Jessica S. Hook is a research assistant at the University of Iowa, where she manages the lab of Jessica G. Moreland, a critical-care pediatrician and associate professor of pediatrics.
Q. What are you working on?
A. The research in our lab is focused mostly on understanding the innate immune system. I study one specific white blood cell called a neutrophil. We have found that there is a specific protein, and mice that are deficient in that protein are more likely to die if they get bacteria in their bloodstream. So we want to figure out how that specific protein helps keep us alive.
Q. What does your role as lab manager involve?
A. Basically I know where everything is in the lab, and when new people come in I typically train them. I also do just basic things like ordering stuff that we need for our lab, or keeping track of our grant spending, or working with my principal investigator on writing grants or getting papers ready to be published.
Q. The recent murder at Yale highlighted the clash of cultures that can occur in research labs, where people of widely varying social and educational backgrounds come in close contact. Have you seen that?
A. It’s true that in most labs, especially larger labs, there is definitely a hierarchy. In the lab you could have everything from kids who are in high school to kids in college, people with bachelor’s degrees, master’s degrees, Ph.D.'s. In other labs that I’ve been in, I have definitely seen that cause problems. The lab that I’m in now is really, really wonderful. We don’t have that much diversity as far as education.
But I also think it sometimes is just basic work friction: You have staff people who are in the lab all day who are oftentimes doing a lot of the preparation work and support work, and then you have a graduate student or a postdoc who’s in and out of the lab, and sometimes they don’t really know all of this preparation work that the staff members are doing, or they don’t appreciate it.
Q. How driven by money and career success are your colleagues?
A. Our main concern is just making sure that we’re doing good work in the lab and generating good data. I have seen grad students or postdocs put a lot, sometimes years, into a project, and then the principal investigator takes credit for it. Sometimes the principal investigator needs to publish papers and they want to be the first author when it really was the grad student’s idea or the postdoc’s idea.
Q. Given the potential for deadly accidents, what level of attentiveness do you see to workplace safety?
A. Systemically, the University of Iowa tries to do a really good job. We have a safety audit every year, and the woman who does the safety audit is meticulous, and she really educates people in the labs. But you can only do so much, and I would say that safety issues from lab to lab vary greatly. I have worked in labs where I have been concerned about the ways other people handle stuff. But there are hazards to working in the lab. You can be as careful as you can be, and sometimes accidents happen.