TEJAL DESAI, 36. Professor of physiology and bioengineering, UCSF; director, UCSF's Therapeutic Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory. Shot on location at UCSF Mission Bay by Keeney + Law.
If Tejal Desai has anything to say about it, insulin needles and chemo drips will one day become history, relegated to the same dusty museum shelves as the trepan and the iron lung. And should that day arrive sooner rather than later, it'll be in large part thanks to the work done at Dr. Desai's nanotechnology lab at Mission Bay. That's where her team of grad students from UC Berkeley and UCSF—enrolled in the same joint PhD program their boss graduated from 10 years ago—are busy figuring out ways to, in a nutshell, deliver medicine to the right place in the body with the help of unbelievably small materials.
"You can ingest aspirin, but most things you would take for a chronic disease can't actually cross the intestinal wall," Desai explains. "But wouldn't it be nice if you could just pop a pill—an insulin pill, a cancer-drug pill—rather than inject yourself or sit hooked up to an IV?"
Her lab's other project is figuring out how to grow replacement tissue—cardiac muscle, say, or retinal cells. One might think these two endeavors, plus raising three children (the youngest was born this July), would be enough for one woman, but the Presidio Heights resident does education outreach as well, working with the city's public schools to get the next generation—"especially young girls"—thinking about science and technology. Does she take any time off? "I'm addicted to those murder-crime shows—CSI, Law & Order, anything with a little bit of science involved. I like to solve the puzzle before they do." Why are we not surprised?
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What do you think of the state of scientific literacy today?
It's pretty dismal. You know, when you live in a place like San Francisco, it's a completely different world, because literacy is actually extremely high from a technology point of view, but when you go to the rest of the world, it really is next to nothing. Part of it is the responsibility of the scientific community, which—and maybe justly so—concentrates on just the science and working in the lab, and we don't have many people who are scientifically literate both in public policy and the political world.
Does popular sci-fi help people to understand your work, or the opposite?
You know, it goes both ways. I think for the younger generation, it actually excites kids to want to think about doing some of that—so in that sense, it's positive, because they may see it in everything from Star Trek to other movies, other science fiction, and say, "Wow, can you do something like that?" A little bit is nice to get people interested in it, but you can't have all hype—you really have to look at the reality.
What do you think might discourage girls from pursuing science as a career?
I think it's a combination of things. Certainly, methodologies of how science and math are taught in some of the earlier grades often doesn't cater to different learning styles, so that's one reason. And women see very few role models in the upper professorial ranks. Even my graduate students—my lab has maybe 75 percent women, but already they say, "Well, I'm not going to do it, I'm not going to pursue this later on. How do you have a family, how do you get tenure?" I think it helps to have someone [there] who's doing it, and I bring the baby to work and they see that and they go, "Great, it can be done," but I think there's a lot of times they don't see that.
What made you push through when you were a young girl?
I was equally interested in English, and I guess what sort of pushed me to the edge was that I ended up doing a summer program for girls only—sponsored by the National Science Foundation—that one of my teachers had nominated me for. This was in 10th grade or ninth grade. Basically, we spent the summer in New York City, and we met all these women who were technology leaders, and got to tour different labs and go to different companies and see all these great role models and that was when I really thought, "Hey, this is a great thing to do."
All clothing, model's own.
More 2008 Hot 20 Under 40 Picks
TEJAL DESAI, 36. Professor of physiology and bioengineering, UCSF; director, UCSF's Therapeutic Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory. Shot on location at UCSF Mission Bay by Keeney + Law.
If Tejal Desai has anything to say about it, insulin needles and chemo drips will one day become history, relegated to the same dusty museum shelves as the trepan and the iron lung. And should that day arrive sooner rather than later, it'll be in large part thanks to the work done at Dr. Desai's nanotechnology lab at Mission Bay. That's where her team of grad students from UC Berkeley and UCSF—enrolled in the same joint PhD program their boss graduated from 10 years ago—are busy figuring out ways to, in a nutshell, deliver medicine to the right place in the body with the help of unbelievably small materials.
"You can ingest aspirin, but most things you would take for a chronic disease can't actually cross the intestinal wall," Desai explains. "But wouldn't it be nice if you could just pop a pill—an insulin pill, a cancer-drug pill—rather than inject yourself or sit hooked up to an IV?"
Her lab's other project is figuring out how to grow replacement tissue—cardiac muscle, say, or retinal cells. One might think these two endeavors, plus raising three children (the youngest was born this July), would be enough for one woman, but the Presidio Heights resident does education outreach as well, working with the city's public schools to get the next generation—"especially young girls"—thinking about science and technology. Does she take any time off? "I'm addicted to those murder-crime shows—CSI, Law & Order, anything with a little bit of science involved. I like to solve the puzzle before they do." Why are we not surprised?
Web Exclusive:
What do you think of the state of scientific literacy today?
It's pretty dismal. You know, when you live in a place like San Francisco, it's a completely different world, because literacy is actually extremely high from a technology point of view, but when you go to the rest of the world, it really is next to nothing. Part of it is the responsibility of the scientific community, which—and maybe justly so—concentrates on just the science and working in the lab, and we don't have many people who are scientifically literate both in public policy and the political world.
Does popular sci-fi help people to understand your work, or the opposite?
You know, it goes both ways. I think for the younger generation, it actually excites kids to want to think about doing some of that—so in that sense, it's positive, because they may see it in everything from Star Trek to other movies, other science fiction, and say, "Wow, can you do something like that?" A little bit is nice to get people interested in it, but you can't have all hype—you really have to look at the reality.
What do you think might discourage girls from pursuing science as a career?
I think it's a combination of things. Certainly, methodologies of how science and math are taught in some of the earlier grades often doesn't cater to different learning styles, so that's one reason. And women see very few role models in the upper professorial ranks. Even my graduate students—my lab has maybe 75 percent women, but already they say, "Well, I'm not going to do it, I'm not going to pursue this later on. How do you have a family, how do you get tenure?" I think it helps to have someone [there] who's doing it, and I bring the baby to work and they see that and they go, "Great, it can be done," but I think there's a lot of times they don't see that.
What made you push through when you were a young girl?
I was equally interested in English, and I guess what sort of pushed me to the edge was that I ended up doing a summer program for girls only—sponsored by the National Science Foundation—that one of my teachers had nominated me for. This was in 10th grade or ninth grade. Basically, we spent the summer in New York City, and we met all these women who were technology leaders, and got to tour different labs and go to different companies and see all these great role models and that was when I really thought, "Hey, this is a great thing to do."
All clothing, model's own.
More 2008 Hot 20 Under 40 Picks
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