SciMuse: Dr. David Kroll: scientist, musician, mensch

(this post is crossposted at the Science in the Triangle Blog)

Dr. David Kroll is a man who wears many hats: researcher, professor, science blogger, and musician. His life seems to tie together all these separate parts into one cohesive theme of giving back to the community and enriching the lives of others.
Kroll grew up on a neighborhood perched on a hill that afforded a direct view of the Roche tower in Nutley, New Jersey. Growing up looking at the Roche tower every day lead him to take an interest in pharmacology and the drug industry. He went to college as a first generation student and majored in Toxicology at Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science, following his dream of someday being able to help others by working in that same tower.
Throughout his career, Kroll kept in mind that knowledge can be used inclusively or exclusively. He wanted to use his knowledge of pharmacology to help regular people navigate the drugs that they were taking, but wasn’t very prepared for the discovery that science could be a profession so isolated from the public at large. He starting blogging as an outlet for his desire to educate the wider public on drugs, supplements, and pharmacology in general. Kroll recently celebrated his fifth year of blogging in December 2010, blogging for ScienceBlogs, the American Chemical Society’s CENtral Science, and for PLoS Blogs over the years.

The path of Kroll’s educational and musical career intersect at many points in his life. He started playing guitar at the age of fourteen as a way to escape being labeled as a “real dork in high school.” However, the release of The Police’s Outlandos D’Amour and Joe Jackson’s Look Sharp lead him to an appreciation of the bass, which he switched to a year after picking up the guitar. This step proved to be successful as he went on to play bass in his first band with his high school girlfriend, his high school friend, his guidance counselor, and his high school history teacher. Kroll cites his history teacher as being a huge influence on getting him interested in the history of social injustice and specifically the history of science. His first band played bars and clubs around town throughout Kroll’s high school years.

In college, he played mostly solo but would occasionally play with his old high school band while visiting home. Around the time he was finishing college, Tom Petty and the Heartbreaker’s “Southern Accents” was released and proved to be yet another pivotal album in his life. This Tom Petty album release was right around the time of his acceptance into a pharmacology doctorate program at the University of Florida in Gainesville, the hometown of the Heartbreakers. Tom Rowe, his advisor at UF, was supportive of a work/life balance, and this freedom allowed him to play in a U2 tribute band for two years in graduate school.

After finishing his Ph.D., he landed an offer for a postdoc position at Roche, the original setting of his dream of working in pharmacology. He was literally within days of accepting when he got offered a position at the University of Colorado in Denver. He ended up taking the position in Denver instead, where he worked on the transcriptional regulation of the CREB protein and a shortly afterward went on to land an Assistant Professor position in the School of Pharmacology at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.

The move to Denver proved to be fortuitous to his musical life as well. One day he was typing up an abstract in the main office of the Division of Endocrinology, Metabolism, and Diabetes at the Univ of Colorado Health Sciences Center when a endocrinology fellow walked in to answer a page for a gig he was playing later that evening. Kroll struck up a conversation, mentioning that he was a bass player, and got invited to jam with Dan Bessesen, and his bandmate, Jay Reusch, a cardiologist whose wife was also an endocrinology fellow. These jam sessions evolved into Dogs in the Yard, an adult alternative band that lasted for eleven years, from 1990 – 2001. They played gigs at the medical center, fundraisers, and even the endocrine department Christmas party. They released two CDs, one in 1997 entitled “Sunday Afternoon” and one in 2001, “Til the Summer Fades Away.” About eight years into the band, EMI called and offered them a move to LA to pursue the possibility of a record deal. But as all of the people in the band had work and family obligations, they decided to turn it down.


Eleven years is an ancient time in band years, but all good things must come to an end. Kroll left Dogs in the Yard after he met his now-wife at a cancer research conference in Colorado. She was a Duke oncology physician-scientist who lead him to doing a sabbatical at Duke that eventually lead to a job offer in the North Carolina Research Triangle at RTI International. Despite the loss of the band, he continued his musical career with other scientists, playing with Nick Oberlies, a chemistry postdoc, scientific collaborator at RTI, and DJ at Duke University station WXDU. He also played with Cole Guerra, a psychology graduate student at Duke who Kroll contacted after reading an article featuring him in the local Triangle Independent Weekly. Kroll joined his band on bass for shows at Cafe Driade and Local 506 in Chapel Hill. However, at RTI he missed the joy of teaching students and moved to take a professorship at North Carolina Central University in Durham.


