiring questions if you don’t understand sort of the fundamental organization because you can’t tell if it’s different or the same and kind of different manipulations or disease states. And the retina we have this understanding, so it becomes a lot easier to tell if things are going wrong or going right. The other advantage of it is that it’s laminated or layered, kind of like a ham sandwich. So, there is neuron, synapsis, neuron, synapsis and so because you have that ordering if instead of looking like a ham sandwich it starts to look like a bagel or some other food group you know something is wrong with it. So, there is kind of that basic organization that allows you to readily tell if things are okay and developed correctly or if things are not okay. So that is helpful too.
Jenny: How do you practically study the retina? It’s so thin and delicate I feel like it would be really challenging.
Dr. Samuel: Yeah, so you develop fine motor skills.
Jenny: Yeah.
Dr. Samuel: That’s key and ya know really as a neural structure having it be accessible through the eye is really helpful because the brain is protected by the skull. So, when you’re doing experiments it can be quite hard to access and manipulate and the retina, because it’s outside the skull, but still part of the CNS you can directly manipulate cells much more easily so that’s quite helpful. And having it be thin is actually an advantage because you can look all the way through it and see all the neurons and you’re not as affected by kind of things that can diffuse the signal or make it hard to visualize deep into the brain, for example.
Jenny: Cool. It still sounds challenging.
Dr. Samuel: Come to the lab. You can help us dissect some retina.
Jenny: See it in real life. So, our next question is how does synaptic wiring change in the brain over time?
Dr. Samuel: Yeah, that’s a great question. So, first of all, I think it’s important to say this is an area of active investigation, so we don’t have all the answers. In fact, we have very few of the answers. What we do know is that in many types of neural diseases including normal aging, disease free aging, synapses are among the first structures to kind of become degraded as we get older and that’s because we are very precisely ordered structures and very small and often very far from the cell body of the neuron so it takes a lot of effort for the neuron to maintain them and so those are some of the reasons that we think they are susceptible. And so that’s one of the reasons that we’ve focused our work on synapses because changes at the structures seem to be common among a lot of different types of neurologic disease and neurologic insults.
Jenny: Okay. Does your lab do specifically Alzheimer’s research or other neurodegenerative diseases?
Dr. Samuel: Yeah, so we do. We do both basic development, how do these cells know the partners to wire up with and make those decisions correctly during development and then how do those connections go awry and we have a various number of models that we use to study that. One is Alzheimer’s and we’ve also looked at other types of diseases including epilepsy, ETC. So, we really think about the retina as a window into the brain and kind of an approachable part of the brain.
Jenny: So, as we get older do those connections kind of become more faulty or it gets harder to make those connections?
Dr. Samuel: Yeah, so it’s quite interesting in some work I did starting as a Postdoc what we found was that there are particular neurons and their synapses that were more susceptible to aging. So, some neurons seem to be okay and others undergo dramatic remodeling and kind of make synapses where they shouldn’t be and lose other synapses. So, we’re very curious as to what protects some neurons and what makes other neurons susceptible. So that’s an area of active investigation in the lab.
Jenny: Cool. Is there any regional difference? Like does our hippocampus degenerate faster or anything like that?
Dr. Samuel: Yes. So, in the brain there are certain areas that are more suspectable to disease including things like the hippocampus and one of the theories is that because that area involved in learning and memory is that it needs to be continually synaptically plastic. That means that it has to have the ability to change even in adulthood. So, one of the theories is that that plasticity is what makes some of those areas more vulnerable. In the retina we see that photo receptors, rods particularly, their night vision cells are acutely susceptible to age related changes. They don’t die but instead they undergo the synaptic remodeling events at least in our animal models.
Brandon: So, I’m sorry you just said that like different parts of the brain are different amounts of plastic. Can you elaborate a little bit more just on that aspect? I think that’s kind of fascinating. That’s not something I’ve heard a lot about.
