Episode 1: Steve Bonilla

In our first episode, we meet Dr. Steve Bonilla, a Head of Lab at The Rockefeller University whose research explores the physics behind RNA’s 3D structures and how these structures shape its activity. Beyond the lab, we learn about Dr. Bonilla’s gig as a world cup security guard, his recommendations for horror movies, and why science is nothing to be intimidated by.

This episode was hosted and recorded by Sarah, Shimla, and Kayatu.

Beyond the Lab is produced by RockEDU Science Outreach and was recorded during the 2025 Summer Science Research Program (SSRP). To learn more, visit rockefeller.edu/outreach.

Listen to Beyond the Lab on Spotify or Apple Podcasts! For audio with closed-captioning, please visit our YouTube page.

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Transcript

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Steve: I wasn’t prepared for such deep questions! (laughing) I thought we were gonna talk about RNA, okay?

Shimla: Okay, hi everyone, I’m Shimla.

Sarah: I’m Sarah. And this is…

In unison: Beyond the Lab!

Shimla: Welcome to Beyond the Lab, the podcast where we discuss all things not science with the world’s leading scientists.

Sarah: Today, we’re honored to speak to Dr. Steve Bonilla, head of the Bonilla Lab at The Rockefeller University. At Rockefeller University, Steve Bonilla and his lab investigate how RNA falls into complex three-dimensional structures and how those structures control critical biological functions in cells and viruses.

Shimla: So first we have an icebreaker. What is your comfort food? Your go-to comfort food?

Steve: My comfort food. I like ramen. Yeah.

Shimla: That’s what I was gonna say too.

Steve: Good, good. Yes.

Shimla: Is there a specific way you have your ramen or no? Straight out of the packet?

Sarah: Yeah, do you put any spices or anything?

Steve: Sometimes I mix spinach and I put an egg in it. I put some carrots.

Shimla: Oh, that’s much healthier than me.

Steve: I make it into a pretty, yeah, yeah.

Sarah: Oh, ’cause I just think of cup noodles. I just buy some from–

Steve: You can do it with cup noodles too.

Sarah: Really?

Steve: Just put it in a pot and then just add things to it.

Sarah: Oh! Now I need to try that out. That actually does sound delicious.

Okay, so now we’re going to go into your childhood and background. So our first question is, did you always want to be a scientist? Why or why not?

Steve: I actually did not always want to be a scientist. I did always have an affinity for math and science growing up. But then as a teenager, I started to become interested in other things like humanities. So I think I was interested in anthropology and that sort of thing. And literature. But then, I went into college and I started to get pulled again back into science and engineering. I actually graduated with an engineering degree in college. And I started doing research then, and I started finding my way into science, and I fell in love with science as an undergraduate researcher.

Sarah: Was there a specific person or reason why in undergrad you fell back into science?

Steve: Definitely some of my professors inspired me. I was already an engineering major and one of my professors in thermodynamics approached me after class and she asked me if I ever thought of doing undergraduate research. And I actually didn’t even know what that really meant. And then I said, “no, but you know, I would like to learn more about it.” So she said, “yeah, just come to my lab in the afternoon.” And that’s how I got into it. Yeah, it was just because she kind of approached me after class.

Sarah: Oh, wow.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah.

Shimla: Where did you grow up? Were you born in New York City or…?

Steve: No, no, I grew up in Guatemala. I grew up in Guatemala City and I moved to the U.S. already when I was 19.

Shimla: Tell us maybe a little bit more about your childhood in Guatemala City. Do you have any favorite memories or places you distinctly remember?

Steve: Well, I had a very fun childhood. I had a lot of friends. I played soccer in the streets and I had dogs growing up. Places that are special are still the house where I grew up, which I still go visit once in a while because some of my family lives there.

Shimla: How many dogs do you have growing up?

Steve: We had many, but there was always at least one. But there was a time when we had maybe two or three dogs.

Sarah: Wow. What was your favorite breed of dog?

Steve: For some reason my family always had cocker spaniels. Yeah that was, we always had cocker spaniels.

Shimla: Do you have one right now?

Steve: No, no, no, no. No time for dogs. (laughs)

Sarah: (laughs) You’re too busy here.

Steve: Yeah, that’s right.

Sarah: So since you mentioned you moved to the U.S. when you were 19, what was the hardest adjustment when coming here to the U.S.?

Steve: Well, definitely the weather. Yeah, I moved to Seattle. That’s where I did my undergraduate degree. And definitely the Seattle weather compared to Guatemala is rough. It’s really different. Language was difficult, right? Yeah. I think all of a sudden there were many challenges that came up, but overall, I think I was able to adjust pretty well.

