Chris Yip 0:01 Welcome to Tell Me More: Coffee with Chris Yip, the official podcast of the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering at the University of Toronto. Each month, I sit down with someone from our vibrant global community to talk about what places them at the heart of designing bold solutions for a better world. You'll meet students, professors and alumni who are making a difference across a range of fields, including some where you may not expect to find them. My guest today is Professor Jenna Usprech, who completed her PhD in our Institute of Biomedical Engineering in 2018, where she specialized in tissue engineering. And today, she's an assistant professor of teaching in the School of Biomedical Engineering at the University of British Columbia. And she's particularly passionate about student wellness, science communication, and classroom strategies that promote critical thought. Professor Usprech, or Jenna, I'll say actually, welcome to the podcast. Jenna Usprech 0:59 Thank you. Nice to be here, Chris. Thanks for inviting me. Chris Yip 1:03 Yeah, no problem. It's good to connect. We have a, we have a long history [laughs]. So who knows where this podcast is gonna go. We always have these classic questions that I have to go through. And actually, this is good for me because I didn't - I only knew you as a grad student, but good to get some background. So tell us where, how you grew up? And of course, when did you know engineering was for you? Jenna Usprech 1:27 Yeah, so I grew up in Thornhill, which is just north of Toronto. No one in my family is a scientist or an engineer so I didn't have that kind of exposure or role model to me as a kid but I did have a love of learning, I really liked school and that was supported by my family and, and friends. And I liked all sorts of topics. So if you would have asked me as a kid, like, what I was going to be, I would have never said engineer, because I actually didn't know what an engineer was until I was in high school. At least at the school that I was in, it wasn't as common to promote engineering and so when I was trying to decide the courses to take in my last two years, people who were talking about the different math courses, were saying, Oh, you only need to take these advanced types of math courses if you want to be an engineer. And I was like, Well, I don't know what an engineer is so might as well take these math courses in case, I want to do that. That's what I did and then I figured out what an engineer was and I thought it was really interesting, an interesting way to apply the science concepts that I really liked. I thought that was a really kind of cool area to explore. Chris Yip 2:45 So although I don't know...you don't think...you need to take all the maths, but actually I think we'll see that it's not...engineering...I would make sure to our audience that engineering is not all about math [laughs]. Jenna Usprech 2:56 Oh, so true. Yeah, so true. You know, that was just a way of someone saying, don't close these doors on you so keep all the doors open and you don't know what's possible after. Chris Yip 3:09 You went to the University of Guelph, and you involve your, sorry, you enrolled in biological engineering. So actually, we talked about math. And again you sort of think classic engineering, you think buildings and mechanical devices and cars and robots and so yeah, but then you went into the interface, actually, right? Biological sciences engineering, so biological engineering so what was the, what was really the the draw there? Jenna Usprech 3:34 I mean, at the time, that was one of the only undergraduate programs in Canada, that focused right away in biomedical engineering and it just happened to be called Biological Engineering at that time, but it always had an option for a biomedical side. So I guess the difference at Guelph at the time, and maybe it's not as much of a distinction now, but biological engineering, you could go into sort of more chemical or food systems, agricultural connections, whereas the biomedical side focused on that medical context on patients and people and designing solutions for them. What got me focused from the get-go was, I guess, still not knowing exactly what I wanted to do in high school, liking a lot of different areas, but finding biology, like really fascinating. So anytime I learned something about how our human body worked I just thought it was amazing and complex so that curiosity was there for me in biology. I like the idea that if you were in some bio focused engineering, like biomedical engineering, that you could actually apply that. You could look at actual problems that were happening, you know, let's say someone is sick with a certain disease or a condition, and how can we actually solve that, create solutions to make their lives better, or, you know, fix that ailment? As a scientist, you might be focused more on kind of studying the system but not kind of helping to solve it, so that's what kind of drew me to that. It was, you know, not many programs in Canada, and then I had heard from, you know, my dad's friend that his daughter went to Guelph and, and focused on prosthetic devices and I thought that was really cool. Chris Yip 5:16 Right. Yeah, I think it's as interesting, you know, as we sort of alluded to sort of engineering is all about machines and then it's hard to think of a more complex machine, right? Than the human body and how it interacts. And the brain controlling stuff, you've got mechanical structures, basically, that are moving, right? Joints