Dr. Samuel: Yeah, so I should say that this is not my area of expertise but I’m happy to chat a bit about it. So, the leading theory about memory and memory formation is that it involves structural changes to our neurons. So, when you make a memory you have to have something that physically changes in your brain to have that memory stay there and so that you can recall it. And it’s thought that a lot of this encoding happens at the level of synapsis these connections between neurons and that plasticity refers to the synapsis sort of change and remodel. So there is this idea that when we are young we have this period time called the critical period where we are really good at learning and we can learn languages and kind of cram a bunch of information to our brains but as we get older that critical period ends and we become less able to kind of learn languages as well and things like that. But we still have the ability in some part of our brain to kind of encode memories and learn in that way. Obviously because you guys are a medical school you are adults, but you still have to learn lots of information. So there are certain parts of the brain that participate in that and one of them is the hippocampus.
Brandon: Oh wow. Thank you.
Erik: So, it sounds like barring disease though our brains will keep remodeling throughout our life? Is that true?
Dr. Samuel: So, ya know again this is an area of active investigation so we are still trying to figure out what parts of our brain are really plastic. There are certainly evidence for some level of new neurons born in adults, in particular regions in the brain in our animal models, and there is of course evidence of the ability to form memories but whether or not particular subsets of neurons in different parts in the brain can remain synaptic and plastic, I think we don’t know. In the system that we study, I’ve been surprised that neurons that we thought kind of that had made their final synaptic wiring choice if you manipulate them in particular ways, they can actually become plastic again. So, I’m hopeful that as we understand factors that control neuron stability verses neuron flexibility that we may be able to manipulate them in precise ways to repair the nervous system when we need to.
Erik: So, I wonder then, because you hear a lot if you read a magazine there is a lot of buzz articles about keep your brain healthy and what not.
Brandon: Yeah, the luminosity or other brain apps and stuff like that.
Jenny: Cross word puzzles.
Erik: I mean it’s such an array that we should probably pick one, but I don’t know if there is actually any mechanisms that are known to actually “keep your brain healthy” or is it all a marketing gamma?
Dr. Samuel: Right, so there are very few good controlled studies about the effectiveness of these things. However, it’s never a bad idea to continues to be engaged and mentally active as throughout our life. I think that’s pretty clear that people that continue to work or be mentally actively engaged even as they grow older tend to have a higher cognitive function for longer periods of time. But the mechanisms and whether these apps help, I don’t think we really know.
Erik: Yeah. I understand.
Jenny: So do you think people can change I know it’s more of a philosophical question, given your work with how synaptic wiring changes and if that makes up, ya know, someone’s soul we just wanted to know what you think about that question.
Dr. Samuel: Yeah, so this is very philosophical. Let’s see. I think people change in the sense of perhaps an onion that maybe they reveal more layers of their personality that were maybe there a little bit from the beginning. And certainly, people can change in the sense of maybe variations on a theme like a musical composition will change a little bit and you’ll have a few new notes here and there, but the same kind of tune probably will still be present. I’ve observed that too in mentoring lots of students that sort of. The student hat walks in the door is the person that is there, and they will learn, and they will grow but that fundamental personality traits are kind of they’re solid.
Jenny: They’re set in place.
Dr. Samuel: Yeah, exactly.
Jenny: Yeah, from an early age.
Brandon: So maybe not necessarily you can teach an old dog new tricks, but you can help him with the ones he’s already learned.
Dr. Samuel: Yeah or strengthen the ones that are there but maybe haven’t been brought to the forefront. I think we all have innate capabilities that maybe we are untapped just by virtue of our the way what we’ve been exposed to and what we’ve chosen to do with our lives.
Brandon: That’s awesome. So, we want to switch gears a little bit and talk a little bit about your work and advocacy and outreach in terms of like scientific funding and things like that. First of all, what made you want to take an active role in science, policy and scientific funding?