Sarah: Okay.

Steve: Yeah.

Sarah: If you can go back into time, what advice would you tell your 19-year-old self about the journey ahead?

Steve: Wow. I wasn’t prepared for such deep questions! I thought we were going to talk about RNA, ok?

Well, I think that maybe I had been too worried about things and always a little bit in my head. So I would just tell myself to relax a little more. Yeah. You know, take it easy and things will be okay. Things tend to work out for the best. So yeah, just enjoy life and enjoy the time especially when you’re young. ‘Cause then, the years pass by and you look back and you’re like, “Oh my God, I was worrying about all of these things that didn’t matter.”

Sarah: Yeah.

Steve: And so, yeah, I think that’s probably [what I would] tell my young self if I could go back.

Shimla: Yeah, enjoy the weather, guys.

Sarah: Exactly! That’s great advice, actually.

Shimla: So while you were kind of moving all over, did you have any odd jobs you picked up along the way?

Steve: Odd jobs… My first job in Guatemala actually was as a security staff at the indoor soccer world cup.

Sarah: Wait, the World Cup?

Steve: There was an indoor soccer world cup in Guatemala. I don’t even remember.

Sarah: As your first job?

Steve: And I was very young and I don’t know why they would hire me for that.

Sarah: Yeah, what?

Steve: I was super skinny. I definitely could not do any security.

Sarah: You could not fight off anybody!

Steve: (laughing) Yeah, yeah. But I think I got that job because I did martial arts growing up.

Sarah: Oh.

Steve: And they basically just hired a bunch of the kids who were in this martial arts gym.

Sarah: Okay.

Steve: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sarah: Yeah, totally, nobody’s gonna get hurt.

Steve: (laughing) Other than that, you know, I’ve had normal jobs. I worked at an office supply store. I was like the guy at the copy and print center, you know, making photocopies.

Shimla: Like The Office.

Steve: Well, yeah, but I was actually at The Office Depot. (laughing)

Shimla: You kind of already answered this, but what’s something about your present self that your childhood self would be kind of shocked about?

Steve: I think that I would have never thought that I was gonna be able to become, you know, like a scientist at a place like Rockefeller. Yeah, it was definitely something that maybe I didn’t think was possible back then.

Shimla: That gives me a lot of hope!

Sarah: Yeah, me too!

Steve: Yeah. No, definitely, you should.

Shimla: Okay, and now we have a special segment: Dr. Bonilla’s Favorite Things.

Sarah: Okay, so our first question is: do you have a favorite book?

Steve: My favorite author is an Argentinian writer, his name is Ernesto Sabato and he has two books that I really like. The Tunnel is one of them and the other one is called About Heroes and Tombs. I can remember their names in Spanish because I read them in Spanish. So those are probably my two favorite books. Franz Kafka is one of my favorite authors too. So I really like the classics like The Trial and The Metamorphosis.

Shimla: I sat down the other day trying to read The Trial. I already tried reading it once, I failed and I tried reading it again.

Sarah: Your second trial! (laughing)

Shimla: It’s really hard to read so I actually like… wow.

Sarah: Do you have a favorite movie or TV show?

Steve: Yes, I really like Seinfeld. I really like Seinfeld and Breaking Bad.

Sarah: Yeah, I actually went to Albuquerque. I saw Walter White’s house. My dad’s a huge fan so he was like, “oh my gosh, that’s Walter White’s house.”

Steve: Yeah. Movies, I like The Prestige.

Sarah: The Prestige, I’ve heard of it.

Steve: Yeah, it’s a great movie. I’d recommend it.

Sarah: All right, I’ll check it out.

Steve: And I like horror movies.

Sarah: Me too. What’s your favorite horror movie?

Steve: Oh my god. Favorite horror movie… I really like The Babadook. (laughing)

Sarah: The Babadook! (laughing)

Sarah: My favorite horror movie, like my favorite franchise, is probably Scream with Ghostface. Also Halloween. I feel like Michael Myers is always good. The original one though, the original Halloween is really good, in my opinion.

Shimla: I do bad with suspense, so the whole entire time I’ll be watching it, I have to be with someone, and half the time my eyes are closed. Horror isn’t my thing. What are some of your hobbies?

Steve: I play the guitar. Yeah, I played for many years. And I like to run. I run in Central Park. I would say those are my two main hobbies.

Sarah: Do you want to do a marathon one day by any chance?

Steve: Yeah, I thought I wanted to, but I think that my knees won’t like it so probably not. I think maybe I’ll do it one day. Yeah, it’s still on my list.