and muscles, and all this sort of stuff, and things are doing work and everything so trying to link it as, as engineering is actually there's a very natural kind of flow into that space. Jenna Usprech 5:43 Yeah, you're so right. Like, you know, if you look at our anatomy, if you look at our physiology, like how our body fits together, how our body you know, processes, different things that how our organs work, it's all systems, machines, it's just made out of different parts. It's like, our cells are just squishy machines, they're liquid machines that you know, it's similar. Chris Yip 6:06 From Guelph you went to Kingston, so you went to Queens, and then you kind of cycled back to Toronto. Your master's, sorry, and your grad work were all in tissue engineering, right? Jenna Usprech 6:14 Yeah. Chris Yip 6:15 Maybe tell us a little bit or tell our audience a little bit about. So what is tissue engineering? And what are you working on? Jenna Usprech 6:22 Our body only has so much ability to repair and regenerate itself. At some point, we need help, we need a replacement, we need new tissue to function as it normally would or should. So tissue engineering is trying to make those tissues from scratch or get our body to make them again. It has a lot to do with figuring out how you get cells to make those tissues, or how you convince cells to do that, again. Tissue engineering is basically a way to address things like an organ shortage. So let's say I need a lung transplant, and I need it critically but I can't get it in time. If we had some way to make lung tissue that would solve some of that kind of demand for it. So at Queens when I was doing my master's, I focused on cartilage tissue, and it's one of the really common tissue in our body, we have it lining all of our joints, most common replacement is a knee replacement and that has a lot to do with degenerating or wear and tear of your cartilage. So if you are someone who has osteoarthritis, you're, you know, a bit older, you might need to have a total knee replacement just because your cartilage is worn down. So very thin layer of cartilage absorbing the shock and high stress and weight of your body. Even for athletes, they're more prone to getting damaged cartilage, so our body can't repair any damage to our cartilage. So it just wears away. And when it's just your bone contacting bone, that's really painful. So people need those total knee replacements because they're in a lot of pain when they walk. So what a great way to have some tissue engineering come in, if it's possible to make cartilage tissue, then maybe we don't need to have a total knee replacement that...sure it gets you out of pain, but then you lose some mobility, you know, it's not an ideal solution. So that was sort of the motivation for me going into cartilage tissue engineering. I happen to focus on sort of the mechanobiology around cartilage. So if you squish cartilage tissue, what happens to that tissue? What are those signals? Then coming back and communicating to the cells, what is that doing? So trying to understand a little bit more of that process, to then be able to figure out ways that we can tell chondrocytes which are the cells of cartilage to make new cartilage. Chris Yip 9:02 As a runner who tends to have a sore knee every so often I'm sort of listening. Jenna Usprech 9:11 No, it's good. I mean, movement is really good. It's sort of you need to be moving to keeping your joints like lubricated. It's just, you know, some people are unlucky, and they have osteoarthritis, and it's not something they did. And yeah, like you said, some people are competitive athletes and that can aggravate things, but I think running is is okay. I think you could still run. Chris Yip 9:32 So in Toronto, you work, I think you work for Craig, Craig Simmons, right? For your project, heart valve stuff, right? And so what were you working on in Craig's lab then? Jenna Usprech 9:40 Craig's lab works on a number of different types of things, but one area is heart valve. Understanding how heart valves work and calcify and disease but also trying to figure out how do you engineer a heart valve so that was sort of my focus in his lab was, you know, now it's a different tissue instead of cartilage but there are a lot of similarities between cartilage and heart valves. Heart valve tissue is a connective tissue, it is going through a lot of you know, wear and tear cycles of our heart beating all the time. And so in Craig's lab, I started working with stem cells and trying to understand kind of the complex combination of factors that can influence a cell to specialize or become a certain type of cell. So that would be the like, the first step in tissue engineering would be, how do I make a heart valve cell from a stem cell? I can have mechanical cues, so I can squish those cells or squish that tissue and, and that would be one factor. I can add different chemicals to that and that could be another factor. I can change the material that those cells are sitting on or kind of existing within, and that could be another. So I looked at combining all of those different factors together, different combinations, and actually did a lot of statistical analyses to figure out, you know, which factors were more influential at what levels and trying to find, you know, an optimal set of conditions for heart valve tissue engineering, which is very engineering-y, it's sort of like the most engineering application of biology that I had seen up until that point. Chris Yip 11:21 We could spend hours talking about regeneration