Episode 5: Dr. Shai Shaham

In this episode, we meet Dr. Shai Shaham, a Head of Lab at The Rockefeller University who studies how glial cells (a type of brain cell) function in the nervous system in C. elegans. Beyond the lab, we learn about Dr. Shaham’s life-changing experience seeing a solar eclipse, his enthusiasm for Brahms and basketball, and the importance of listening to your inner “little voice”.

Beyond the Lab is produced by RockEDU Science Outreach and was recorded during the 2024 Summer Science Research Program (SSRP). To learn more, visit rockefeller.edu/outreach.

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P.S. Eminem and Mac Miller feature in this episode–see if you can spot where!

Note: This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Hana: Okay, good? 

Leora: Yeah! 

Jacob: I’m excited. So this is the intro. 

Shai: We used this dark film to look at the eclipse happening. And it was the most amazing experience and I still remember it like it was yesterday. 

Hana: Hi everyone. We’re Hana, 

Leora: Leora, 

Jacob: and Jacob, 

Hana: and this is 

In unison: Beyond the Lab!

Leora: Okay. Welcome to Beyond the Lab, the podcast where we discuss all things not science with the world’s leading scientists. Today we’re honored to host Dr. Shai Shaham, a Head of Lab at The Rockefeller University. Dr. Shaham’s research focuses on the role of glial cells in the nervous system and the control of programmed cell death using the roundworm C. elegans as a model. His groundbreaking work reveals how these processes are conserved from worms to humans, providing critical insights into neural development and function. Thank you for coming, Dr. Shaham. 

Shai: Thank you for inviting me. 

Hana: First an icebreaker. We wanna know what your favorite dessert is, and why? 

Shai: My favorite dessert is an apple tart that my mom used to make when I was a kid. And in fact I just celebrated my birthday and my mom gave my wife the recipe and she made it.

Hana: Oh, that’s so sweet. It’s amazing. 

Shai: It’s amazing. It has a nice crust with apples and a meringue on top. You bake it at low heat for about half an hour or so, and it’s really yummy. 

Hana: Great. What about you guys? Leora? 

Leora: My favorite dessert is just like a warm, freshly baked chocolate chip cookie. 

Jacob: That’s a good choice.

Hana: Good answer. What about you, Jacob? 

Jacob: This is specific. I really like fruit dessert-flavored ice cream. So for example, if you have like a strawberry cheesecake ice cream, or like a lemon merengue pie ice cream.

Hana: Mine is also very specific, and it’s not something you really get here. It’s very English. It’s a sticky toffee pudding. Have you ever tried that? 

Leora: No, never tried it. 

Hana: So it’s like a warm cake, it’s made with dates, it’s like really sweet. And then you have it with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top and like caramel sauce basically. 

Leora: Sounds delicious! 

Jacob: Sounds like something I’d enjoy. 

Hana: Yeah, it’s really good!

Leora: Okay. Now to our first question, so did you always know that you wanted to be a scientist? Or did you wanna be something else when you were younger?

Shai: I really can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to be a scientist. I thought for the longest time that I was gonna be an astronomer, and then a physicist. But somehow I ended up doing biological research. But I pretty much knew that I was interested in exploring the world around me all my life.

Jacob: Can you tell us a little bit about your childhood? 

Shai: Yeah. I can tell you a story which kind of cemented for me the idea that I wanted to become a scientist.

I was in first grade–this was in Israel, I was living in Jerusalem with my family–and I was returning home from school. On my way I went through the Valley of the Cross there, which is kind of a beautiful area with lots of trees and gravel paths, and I usually walk that area on my way back home and to school. So on my way back home one day, I suddenly saw my dad running towards me, which was a very unusual occurrence, and he had this funny looking dark film in his hand and he says, “Come! Hurry, hurry up! We have to run back home because there’s going to be a solar eclipse!” And so we ran home. And within about half an hour, the eclipse started and we used this dark film to look at the eclipse happening.

And it was the most amazing experience, and I still remember it like it was yesterday, how the lighting changed, everything became darker, the birds started tweeting and singing. And I was just amazed by the phenomenon itself, but I was also astonished that my dad actually knew that it was going to happen. And that sort of was a huge moment for me that inspired me to try to understand things around me. 