Shimla: We’ll be there. Email us.

Sarah: We’ll support you at the finish line.

Steve: Sounds good.

Shimla: What do you play on your guitar? Acoustic or…?

Steve: I play both acoustic and electric.

Shimla: Oh, that’s so cool. I’ve been wanting to get into electric.

Sarah: What’s your go-to song?

Steve: So there’s this Spanish band that I really like. It’s a rock band. Well, in Spanish it’s Héroes del Silencio and I play a lot of their songs.

Sarah: Oh, I see.

Steve: Yeah, yeah.

Shimla: You did also mention the one thing you would tell your past self is to kind of relax, have fun, enjoy your time. So what is your favorite way right now to destress after lab, or after a stressful day?

Steve: I like to go out with friends, you know, go to a nice restaurant, talk about things. Just normal, out of work things. Definitely playing the guitar is one of the ways that I can also decompress and relax. And exercising. I think it’s also a nice way.

Shimla: Do you have a favorite restaurant? I’m trying to build my go-to list.

Steve: Favorite restaurants? I like Boqueria. It’s a Spanish restaurant. It’s a tapas place. I think it’s on Second Avenue.

Shimla: I need to try more Spanish food. The one restaurant I did go to, that was so good. Oh my gosh. Leticia’s. It’s in maybe the Brooklyn area, but so good.

Steve: Nice.

Sarah: I would just say because I’m from the Bronx, which has a lot of Hispanic people, after school, I always get birria tacos. So good.

Steve: You know Seth Darst? So he’s one of the faculty here. We biked to Queens with Citibikes to go to his favorite taco place. I think it’s called Ramirez taco (Taqueria Ramirez). It was very good.

Sarah: All right, so our next question is: what is your favorite spot to travel or to go on vacation?

Steve: So of the places that I’ve traveled, I say probably my favorite place that I’ve been to was Japan.

Sarah: Oh Japan.

Steve: Yeah, so I had a chance to go to Japan. And I went to Kyoto and Tokyo and I really loved it. And if I could go back, whenever I get a chance, I’ll try to go back.

Shimla: What did you like so much about it?

Steve: Yeah, I just felt like… For a moment I felt like I was really far away and that it was a sensation that I really enjoyed. Yeah, so I was really able to disconnect.

Shimla: Was there a moment when you knew you were meant to be a Head of Lab, or was it more of an impulsive jump you took and figured out along the way?

Steve: I think that at some point during my graduate studies, it felt that that was going to be the direction that I was gonna take. And at that point I was pretty determined and I guess somehow I convinced myself that I was gonna be able to go in that direction. But it happened in my grad school.

Shimla: Can I ask why?

Steve: Why? I don’t know. I guess that it just felt like that was going to be the thing that I was going to do.

Shimla: You’re meant to be. This is your life’s purpose.

Steve: Yes, exactly.

Sarah: Would you say, with your professor giving you the open internship at the lab that you were talking about earlier, like that kind of inspired you to get into science more? Like why did the passion grow rather than…

Steve: Yeah, I don’t know why. I think that something that I really enjoyed and I always enjoyed throughout my life was learning new things. And I think that this job allows me to learn something every day, and I cannot see myself doing anything that’s not that. And also like the freedom that you have to pursue ideas–it’s something that just matches my personality.

Sarah: It’s like your curiosity to learn about the world around you.

Steve: Yeah, yeah.

Shimla: So I imagine being a Head of Lab, your life is pretty busy. You have experiments running all the time, maybe. How do you balance your life outside of the lab? And is it hard?

Steve: Yeah, I would say it is hard. And it’s something that you kind of have to be very, how do you say… It’s easy to start losing control of that balance, right? So you have to remind yourself. And there are times where a lot of things accumulate and you really have to get a lot done, and it’s really hard to make time to do anything else. But there are times that come when you’re like, “okay, I can stop now and I can recover from this.” It’s difficult, I think. I imagine it’s a challenge that we all have in this life, in this field. So, yeah, I think it’s something that you have to remind [yourself], and sometimes having people around that support you and remind you of it is a good thing.

Shimla: Yeah, no, what you said really does resonate with me. I’m a senior right now, so we’re all bouncing college applications, school, doing SAT prep, doing all of these different things. So I think a lot of us do face this issue and it’s really hard to get over actually.

Sarah: Yeah. I feel like it’s kind of shocking that no matter what age you are, you’re always going to have to find that balance in life. And I feel like everyone in this world [is trying] to have that stability and it’s hard. But we have to go with the flow and know how to balance our professional life rather than our personal life and just know when it’s time to do work and it’s time to have fun. Yeah.