and this sort of aspect, which is fun, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna slide a little bit because normally, when you think of folks are going through grad school, right? They want to be a faculty member, as you did, as you ended up but you're in a very kind of interesting faculty position at UBC. One, which I think a lot of schools are now starting to, to create these these interesting professors of teaching roles, which is what what path you're on now at UBC and I think there's a fascinating role. So maybe you could tell our listeners a little bit about what drew you to it and I'm assuming you're having a lot of fun doing it too. Jenna Usprech 11:57 Yeah, so the professor of teaching kind of track, I'm at the beginning of that track as an assistant professor of teaching, my role is focus mainly on teaching different courses. I happen to be in the School of Biomedical Engineering so in the biomedical engineering department, I'm responsible for creating new courses, teaching new courses, and educational leadership, which is sort of defined as how are you innovating or studying aspects of teaching and learning? How are you pushing forward education at the university setting? And this can take many different forms, it can be in the form of outreach, it can be in the form of scholarships, so writing papers about how students, you know, study engineering in the best possible way, different strategies in the classroom. So it is not like a traditional faculty role, like a research professor role. So for me, I don't have my own lab with students but I teach, you know, about five to six courses a year, and I interact with students in a different way as like a supervisor to TAs. So I have teaching assistants who are graduate students, and I mentor those students. Chris Yip 13:09 So although you said you don't have a lab, I mean, I'm gonna I'm gonna put a bit of an analogy on you. Is it, is it too much of a stretch to say that your classroom is your research lab? Jenna Usprech 13:19 Definitely. The classroom is sort of my lab, I also teach a lab course, so it's like a lab in a lab. But yeah, I do, like I ,the classes are my testbed for a lot of ideas. I also can do some research on the side. So I don't, I might not have a facility where I do biomedical engineering research but I do run different studies, educational studies on the side. We do as a biomedical engineering professor, and one that teaches lab courses, I am in a facility, cell culture facility, wet lab quite often for my course making sure that things are going to run properly for the course and like you said, I can test out a new lab idea and that might be actually studying something that hasn't been done before, getting the students to recreate experiments that haven't been performed before. So yeah, there are a lot of analogies between what I'm doing and what I did as a grad student. Chris Yip 14:18 Yeah, just and I just want to make sure that our, the audience doesn't misconstrue it as saying that your test subjects are your students, because that kind of comes out the wrong way. Jenna Usprech 14:28 Everything is ethical, Chris, like we when it is, when it actually is the students being test subjects. Let's say I would run a survey in my class to see how something I did in the class was perceived. If I intend that to be a research study, then I would submit for an ethics approval for that. I see your point, it isn't like they're my test subjects. Chris Yip 14:51 I was gonna ask an interesting question, because I know this is something we thought about a lot here when you were a grad student, which was sort of how does one take a research results and get the students in the labs to, I don't know, translate that into the lab experience. So they say, Well, you know, there was a paper about this, it just came out, you know, what you're doing in the lab, actually, is the same technique that was used in this paper. Jenna Usprech 15:13 I definitely do that. So I mean, I teach a cellular bioengineering lab course, that I created two years ago and that just happened to be in our online year of the pandemic. But last year, I was able to roll it out in person. And because of the, I guess, the recency of creating it, it's still pretty up to date. It's not completely up to date in terms of techniques, and there are limitations of what groups of students can do in a teaching lab facility but I do connect what they are doing in the lab to the later iterations that might be in a paper. I think there's a lot of ways that we can simplify some of the complicated work that's being done in a laboratory by a grad student, let's say, into an accessible format for an undergrad students who still understand the main concepts behind it, the main techniques that either form the underpinning or exactly what the grad student might be doing in the lab, you just wouldn't be showing them the entire process. So sometimes, like, kind of like a cooking show, sometimes some of it becomes a, this is what happened after a week of maintaining these cells, you know, coming in every couple of days, feeding them, you know, dealing with them, they don't necessarily get that full experience that a graduate student would be, but they get to see and take part in the most critical aspects, including designing those types of experiments. So they understand kind of from the beginning idea how you translate that idea into, you know, what equipment and methods do you need to go through? And then how do you analyze that data? And what does it mean? So that's what we