Q&A with Christina Zelano

Christina Zelano is currently a graduate student in physics at University of California at Berkeley. She has a Bachelor of Science degree from University of California at Santa Cruz. Christina is originally from Falls Church Virginia.

Do you remember when you first thought you might like to go into science?

I always liked science, even when I was a kid. In elementary school, science was my favorite subject, and the science fair was always my favorite part of the school year. I remember one year, I measured how much electricity could flow through different fruits and vegetables. I wanted to know which fruit would conduct the most electricity and why. Another year, I did an experiment to see which kind of grape turns into a raisin the fastest, and then once all the grapes became raisons, I conducted a taste test to see which grape made the best tasting raisin!

Even though I still liked science, I remember in 7th and 8th grade, I thought maybe I wouldn’t go into science because I was afraid of math, and I knew math was very important for science. But in high-school, I realized that anyone can do math, it just seems scary at first.

First you went to college now you are back in school studying for a PhD, is that tough to do?

There have definitely been times when college and studying for a PhD have been tough.

I think college was tough in a few different ways.

First, it was my first time living far away from my parents, so in the beginning, I was a little bit homesick!

Second, in college I studied physics. There weren’t very many other girls who wanted to study physics, so I was one of very few girls in most of my classes. I found that very difficult in the beginning.

Third, I had lots of tests and homework to do, so naturally, sometimes that was hard. But it was worth all of the hard work when I look back on it now!

Studying for a PhD is tough in different ways than college.

I still had to take some classes like in college, but classes aren’t as important for a PhD as they are for college. What is most important for a PhD is finding an interesting unanswered scientific question and figuring out how to go about solving it. This usually takes years to finish! This means you need to be very motivated to answer your scientific question, because it takes a very long time to solve. The hard work that goes into this kind of science is definitely worth it, because when you finally answer your question, you publish it in a scientific journal so that other people can also know the answer to your question. This means that you get to directly contribute to scientific knowledge!

If you didn’t do science what would you be doing?

If I hadn’t chosen to do science, I probably would be doing full-time wildlife rescue. As a teenager, I became a certified wildlife rehabilitator for the state of Virginia. This meant that when injured or orphaned baby wildlife was found, I was one of the people they would call to come and take care of the animal. Once healed, I would release the animal back to its natural habitat. I kept doing wildlife rescue in college as well. I helped animals from baby birds to squirrels to wolves and deer.

You are mistaken if you think that what we have done in the lab is technology. What we have done is exploratory science that helps to broaden the foundations of knowledge upon which information technologies are built. Without extending those foundations, we can only go so far before progress grinds to a halt. Is keeping the IT (information technology) revolution going important? You betcha!

As a kid I was always designing and building gizmos and trying to make them work. Now that I am an adult (ha ha ha) the only difference is that people pay me to do it! I am gizmologist with a love of nature and an unquenchable curiosity about how nature works. I guess that makes me scientist?

The sense of smell is one of the least understood of our sensory systems. In other sensory systems, scientists understand what is going on much better. In vision, for example, light waves enter our eye, and the wavelength of that light is what determines what color we will see. In the sense of smell, tiny particles called molecules enter our nose when we sniff in. all the way up at the top of our nose, there are cells called receptors that bind to the molecules that enter the nose. It is these receptors that begin to code what those molecules will smell like to us. Molecules come in many different shapes and sizes, and when we sniff in, lots of different kinds of molecules enter our nose. This makes the question of how the nose determines how a combination of molecules will smell a very difficult one. No one knows what it is about a molecule that makes it smell the way it smells. For example, when you peel an orange to eat it, billions of tiny particles enter the air around you and the orange, and when you sniff in, you perceive the nice smell of oranges! When you have some milk that has been sitting in the fridge for a long long time, and you open it to see if it has gone bad, billions of tiny particles enter the air around you and the milk carton, and when you sniff in, you perceive the horrible smell of rotten milk! No one understands why the particles in rotten milk smell horrible and the particles in orange peels smell wonderful. The nose finds a pattern in those particles that scientists haven’t been able to find yet. Most scientists think it has to do with the shape of the molecule, so they think that certain shapes mean certain smells.

So, the nose is the first part of the sense of smell. I study the second part, which is the brain. After the receptors in the nose bind to the particles in the nose, they send a signal to the brain, and the brain does all kinds of things with it. One of the things it does is to decipher the code made by the receptors. It also creates memories of smells, so that when you smell them again, you will remember the last time you encountered them. The brain also determines whether an odor smells pleasant or unpleasant.

I study the sense of smell by looking at people’s brains while they smell things. To do this, I need to have a person agree to go inside of a big machine that lets me see the inside of their brain. Once they are inside of the machine, I give them odors to smell and I look at activity in their brain in response to the odors.

Working with things you can’t really see is very hard at first. You don’t know how to picture it in your head, which makes it difficult to feel like you understand what’s going on. But in time, you start to develop your own way of picturing it in your head. This helps, and then it becomes easier. When I try to imagine what is happening when we smell things, I picture a molecule like you see in chemistry books going into a nose, all the way up to the end of the nose, and then hitting a receptor that looks like a lock that a key might fit into.

Actually, yes! I think they do. I tend to think much more about what I’m smelling, and I think I’ve gotten better at identifying certain smells.

When I’m not in the lab working, there are lots of other things I like to do. I love to hula-hoop, and I do that pretty much every day! I play fetch with my dog, I go for long hikes, and I do a lot of rock climbing. I also love cooking, which has become even more fun since I study smell, because of all the different odors that appear when you cook things.