In The Spotlight-Postdoc

Maryna Lesoway received the 1st place for a Postdoctoral Oral Presentation at the 2019 meeting of the Pan-American Society for Evolutionary Developmental Biology. She is a recipient of Whitman Center Early Career Investigator Awards at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole (2017, 2018), of an Emerging Models Grant of the Society for Developmental Biology (2017), and of an EDEN: Evo-Devo-Eco Network Research Exchange Award (2011) Website: https://marynalesoway.com With whom and where did you study? Right now, I am working with Jonathan Henry in Illinois, where we've been building infrastructure to support growing marine animals like calyptraeids (slipper snails) in non-marine labs, and digging into the sexual development of these crazy snails. Before that, I did my PhD in Biology as a student in the Neotropical Environment Option, a joint program between McGill University in Montreal and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. This gave me the opportunity to build a project combining my interests in larval biology with EvoDevo approaches. At McGill, I was supervised by Ehab Abouheif, who taught me everything I know about eco-evo-devo. At STRI, I was supervised by Rachel Collin, who showed me the diversity of the calyptraeids and what a great system they are to work with. Before that, I did a Master's degree at the University of Victoria with Louise Page, who introduced me to EvoDevo and patiently taught me microscopy and imaging. What got you interested in Biology? When did you know EvoDevo was for you? It started with an undergraduate field course. In school, I had always liked my biology classes, but until that point I was planning to go into medicine, because that's what smart kids who were good at biology did. I had taken all the invertebrate biology courses offered at the University of Calgary during my bachelor's degree, so I signed up to take Invertebrate Biology at the Bamfield Marine Sciences Center (BC, Canada) too. It didn't hurt that there was a scholarship to help with the costs. That summer, it was taught by Sally Leys (University of Alberta), and it was the first time I encountered living invertebrates in their natural habitat—such a difference from the preserved specimens in my lab courses in landlocked Calgary! It was also the first time that I designed my own research project (I spent a long time looking for penis-fencing behavior in the local flatworms) and realized that research was a career option. I wrote the MCAT that same summer, but applied to graduate school instead of medical school. What makes an EvoDevo lab particularly welcoming? In my experience, the best places to work have a diversity of people, organisms, and approaches. EvoDevo labs usually have this feature by default. There are many ways to do and think about EvoDevo, and it is this openness to new things—new models, new tools, new approaches—that makes it exciting to work in an EvoDevo lab. The best labs that I've worked in have been collaborative and supportive, and excited about the biology of the whole organism. I love working with people who share tools and ideas. That's how we advance the field the fastest—by collaboration, and not by competition. What is the biggest challenge you face as a postdoc? What are issues that you feel the discipline still needs to address? The hardest part of being a postdoc is the uncertainty of what happens next. The academic job market is hard, and what with the COVID-19 pandemic, US immigration issues, and everything else going on in the world, it just got much harder. On a career level, I worry about how long it takes to build new tools and techniques in nontraditional models, especially in such a competitive environment. Experiments can take longer in new models because you often have to start from scratch, and making multi-species comparisons only adds to this. Expectations (often my own) can be unrealistic. I have also been told by that I haven't specialized enough on a single area of research and that this will make it difficult to be hired. I don't believe that, but sometimes it can feel like search committees are only excited about interdisciplinarity in theory. I've also been thinking a lot more about equity and social justice issues. These are big challenges that have not been seriously addressed in academia. As a white woman I am not an underrepresented minority in biology, so the challenge is how I can use my privilege to change structural issues.