Kroll has continued to keep in touch with music at NCCU, playing the annual Faculty Talent Show and working on solo projects. Lately, he’s been writing songs under his own name in preparation to record a solo album called “From Denver to Durham.” The namesake of his album comes from the fact that both cities have an interstate exit numbered 284 that leads to the international airport, a testament to the myriad levels of interconnectivity in both his scientific and musical career.

At the BlogTogether bash in Durham in October, he debuted a song called “Minister of the Ether” that pays tribute to Anton Zuiker in celebration of his 10th year of blogging and to all his work in the blogging community. Check out an exclusive video below of Kroll giving an acoustic performance of the song under the bull statue in Durham’s city center.


David Kroll - "Minister of the Ether" from Princess Ojiaku on Vimeo.

DOUBLE Brainbows (all the way)

The meaning of the word BRAINBOWS is dualistic and both sides of the coin are equally awesome.

Exhibit 1.

A BRAINBOW of neurons in the auditory cortex. These are the neurons that enable you listen to Exhibit 2.

Brainbows, the awesome imaging technique created back in 2007 by Jeff Lichtman's research group at Harvard, in which he was able to use old scientific tricks such as taking glowing fluorescent colors from jellyfish and coral, combining them in the neurons of mice, and using their color palette to make each individual neuron in the brain emit of different color of pretty glowing light. These images have won a few scientific photography prizes and seem to be a modern-day equivalent of the painstakingly hand-drawn pictures of neurons that Santiago Ramón y Cajal created during the dawn of the study of neuroscience.

 

Cajal's drawing of a Purkinje cell that lives in the cerebellum, the part of the brain that controls movement, enabling Exhibit 2 to play their instruments. 

Exhibit 2.

BRAINBOWS, the band's first show.

Brainbows, the new band that rose from the ashes of the short lived local Chapel Hill/Durham band Just Friends to become a phoenix of frantic energy as illuminating and colorful as Exhibit 1. They are playing an early show (6 pm!) next Friday November 19 at the awesome and also new All Day Records in Carrboro. Now you know what you're doing a week from today.

This post was short and sweet, but I'll be back with more posts next week! Hope the weekend is illuminating.

Friday Quickie

I love doing what I do here on Science with Moxie, but I've got to admit that I'm a little jealous that I wasn't the one interviewing bassist Chris Cain from We are Scientists for a real live science publication.

Check out the interview with The Scientist, and find out Chris' opinion on whether it's easier to get laid as a rock star or as a scientist. I can't really speak to what I think of that, but I can say that I share his opinion* on what instrument Charles Darwin would play.

*Admittedly, for completely biased reasons.

SciMuse: Jim Holmquist, of Peat Bogs and Ukuleles

My second SciMuse interview subject is Jim Holmquist, who is a paleoecologist by day and the fearless leader of The Long Holidays by night.


So tell me a little about the science you do by day.

I'm a second year graduate student at UCLA in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. I use peat cores from areas adjacent to the Hudson Bay in Canada to reconstruct climate and ecology from macro and micro fossils. I then compare those reconstructions to the rates of Carbon accumulation in the cores. Essentially we're looking for how they reacted to past drought and patterns in warming to understand how they may react to future climate change.

What is a peat core and does it contain fossils? How do you get them?

So a peat core is a continuous sample from the top to the bottom of the soil. It's shaped like a cylinder and gets older as it gets deeper. We have special tools that are like metal cylinders with a flap and a trap door that you can shove into the ground, twist and pull up an intact core.

Here's a picture of a tool used to collect peat cores. Jim drops these from helicopters into the soil of peatlands in the Canadian Hudson Bay!

The reason that we gather them is because peatlands store a lot of carbon in their soils in the form of poorly decayed plant material. This is carbon that is currently not in the atmosphere causing greenhouse warming. However if the climate gets dry and warmer in the future a lot of this soil can decay and put more C back into the atmosphere. Alternatively soil warming can possibly cause increased plant growth and peat formation causing increased C storage in the soil.

The cores contain a record of the rates of C storage and a fossil record of the plants that form the soil. So they do have fossils in them from the recent past... recent meaning as old as about 10,000 years ago.

There are macro-fossils, large pieces of mosses, leaves and wood and micro-fossils, such as microscopic animals called amoeba, and pollen grains. I pretty much go down the core, meaning back in time over the last few thousand years, and look for large changes in the macro-fossil record which could indicate a major change in vegetation.