Steve: Yeah, yeah.

Shimla: Do you think doing self-care for example has helped your leadership abilities? And if so, how?

Steve: I think it does help. I think that you can feel it when you are overwhelmed. If you don’t take care of yourself, you are too tired, your ability, your sharpness to think of solutions to problems, your ability to deal with stress, to talk to people, it becomes more difficult to deal with. So when you are able to feel a little bit more fresh and rested, it’s like the ideas come a little bit easier to you. The solutions to problems also come easier. Definitely it’s important. Yeah.

Shimla: Also, I didn’t get to ask this before ’cause I forgot, but like you said, you went from studying humanities to engineering and then right now you’re studying RNA. So how did… I feel like what you’re doing is so niche. I just, I have to know what happened.

Steve: Yeah. So my PhD is in chemical engineering. When it came time to choose a lab, I met the person who became my PhD advisor, and essentially he introduced me to this problem of RNA structure and RNA folding. And I just became fascinated by that problem. So I joined his lab and I ended up doing my thesis in that lab. So my degree’s in engineering but basically I think of my PhD as being more in biochemistry. I’m more of a biochemist. And then from there, my postdoc and everything followed from that.

Sarah: Do you think you still implement all that engineering into what you do for RNA, with like the structures and stuff?

Steve: I think it did help. It did help to have a different perspective. And also, you do get a lot of quantitative ways of thinking of things. And also the math and all this comes handy once in a while, right? Like when you don’t get intimidated when you find a paper that has a few equations in it, and then you feel comfortable going after that. So I think it does help to have that quantitative background.

Sarah: Who has been your biggest scientific role model, both personally and famous figures?

Steve: I mean, I’m definitely inspired by some of the classics like Darwin and just the idea of discovering something that is so central to…like its implications are so great. I just imagine that must have felt.

I definitely learned a lot from my advisors. So my PhD advisor and my postdoctoral advisor are people who I looked up to and I learned a lot from, and I think that I tried to bring some of the things that I learned from them in the way that I run my lab.

And I am also quite inspired by my students and the people in my lab. They’re very inspiring, they’re really great to work with, and they are very motivated. And I like [their] kind of very fresh way of approaching things. Yeah.

Sarah: Oh, that’s really cool. I used to think some heads of labs think that they’re better than the workers. But it’s really cool to see that, as a Head of Lab, you even get to learn more with your team and stuff. So that was really cool for me to hear.

This might also be another heavy hitter, but what advice would you give to high school or college students who are thinking about careers in science?

Steve: I think that one advice would be to not be intimidated by it. I mean, I think that there is this common thought that science is very hard, or you have to be super smart. And I think that if that’s something that you’re interested in and you think you like, you should explore it. There are many different ways to be scientists. There are many different fields and different questions that require different types of people and different types of thinking. So there is a place for almost everyone, I would say. So yeah, don’t feel intimidated. And if it’s something that looks interesting to you, you should go for it.

Shimla: What is the most underrated skill to have in science that no one really talks about?

Steve: Oh, wow. Definitely, I think your social skills. Yeah. I think a lot of what I currently do has to do with my ability to communicate and [have] emotional intelligence and just be able to perceive and communicate. I think that’s a really important skill that is often not thought of as a scientific skill, but it ends up being very, very important. Yeah.

Shimla: In your opinion, what is the best part of your job and the best part of science?

Steve: I really, really enjoy working with my students and my trainees. My favorite part of the job is when they are in my office and we are discussing some experiment or we’re brainstorming about some project.

Sarah: Oh, that’s nice.

Steve: I really enjoy the troubleshooting and the back and forth, thinking about what is the next experiment, getting on the whiteboard, drawing some models…

Sarah: Oh, I could see through the doodles!

Steve: Yeah, and it’s actually something that was a little bit surprising to me, ’cause I did not know that was gonna be my favorite part. Starting this job, I didn’t realize that I was going to enjoy so much the mentoring side of the job.

Sarah: Oh wow.

Steve: Yeah, I’m really honored for your visit.

Sarah: Aw!

Steve: So thank you.

Sarah: No thank you for sitting with us, we really appreciate it.

[OUTRO]

Sarah and Shimla in unison: Dr. Bonilla’s favorite… (laughing)

Shimla: Let’s retake. Retake. Ok.

Sarah: Ok.

Shimla: We have to say it in unison. I’m so sorry.

Sarah: It’s the law of podcasting.

Steve: Ok.