try to create in the undergrad labs so that they understand those like fundamental skills. Chris Yip 17:04 It's clear you've got these really great teaching strategies but I know you're also interested in student wellness, right? I think this is a huge consideration these days. And, and so so what are some of the strategies you're applying either within your own context, but also broadly within the school and at UBC? Jenna Usprech 17:19 In terms of strategies, honestly, it is more just building a system that is supportive of students and, and listen...provides a forum for listening to students, because I don't think anyone understands, at least now, like us, adults, I don't think a lot of us understand what it's like to go through a pandemic, as a young adults, you know, someone new to university, and having your whole expectations turned upside down, having all of your professors scrambling to find new ways to teach you best and something's working and something's not working. So it's no wonder that a lot of students are stressed. Engineering is a really challenging program to begin with. It is exciting, but it also can be overwhelming and so making sure we are listening to students and finding ways that actually resonate with them to making that more manageable, it doesn't change the fact that it's challenging and there are some things that we can't compromise on. But you can also frame it in ways of, you know, this is an opportunity to learn something really interesting to, to kind of grapple with these challenging topics and that itself can be exciting. Sometimes it's a bit of framing, reframing the stress as being you know, okay, it makes sense that you'd be stressed because it's a lot of work to work in an engineering program, and the pandemic is happening so some sense of understanding, but then also trying to listen to understand when the stress becomes more than than just what is expected? And how can we accommodate for that? How can we not bend on our high bar that we have for education, but we can understand that people go through challenging times, and we can try to support them in different ways. So the university has a lot of different resources for wellness support that I know during the pandemic they they tried to increase. So we have a program at UBC called Early Alert. So if I'm worried about a student who I see maybe isn't coming to class or is struggling, I can, you know, send an alert. This is a central system that you know, contacts the student and and tries to connect them with resources that can help. Chris Yip 19:45 I know you have a pretty keen interest, a longstanding interest in kind of science communication, and the pandemic was a good case of getting good communication about science out. Give me a little bit of a sense of what you've done in that space. Jenna Usprech 19:59 So I think any barrier to someone being able to understand scientific engineering technical information is partly a failure in people being able to communicate it well. So I really am passionate about reducing those barriers to people who are interested in those topics, and no one has to be interested in them, it's a personal thing but if someone's interested, then it shouldn't be hard for them to at least try to access that. And that is a little bit personal to me of being someone who, you know, was fortunate to connect to those topics at a young age and seeing other people who didn't connect to that, at that those young ages and, you know, that sort of is like a fork in the road of, you know, if you're able to get people excited or interested or even understand those topics, then it sort of can open more doors to them. So as a grad student at Queen's, and then at U of T, as well, I participated in Let's Talk Science, which is a national Canadian outreach program, that is really wonderful, it has graduate students going into classrooms of, you know, kindergarten to grade 12 students and showing them science demos, or engineering demos. So it could be topics, I would have talked about states of matter. So solid, liquid, gas, to grade twos, you know, or I would have gone to a scouts group to talk about dinosaurs and what it means to dig up fossils and, and maybe I would have talked to, you know, grade 11 students about optics and, and shown them some prisms and, you know, interesting demos. So for me, it was a little bit of an escape away from my graduate student work that still had me, it still had me interacting with science, but in a very different forum than what I would have been studying. So gave me a little bit of a broader horizon there. And then I was also able to interact with, you know, kids, students of different ages and my ability to talk about technical topics was improved very greatly by talking with people that didn't have any background in them. So you have to come to a common language, you have to really understand who you're speaking to, and make sure that you're not using terms that they don't know. Or if you are using terms that they don't know you're defining them or or making them understandable in whatever context that person is in. Personally, I feel like I'd rather be on that end, because more people are going to understand me than the other end where only a few people understand what I'm talking about. I have a science communication course that I've taught that I've actually had grad students creating interesting demos based on their research that they got to showcase to, you know, grade 6, 7 students in summer camp. And so those students would come for, you know, a reverse