Dr. Samuel: Yeah, this is a really important question so I’m glad you asked it. I feel that as scientists it’s our job to make sure that the general public knows what it is that we do every day and why it’s so important. If you think about back to the 1600’s and times before there were things like antibiotics what world we lived in and how different it is from all of the medical tools and techniques we have at our disposal all of that was made possible through science and through discovery and I think sometimes we take a lot of that for granted we forget, we forget how lucky we are and how far we have come and it’s scientists and doctors that have brought us there. So, it’s really important that we communicate that, and I think often as scientists we don’t do a good job. We kind of get excited about the details of our work and we forget that those aren’t immediately obvious to the general public and so I really have kind of embraced that idea and taken it to heart and I do whatever I can with things like this and other things to help spread, spread the word about what science and medicine are capable of. In terms of science funding of course nothing can happen without money and this is particularly true with research because it requires and ton of infostructure, a ton of equipment, expensive equipment to even be able to attempt these studies and all of that is funded through the government primarily, although there are some small foundations that help as well, and so it’s our tax dollars at work in funding these studies through a competitive grant process that we go through. We submit, we write grants. Those are our ideas about science, hypothesis and experiments and test them. Those get sent to review panels and the federal government that are composed of peers, other scientists, they get scored and then the top 5%, usually or maybe 10%, get money and the other 90% don’t. So, it’s extremely competitive. Then that money comes to the lab and they use it to accomplish the aims of the grant. If there is no money for science, then grants don’t get funded and the work simply just doesn’t get done. So as a percentage of the budget, the money that goes to what’s called The National Institutes of Health and The National Science Foundation is a very small part of the pie but it’s often one that congress may go to to kind of carve things out of and so it’s really important that scientists are there on Capitol Hill to say, ‘Oh no wait, remember this money is really important otherwise we won’t be able to make these discoveries that have helped increase our lifespan in the last century. So, I routinely go to Capitol Hill to advocate to science funding with our congress people and our senators and generally people are really receptive I mean this is something we can all get behind. This nonpartisan issue. I think we all have family members that have been affected by various diseases and we’ve seen the kind of impact those can have and we’ve also seen the impact of effective medicine and effective understanding of the way these pathways work. So thankfully in the last few years science funding has been maintained and has gone up a bit and these are highly coordinated effects. So, we all go in asking for the same budgetary increase and we have a plan about how what money is needed to continue to fund the research.
Brandon: I do what to know, we’ve talked a lot about this. What do you think we can as students either graduate students, medical students, ya know of the like, anyone who is curious about getting into this field, what can we do to improve awareness and understanding of science?
Dr. Samuel: Yeah, that’s a great question. So, I wanted to say a couple of things. One, for those listeners who are interested in thinking about science as a career and are concerned about this issue of science funding. First of all, I’d be happy to chat with anybody one on one about this. The second thing is what really makes a difference is your ability to write. So for students about there who are thinking about going into science and really wanted to do research, you’re going to need to be able to write well so I would encourage you to hone those skills now, practice early and often, take writing courses, hug your English teachers. I think that’s all really important.
Brandon: Says the English major, right?
Dr. Samuel: I think it’s true. I thank them every day, right?
Brandon: Yeah.
Dr. Samuel: I mean they really made a big impact on my career as a scientist. Okay, to get to your other question about what students can do to raise awareness. There are a couple really, really practical things. One is to get involved in science policy, advocacy and outreach. At Baylor we have a student-lead science policy group that’s really strong and they have initiatives, they invite congress people and senators and people to come to Baylor and tour, they have advocacy efforts to contact senators with particular messages and all those things are really effective. If your senator or congress person hears from you that you care about science that makes a difference and that’s something we all can do as constituents. Write emails, show up in people’s offices, ya know just give them the message that science is important, and we need their support of it. So, we all as citizens have the ability to do that. In terms of particular things, in addition to that, different societies have policy outreach and policy groups so I work a lot with The Society for Neuroscience, I’m the local advocacy leader for that society here in the Houston area and that’s composed of I think at our annual meeting we have over 25,000 neurosciences so it’s a large group of people with a big voice that coordinates Capitol Hill Days so we actually go to Washington DC twice a year at a particular time and they arrange meetings and we go shake hands with the congress people, senators, and talk about what we want to ask them to fund specifically and give our personal stories. So, you can do anything form sending an email to actually going to Washington DC to kind of personally advocate for science and all those things are really powerful but also supper fun. I think it’s important to say that it’s not just a thing to do because we feel like we should but it’s actually really cool and you get to go and see how government works and so that’s really neat.
Brandon: Oh yeah, I would love to go and shake hands with a congressman or a senator or two.
Jenny: I was curious what does that actually look like? Do you go into the capitol and meet with them?
Dr. Samuel: Yep.
Jenny: Or do they set up conference rooms?