I also use testate-amoeba's, a microscopic animal that is very sensitive to moisture, to calculate past surface moisture with complex mathematical functions. Overall these two records tell me when there was past climate change in the area. I look at how past climate change has affected the rates of past C storage to see if they were increased or reduced under different climate scenarios.

A picture of a testate-amoeba.

So how'd you get into this stuff?

Originally I was interested in marine biology because I liked snorkeling, scuba diving and surfing as a kid. I was really into nature docs and aquariums. In college I got involved in a multidisciplinary research project that involved wetland ecology, chemistry and environmental science. Me and my mentor tracked metal pollution in Los Angeles wetlands using plant tissues. After that I really like the idea of learning more about wetland ecology, especially paleoecology and Glen's work at UCLA was a great fit.

How long have you been playing music?

I've been playing music since 2000 where I started on guitar. My brother, me and two of our friends started a surf rock band called Caution Heavy Surf and we made two albums "Caution Heavy Surf's Greatest Hits: Vol. 1" and "Oh Yeah! Another Summer."

After I started college at Loyola Marymount I learned how to play ukulele and started a new band "The Long Holidays". We're a bit more eclectic in our influences span the gamete from country to folk to rock and a little bit of surf and uke.

Jim, ukulele in hand, captivating a dog.

How do you find balance between science and music?

The music kind of helps keep me sane through all of the grad school craziness. I'm always trying to learn new instruments so I'm always challenged. Plus, songwriting and performing can be very cathartic.

I think my science helps get me some really cool songwriting perspective. Many of my songs are nautical themed and inspired by my adventures scuba diving. "30ft beneath the waves", from our newest record "The Adventure Through Liquid Space", is actually a description of night diving. I write a lot of ecology into my songs, such as "Suburban Coyote" I use the setting of the regular burning california chaparral as a metaphor for change in life being part of a natural and cyclical progression. In Growing Gills I talk about sedimentary rocks and oil forming at the bottom of the ocean as a metaphor for a relationship becoming less real as it becomes more distant.

These are a couple of examples but these type of themes make there way into a good number of my songs.

I found this on your website: "According to Sean our fan base should be… “goofballs and smart-asses, who like nautical shit and old sci-fi movies” (I paraphrase)." Is this a conscious decision you made when forming the band? Or is it something that naturally extends out of your personality?

In terms of our fan base, the goofballs and smartasses are pretty much just our extended group of friends. I'm trying to reach out to like-minded people on the internet who we think would be fans of the music. Your article may actually be a pretty good outlet for this.

There is a fair bit of smart-assery at the shows, partially because the fans are mostly our friends who like to heckle me (I heckle back of course). We're also pretty loose on stage and I improvise new lyrics and jokes into the songs that we've been playing forever.

What's the lineup of the Long Holidays and how did you put together your self-produced record,"The Adventure Through Liquid Space"?

I put the record together with Kevin who's my main collaborator, but doesn't play live very much. He played drums and piano on most of the songs. Sean and I have been playing together ever since we were roommates in college together, but it took him a while to actually start playing with the band. He plays acoustic guitar on the record and presently in the band. The
record also has contributions from my friend Rob Farley (who has great solo work) and members from my old band Caution Heavy Surf.

For the record premiere I put together a completely fresh line-up to give the songs a completely new sound. Gabriel de'Santana plays drums. He's a real pro, and he always wears suits... makes us look bad. Andy Worshill plays bass and trombone and he always encourages me to be crazier and stranger on stage... bad influence. They were both friends of friends who I jammed with a couple of times and really meshed with.

The whole fluid nature of the band and the music works really well with our theme and image as "Adventure Rockers". We always want to be adventurous, try new things and never be totally sure what's going to happen when we get on stage. Adventure as a theme permeates, not only the lyrics and music, but also the process and presentation.

Thanks so much to Jim for doing this interview. You can check his band out on myspace.

The Inaugural SciMuse Interview!

I'm pleased to present the subject of the first Scientist-Musician series of interviews, Toaster Sunshine, who is a self-described immunologist, hacker, and musician. This guy is doing so many amazing things that it's hard to not be inspired by his creativity in multiple areas. I'm honored to have him as the first interviewee.


First of all, where did you go to school and sort of research are you doing?