science fair, basically, they're going to be judging those different demos going around learning about different topics. And I thought that was kind of a fun way to do a little bit of outreach. You know, there are lots of ways to do outreach and communicate your science, I don't pretend to know the best way to do that a lot of it is by practicing and being aware of who you're speaking to. So I'm involved in those sorts of ways. So I really do care about outreach and I guess I do it in little sprinkling amounts throughout my job here. Chris Yip 23:39 That's awesome. It sort of links to this kind of a final thought, which is around sort of, you're acting as a bit of a mentor and there's a lot of students who want to become faculty members, but didn't know about this path. And do you have advice for students who are in grad school now or even thinking about going to grad school about your particular trajectory? Jenna Usprech 23:59 I think there are a lot of things that kind of contributed to me going down this path, definitely one of them was being a teaching assistant. So getting some experience in the classroom, maybe not being the head of the classroom, but definitely learning what it means to grade well to you know, instruct people and how what you're saying be understandable, you know, to work in different aspects of, of the classroom. And then there are so many resources at U of T related to just learning about different soft skills, you can learn do a mini MBA, which I did, and I realized, oh, maybe that's not for me. You can take a mini course or a course on what it's like to be a professor. So there's a prospective professors and training program that I went through, getting to learn about teaching in higher education. So I took advantage of some of those opportunities that were I guess, I didn't have to do but I saw value in doing while I was still a student, and I was still figuring out what I wanted to do. And then another thing was talking to people about not being sure what I want to do, but also explaining what I did like about what I was doing. So it kind of was a turning point, maybe a little bit more than halfway through my PhD, where I felt like, I don't think I want to be a research professor after this, maybe I would go and work in a company doing something related to tissue engineering, I'm not I'm not quite sure about that. What I know right now is one of the most rewarding parts of what I'm doing is being a teaching assistant, I really liked that part of my day, it gives me good structure, I get a lot of serotonin and oxytocin, like boost chemicals, happy chemicals from, from chatting, and helping students. So that was a really fulfilling part of my day to day life as a grad student. So I was, in my mind just thinking, you know, at one point, maybe I'll want to be a teacher, I want to be a professor. But maybe that's like down the line, like after I work in industry for a bit. And then I then as I was talking about that more people are like, Well, why don't you just keep at this area, there are opportunities in this area that I didn't quite realize, and then was a matter of like, well, why am I artificially giving myself another job in the interim, if what I know I want to do is come back and teach. So I think just in my mind figuring out that, you know, even though I don't sometimes think of myself as an expert, I have a lot to share, I have a lot of value to give, and I can facilitate learning, even when I'm just coming out of my PhD. That I don't know if that's advice, but it's I think it's a personal thing of discovering what you are interested in what's resonating with you what you like doing, and then doing a lot of exploring. So you can explore a lot as a PhD student, you might not feel sometimes like you can because you have a lot of deadlines. And you know, you're working on your project, but you have a lot of resources at your fingertips to take advantage of. Chris Yip 27:06 I think I mean, to kind of wrap this up, I think it sounds like sounds like you're just having a ton of fun. Jenna Usprech 27:11 Yeah, yeah, there's, you know, there's a lot of cool things that I get to do and it's really rewarding to see the students appreciate some of that. Chris Yip 27:20 So Jenna, let me just want to wrap this up, I want to thank you so much for taking time today to be on the podcast, for us to actually to catch up, catch up on your lives post, post U of T and how things are going at UBC. So, so proud of what you've accomplished and how you're contributing to UBC and what you're doing so, but again, thank you so much for taking time today to chat. This has been awesome. Jenna Usprech 27:44 Yeah, thanks so much for inviting me Chris and for being always a great mentor to me. Chris Yip 27:52 Thanks again for listening to Coffee with Chris Yip. If you want to catch up on past episodes, or make sure that you don't miss the next one. Please subscribe. We're on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. Just look for Coffee with Chris Yip. You can also check out @uoftengineering on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn for more stories about how our community is building a better world. And finally, if you'd be inspired to join us, we'd love to welcome you. Whether you're thinking of taking a degree or working with us on our research project, you can find us online at engineering.utoronto.ca or you can visit our beautiful campus in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. I hope I can join you for coffee soon. Transcribed by https://otter.ai