Jacob: Did you see the recent solar eclipse? 

Shai: I did. In fact, we spent seven and a half hours driving up to Vermont, stayed in a very generous person’s farm up there for an hour and then spent another seven and a half hours going back, 

Leora: Oh, so you saw when it was completely dark. 

Shai: so it was completely dark. 

Leora: Wow!

Shai: And it was absolutely worth it. I took my telescope with me. 

Hana: Wow. 

Jacob: And as a scientist now, do you look at the eclipse and is your sense of wonder any different?

Shai: I don’t think my sense of wonder is affected. I think it’s probably the same. I think that I can rationalize or explain more what it is that I’m seeing, and I maybe have an expectation of what it is I will see. But it’s very difficult to surpass that childish wonder of just this complete darkness around you and the stars popping up in the middle of the day. I mean, it’s just like it hits you emotionally. It’s very sort of primal. 

Leora: What other activities were you interested in in your childhood besides science? 

Shai: Besides science, I was an avid basketball player. 

Hana: Oh, me too! 

Leora: Yeah, me three. 

Shai: I played basketball both at school and on a local Jerusalem team, and I loved it. I still love basketball. 

Hana: Really? And what was your college experience like, and what activities were you interested in at that time? 

Shai: College was really a wonderful experience for me. 

Leora: Where did you go to college? 

Shai: I went to college at Columbia University. Columbia College. And I started out thinking that I would study physics and math, which I did in the beginning. And I took a lot of courses and they were really eye-opening courses. And at some point, I started hearing about the molecular biology revolution, which had started a few years earlier. So this was in the mid-80s. That really piqued my interest. So I really loved the idea of, as a scientist, I love the idea of exploring just completely new things. And so the idea of coming into a field where very little was known was very exciting. And so I managed to find a lab at Columbia to work at and that sort of changed the path along which I was pursuing my career. 

But I did a lot of other things besides science there. I played a lot of music. I’m a pianist. I played a lot of chamber music there. I sang in the chorus there. And probably most importantly, I met my wife there. That’s great. So it was it was a great time.

Leora: Tell us about it?

Shai: Yeah, it’s actually kind of a cool story. It was the first day of orientation. There was an outdoor event where they were serving different foods, and my wife was standing on the kosher food line speaking to somebody in Hebrew. And being Israeli, I overheard the language and went over to her and started a conversation, and that conversation was still going on.

Hana: Can you tell us a little bit about how and when you got to Rockefeller? 

Shai: After graduate school which I did at MIT, I moved to San Francisco to do a postdoc. And as I was completing my postdoc, I was looking for a faculty position and I interviewed in a number of different spots and ended up getting a very generous offer here at Rockefeller. I arrived in early September 2001, and actually moved into my lab on September 11th, 2001, which was not a very auspicious beginning to the lab. It was quite a rough month and a half afterwards for the city, for the university, for everybody. 

And I guess the main reasons for coming to Rockefeller involved the incredible faculty that were here. And I felt that I would have the freedom here to do the kind of work that I wanted to do. And I– And one of the models of the university is that they really want you to sort of push the envelope, explore new fields, do something that’s completely different but with potential for high impact. And that’s exactly the kind of science that I love to do. So it’s kind of a perfect fit. 

Leora: Do you feel like you’ve made– You said it, Rockefeller’s a very good community. Do you feel like you’ve made friends from working at Rockefeller? 

Shai: Oh yeah. I have a lot of friends on the faculty, on the staff. It’s been a very collegial place. 

Hana: And do you have a lot of non-scientist friends as well?

Shai: You mean outside of Rockefeller? Yeah, of course. I mean, you know, friends from other eras in my life and friends through my wife, so of course. 

Jacob: What does your wife do? 

Shai: She’s a physician. She’s here at Cornell, which is right across the street from Rockefeller. 

Hana: Great. And can you tell us a little bit about your hobbies outside of the lab?

Shai: So outside the lab, probably my main hobby is playing the piano. 

Hana: Me too. 

Shai: So I’m actually the orchestra pianist for the Greenwich Village Orchestra. Wow. I dunno if you guys know this orchestra, but it’s a volunteer orchestra that is really wonderful and it’s been around for many years and they have several performances every year and every once in a while they need a pianist in the mix, usually with baroque pieces or with 20th century music. And so that’s my gig, and I love doing that. 