I did my undergrad at the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor in Cell and Molecular Biology with an unpragmatic minor in German. I am still working on getting into grad school and am still awaiting word on many of my applications out in this current cycle. I now do research in adaptive immunology at the University of Michigan Medical School. Specifically, I am studying the dynamics of T- and B-cell proliferation in non-lymphatic organs in response to infection. This means I grind up a lot of organs and run them through a flow cytometer.

What got you interested in both science and music?

I was interested in music before I realized I was interested in science as more of a career than as school classes. In fact, at one point in high school while I was in both the school's jazz band (upright bass) and a death metal band (bass guitar) I viewed college as a fallback career if the music I did after getting my degree didn't work out. Heh.

I also played chamber music (and some industrial jazz) through college on cello, but have had to lay the cello aside due to how technically demanding it is to focus on science and making stuff. I also make computer music with Reason 4 and have amassed several hours of finished music. Some of it smashed classical instrumentation together with hip-hop/industrial beats while other bits are more like dubstep.

Do you have any additional projects outside the lab?

When I'm not in the lab, I'm usually working at the hackerspace I am helping to found in Ann Arbor, Michigan. We're called All Hands Active and we maintain a common pool of tools and parts where anyone can build anything they want to. I hope it also becomes a start-up incubator.



In this space, I have built a 2-string slide electric guitar out of a glass bottle, wooden plank, copper wire, and drywall screws and am currently trying to build some flex sensors to be the variable resistors in an Atari Punk Circuit. This latter is a prototype for the suit of flex sensors I intend to build to feed through MIDI to make music based upon my movement.

Lots of the other hackers at All Hands Active make musical stuff as well. One of them recently made a tonal drum out of a propane tank (link to a video of it here!), others are building carbon fiber instruments, and there's one guy who likes to tape piezos to old speakers and route it through an amp, then modulate the resulting feedback by tearing holes in the speaker cone with chopsticks.

Where do you see your multiple interests taking you career-wise? Is science still more of a "fall-back" career for you? Or do you plan to create a career out of a combination of all your interests?

You've asked a good question that I'm wrestling with right now. The biological engineering programs I applied to for this coming fall don't seem to have worked out, so I'm currently trying to suss out the flaws in my plans and records. I really like immunology, it's complex and chaotic and runs all over the place like pancake batter through a sieve. But at the same time, I really like mathematics and computers and building robots and things that go "blwtaga;gb!". I want to merge all of these things together into 1 career of awesomeness, but as of yet I haven't found a viable way forward that encompasses all of these things. Computational immunology seems like a possibility, but then again at the same time I'm currently trying to figure out if I'd rather go for founding a start-up company or whether to continue polishing myself on paper to get into grad school and then worry about possible entrepreneurship afterwards.

Thanks again to Toaster Sunshine for volunteering for the first interview of the Sci-Muse interview series. For more of his creative undertakings, you can check out his blog, Mad Scientist Jr. here. All Hands Active was recently featured on the Make Zine Blog, so check that out too!

If you'd like to participate in this interview series too, please don't hesitate to drop me a line!

Musicians/Scientists Interview Series

I have always been of the opinion that science and art are made of mutual stuff. They are both highly creative, innovative, exciting fields that are born of both the solitude and collaboration of like minds. They are both about discovery and looking at the world through new eyes and a different view. They both have the ability to change minds and culture.

As someone who is a both a budding young scientist and musician, I'm pretty interested in the perspective of everyone else who manages to combine the two forces of logic and creativity. So I'm going to be starting a series of interviews here on Science with Moxie with people who are scientists and musicians. I'm fortunate to know a few people who fit both those descriptions already, but if you want to be added to my list, feel free to drop me a line!

Musical Emotions: Chills Edition

CHILLS.

I'm one of the people who gets them when I listen to music I find really, really enjoyable. In fact, there are a whole range of emotions I can go through while listening to something I really like. Last Saturday night, I definitely was on the peak end of experiencing intense music-related emotions while watching my bandmate and favorite drummer, Jessica Caesar play during this song at The Dirty Little Heaters' CD release show. Take a look:



So what is this whole "chills" thing about anyway? What makes listening to music so pleasurable and fun? One theory that a group of researchers decided to test was that music is so much fun for us to listen to because the pleasure we feel while listening correlates to a sort of physical emotional response.