Dr. Samuel: Yes. So, the study for neuroscience has a dedicated staff that are involved in science policy and they prearrange all of these meetings.
Jenny: Oh wow.
Dr. Samuel: It’s over 200 meetings with different congress people and senators from representatives all over the voluntary and then…
Jenny: Scheduling nightmare.
Dr. Samuel: Scientists fly in from all the different states and we have delegations from different parts of the country, so I was in the Texas Delegations and we went to the Texas congress people and senators that were available and met with them and then sometimes I’d be in Ohio but that’s okay, ya know, we just kind of bounce around and fill our day with these meetings. So, it’s a good way to kind of put a face and a story behind science.
Jenny: Right. Yeah. Are they usually pretty receptive? The congress men and women that you’ve met?
Dr. Samuel: Generally, yes. Generally. Again, it’s one of those things that, ya know, we all have families and we all have people that we love, and we all want them to be healthy and so it’s something that I think almost everybody and be behind.
Jenny: Have you seen any changes as a result of your work in the capitol?
Dr. Samuel: Yes. So, we’ve had really good success in the past couple of years of getting the budget initiatives of I think a 2 billion dollar increase in the NAH budget is what we targeted last year.
Jenny: Wow.
Dr. Samuel: And that was passed and we are advocating for the same thing this year and so we had a period not that long ago where science funding fell flat and because of inflation basically it was on a downward track and now we are almost back up to where we were and starting to grow so that’s super exciting.
Brandon: That’s awesome. Is there anything that you would change about the process of getting funding or how scientists get money or how it’s allocated in the government?
Dr. Samuel: Yeah, I mean I think we all would have things we wish were a bit different. On the other hand, I think overall the process works really well. It’s very fair overall. Your coleges are quite good at evaluating work. One thing I think is really fun to think about are some new initiatives that aim to fund maybe the scientist rather than the project. So the idea that if you can identify people that are creative and motivated and skilled that maybe it doesn’t matter so much if they’re going to do a particular aim on Alzheimer’s or instead going to tweak that aim and focus on epilepsy and kind of let them have some control over to be able to follow the signs what particular things they apply the money to. So, there are a few initiatives like this. I think they are very powerful because you get to fund more innovative discovery driven work and is sometimes funded by some more traditional grant mechanisms so I think seeing more things like that would be more fun and helpful.
Brandon: You’ve given us a lot of great advice today. Is there anything else that you would like our listeners to know any passing words of advice you’d like to give us to make sure that as we move forward in our careers as physicians and scientists of things we should be aware of or thoughts we should have?
Dr. Samuel: Yeah, I think one thing that’s really important is to identify what drives you and gives you energy and that you’re passionate about. Because often, we get into doing things because maybe our parents thought it was a good idea or because we thought it was the next hot thing to do, we didn’t ya know, higher education seems great. That’s good but I think our motivation for doing these things really needs to be internal and we need to identify within our self what is it about that career or that job that motives you to show up every day. Because that’s what’s going to make the job fun and that’s what’s going to get you through challenges that we all encounter and so I really encourage my trainees to think about that question early in their training and identify that for themselves and write it down and hold onto it and then when you have that day where you’re just like I’m not sure I can do this anymore, pull it out, remind yourself why you’re here and then you’ll be able to kind of move forward with kind of a sense of internal motivation and I think really a sense of happiness. And you know what if it stops being fun then think about other things you might be able to do. I think we only have one life, so we need to be doing things that we love. We have often the gift in this country of making that choice and so we should pursue it.
Brandon: Well think you so much. Again, we really greatly appreciate you coming out and being on the podcast.
Dr. Samuel: Yeah, thank you. This has been really fun.
Jenny: Yeah, thank you.
Erik: Thanks.
Dr. Samuel: Thanks.
Outro
Erik: Alright. That is it for now. We would like to thank everyone out there who took the time to listen to this episode of the podcast. Special thanks to Jennifer and Brandon for writing the episode. Thank you to our faculty advisor Dr. Poythress for helping us put everything together. Thank you to the Baylor Communications Department for help with the production and website and thank you again to Dr. Samuel for taking the time to be interviewed by us. We hope everyone enjoyed it and we hope you tune in again soon. Goodbye for now.