Leora: Can you give us some highlights where you’ve played? Your favorite? 

Shai: Well, most of the places that we’ve played are local schools here in the city and a couple of churches. I did have one sort of big time performance, which was separate from this. So both my siblings are actually musicians. And, at some point, there was a New Year’s Eve concert at St. Louis where my brother-in-law was the conductor and my brother and sister were performing, and they drafted me into the mix. And so I ended up playing there in front of a packed audience, which was very intimidating.

Leora: Wow. That’s so fun though. 

Shai: But I even got reviewed by the St. Louis Dispatch and it was a good review. 

Hana: Amazing! Congratulations! 

Jacob: So now that we know a little bit about you, we wanted to kind of segue to our next segment…

Hana: My favorite segment: your favorite things. Okay, so to start, we wanna know about your favorite books. 

Shai: My favorite books, I like biographies. I love biographies of scientists. Two of my favorite biographies are– One is a short biography. It’s more of an advice book written by Ramón y Cajal that describes scientific investigations and how to approach them. It’s a book that was written in 1899 and [is] amazingly still relevant today. I love Sidney Brenner’s autobiography, which he came out with a few years ago, before he passed. And there’s a number of authors which I enjoy reading. Some of them are English authors, some of them are Hebrew authors.

Jacob: I mean, we know that you are a pianist. Do you have a favorite composer? 

Shai: I would say that in my teens I was absolutely infatuated with Brahms, and I still am. But I think my palate has definitely expanded and it’s hard for me to pin down a favorite composer. I think there’s many that are just unbelievable. 

Leora: What about a favorite movie? 

Shai: Favorite movie. My favorite recent movie is a movie called Arrival. It’s an absolutely extraordinary movie. It’s about, maybe I shouldn’t say what it’s about… 

Hana: Give us a brief overview. 

Shai: It’s basically about how to communicate with aliens that come to earth. 

Hana: Oh, wow. 

Shai: But it’s totally not like a Star Wars, Star Trek type movie. It’s a very thoughtful movie. It’s incredibly artistic. I think I’ve watched a movie maybe 20 times already.

Leora: Oh my gosh. 

Shai: Every time I watch it, I see another piece of symbolism in the background or in the story. It’s really an incredible movie. It’s very, very deep. Many, many, many layers. 

Jacob: I guess we would ask if you’re a dog person or a cat person, but I think we probably know that because you have a dog on your lap right now. Do you wanna tell us a little bit more about that? 

Shai: Yeah, this is Miller. We got him three years ago. We adopted him. He came from what’s called the Floribama coast, so basically the Florida panhandle right next to Alabama. He was in a shelter there and they drove him in a car to New York. And he was four years old at the time. He’s been a real joy, a real addition to our family. 

Hana: He’s so cute. 

Jacob: Yeah, he’s so cute. 

Hana: And can you tell us a little bit about why he’s named Miller? 

Shai: Well, in fact I might leave this to the audience to formulate the hypothesis. 

Hana: Good idea. 

Shai: But he came with his brother, and his brother is called Mac. And then through DNA testing which we did, we identified another brother, and that other brother’s name was Mathers. So we have an idea, we have a hypothesis about how to connect the names Mathers, Miller, and Mac. And it’d be fun for the audience to try and come up with their own idea.

Jacob: Good luck everyone. 

Hana: Yeah. Good luck!

Jacob: So you said that you are a big basketball person, or you were a big basketball person. Do you have a favorite team? 

Shai: I think in professional basketball I was always a Celtics fan. 

Hana: Why is that? 

Leora: Me too!

Shai: I loved the old Celtics-Lakers rivalry. I grew up on that. I loved Larry Bird; he was like my hero. My wife worked at Brandeis once when we were living in Boston, and it was the time when they were renovating the Boston Garden. And so my wife was studying for her master’s in chemistry there and the Celtics couldn’t practice in the Garden, so they moved all of the practices to the Brandeis gym, and so she could actually see them practicing there. 

Hana: Wow, that’s so cool! Do you ever find it difficult to balance your work life with doing other fun things outside of Rockefeller? 