The Rewarding Aspects of Music Listening Are Related to Degree of Emotional Arousal


In order to test this, they got twenty-six suckers experimental subjects to agree to be hooked up to this machine that takes measurements of all kinds of bodily responses that basically told the researchers how psyched the people were to be listening to different types of music. Here's what that machine looked like:



These robotic-looking hand and torso machines measured the listeners' heart rate, respiration rate, body temperature, galvanic skin response (GSR), and blood volume pulse (BVP) amplitude. The music the subjects listened to was music they had picked out themselves that they really enjoyed, so much that it gave them the chills. As a control, the researchers selected music that the subjects rated beforehand as neutral or "boring" in order to compare the subjects' physical response readings from that dull music to the chills-inducing music. The experiment took place as the subjects sat in a sound-proof room, listened to the music, the machines took their measurements, and the subjects pressed buttons on their robot-hands to indicate what they were feeling during each moment that the music played. The ratings ranged from "meh" to "pleasurable" to "whoa, I got chills." But, of course, the ratings were on a more scientific and quantitative rating scale of 1-3 (1 ="neutral," 2="low pleasure," 3 = "high pleasure," and a fourth button = "chills" because, as you can see above, they only had a thumb to work with).

The results were pretty interesting. In all the physical markers stated above (i.e. heart rate, respiration) they saw significant differences in readings between the music the subjects found boring and the music they found pleasurable. The pleasurable music got a higher physiological response out of the subjects, while the boring music didn't seem to have much of an effect on the markers of emotional arousal. This makes sense because my heart isn't exactly pounding when I hear some boring elevator music in a department store.

They also found that the chills were reported at the same moments in the music that the subjects reported ratings of highest pleasure. In fact, 80% of the chills occurred at the highest moment of pleasure reported. Again, this makes a lot of sense to me because I don't exactly get chills when I'm feeling that the music I'm listening to is good, but not great. I get chills when I can't tear my attention away and a musical experience feels all encompassing and highly pleasurable, and it seems that was what the subjects in the study were feeling too.

The most interesting thing they found was that the chills the subjects reported matched right up with the peak readings from the physical markers of emotional arousal. Check it out on the graph below:



The different boxes show the different physical indicators of emotional arousal of which the machines took measurements. As you can see, they all peaked at the moment when the subjects reported experiencing chills. The two exceptions here are skin surface temperature and BVP amplitude, but these actually got LOWER instead of higher like the other factors.

So basically, the researchers came away from this study with a strong correlation between subjective emotional response and objective physical response to music. When we get chills or feel intense pleasure when listening to music we enjoy, there is an actual range of bodily responses that go along with that! This seems like common sense, but this is important scientifically because having an actual, quantitative measure of the changes our bodies go through when experiencing good music opens doors to scientists thinking about other questions like, "why is music so unique that it causes actual emotional and physical arousal?"

Usually emotional responses have a definite function, such as joy from eating good food serves to keep us alive, or bonding with friends keeps us happy and connected to our fellow humans. Feeling these emotions helps us by making sure we keep doing the things that are good for our survival and well-being. But music is one of the only things that makes us happy without having a clear beneficial function to our survival as human beings. I think that makes it pretty special and interesting, and that makes me content to consume and play it.

P.S. Another fun thing to do with the paper is to check out what music the initial pool of subjects picked for the study as their favorites (this link opens a doc file with the full list). As with any wide pool of people, the results range widely!

Salimpoor VN, Benovoy M, Longo G, Cooperstock JR, & Zatorre RJ (2009). The rewarding aspects of music listening are related to degree of emotional arousal. PloS one, 4 (10) PMID: 19834599

Welcome to Moxie!

Hi Readers (perhaps all 6 of you, but this is the internet, and one may never know for sure),

Welcome to this first entry in this fledgling blog about science, culture, and related topics of interest. My goal for this blog is to have fun talking about science in a way that the everyman can understand, to touch on the ways that science intersects with culture and our everyday lives, and to finally have a little fun throwing around my humble little opinions about the crazy issues that come out of all those intersections. I want to keep this blog interesting and filled with spunk and, yes, MOXIE, so that it feels less like a boring classroom lecture in textual form and more like an adventure with your eccentric babbling nerdy but lovable aunt that was such a blast that you learned something on accident. Since my favorite topics are also politics and music, some stuff related to those topics might pop up in here too. But this ride is just starting up, so we'll see where it takes us.