Shai: I don’t really consider what I do work, so I sort of feel like I’m always having fun. I mean every now and then, there’s stuff that you need to do that’s maybe not precisely what you would consider fun or precisely not what you would wanna be doing at that moment, but overall I really enjoy my work and I don’t feel that it interferes very much with my life outside the lab. Life in the lab is very flexible. It’s one of the hidden perks of this profession. And so I think compared to professions where you have to clock in regular hours or where you have a commitment that you have to make to other people and not just to your research animals, it’s sort of a privileged profession where we can adjust our time as we need.

Jacob: I think maybe something that people who aren’t necessarily into science might find cool about your research is that you work with animals, not just cells. You work with C. elegans, right? The worms. Can you tell us a little bit about maybe the challenges of working with those creatures?

Shai: They’re roundworms. They’re nematodes and in fact, anybody who’s ever watched SpongeBob Squarepants knows that there are these marine nematodes. They are like these trees,

Leora: Oh, yes. Yeah. 

Shai: they look like forests of nematodes. So they’re actually they’re [a] pretty amazing collection of species. So by biomass, there’s more nematodes on earth than any other kind of animal. And they live both in the ocean and on land. And many of the nematodes that have been researched have this extremely unusual feature. Maybe it’s not unusual, because actually the world is mostly made out of these nematodes, but it may be unusual to us, which is that when they develop from a single fertilized egg, the pattern of cell divisions that they undergo is essentially identical between all members of a particular species. So you know that each cell is going to divide a certain number of times, you know exactly how many times, you know what cells it’s going to produce, which cells are going to die, et cetera. 

That’s not true for most other organisms, including ourselves. So the number of cell divisions in our bodies are not well defined, and certainly not programmed to begin with. But the fact that these divisions are so well defined for the nematodes makes many aspects of their development predictable in a way that’s not possible to study in any other setting. And so because of that many discoveries have been made in the worm, which I think would’ve been very difficult to make in other settings.

In terms of difficulties, I guess we can start out with a simple one, which is when somebody asks you what you work on and we say, “we work on worms,” and they say, “ew!” So that’s one. But clearly nematodes are not people, and there is in the biomedical community sort of a bar that you need to sort of pass to sort of convince people that the work that you’re doing has general relevance. Although I will say that as a scientist, I’m much less interested in this particular relevance and more interested just in understanding the fundamental aspects of what it takes to make a living creature. And it doesn’t really matter to me if it’s a worm or a person. So just like physics or chemistry, where there’s applied versions of the science, I feel that applied biology maybe has to do with taking work on the worm and making it relevant to humans. But sort of regular biology is less about that and more about just understanding life.

Leora: Any advice you have for young kids like ourselves who are thinking about science but aren’t sure about it? Like what advice would you give to convince them or just any general advice? 

Shai: I think the best advice that I can give you is to listen to the little person inside you who tells you what’s fun, what is it that you know you’re going to enjoy doing, and just pursue that. And I would do that– I would follow that relentlessly, even in the face of other people telling you not to do that. I think it’s okay to listen to what other people tell you, and you can even incorporate advice from other people, but sometimes other people don’t know better than you. And so I think it’s much more important to listen to that little voice inside.

Hana: Thank you so much for joining us today! 

Shai: Thank you for having me, and good luck to all of you in your scientific careers. 

Jacob: Thank you! 

Leora: Thank you! 

Shai: Or your journalistic careers. 

Jacob: And we’ll see you next time on 

In unison: Beyond the Lab!

Emily: Thanks to our interviewee, Dr. Shai Shaham, and thank you for listening. If you like what you heard, please share our podcast with family, friends, and anyone you know who loves science and stories of the people behind it. 

Beyond the Lab is a production of RockEDU Science Outreach at the Rockefeller University in New York City. It was produced and hosted by Hana, Leora, and Jacob during their participation in the Summer Science Research Program. It was also produced by Emily Costa and Laura Pellicer, with assistance from Lizzie Krisch. Our cover art was designed by Jeanne Garbarino and our theme music is by Blue Dot Sessions. 

To learn more about Beyond the Lab or RockEDU, please visit www.rockefeller.edu/outreach. And thanks for listening!

Hana: Yay, we did it! That was good. 

Shai: That was good?

Jacob: Yeah, that was great!