Episode 2: Tim Stearns

In this episode, we meet Dr. Tim Stearns, the dean of the graduate school at The Rockefeller University who previously researched cell structures called centrosomes and cilia. Beyond the lab, we learn about Dr. Stearns’ talents for music and motorcycle racing, the time he went frog fishing in South Africa (for science), and what to do when you get bitten by the science bug.

This episode was hosted and recorded by Serena, Rana, Murimi, and Diamond.

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.

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Transcript

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Murimi: Okay, we’re good.

Tim: From the beginning.

Murimi: From the top.

Serena: Hi everyone! We’re Serena…

Rana: Rana…

Murimi: And Murimi.

Serena: And this is…

In unison: Beyond the Lab!

Serena: 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 speak to Dr. Tim Stearns, Dean of Graduate and Postgraduate Studies and Vice President for Educational Affairs at [The] Rockefeller University.

Murimi: He is an active researcher and Head of Lab where he focuses on research into the centrosome and cilium. Here, he explores the importance of mechanisms such as cell division, cell signaling, and fungal pathogenesis.

Rana: He’s a Howard Hughes Medical Institute professor. He’s toured the world teaching cell biology, and he works extensively on science regulation and the process of scientific research. Thank you for joining us, Dr. Stearns.

Tim: Thank you for having me.

Serena: So we always like to start off with a little [icebreaker] activity, and so our question is…

Murimi: If you were to be reincarnated as an animal, what animal would you be?

Tim: I think I would like to be reincarnated as a… I wanna say something different, so this is all gonna get cut out when you guys edit it.

Hmmmm, let’s see, what should it be? What would be a good animal to be? How about a mongoose? I would like to be reincarnated as a mongoose.

Murimi: Okay.

Serena: Interesting. Why?

Tim: You know, they seem to be remarkable in their ability to fight cobras. And you know, you think they would have the bad end of the deal, but they often come out ahead in a fight with a cobra.

Serena: What about you, Murimi?

Murimi: I think, on the idea of intimidation, have you heard of shoebill birds? Okay, they make sounds that sound like gunshots actually. So they’re really loud. But they’re like the most cute or ugly birds you’ve ever seen. They’re very small and like they just have these really big beaks and it seems so out of place.

Rana: I would actually want to be a frog because my name in Spanish means frog. Obviously I don’t think intentionally my parents named me to be a frog, but I grew up hearing a lot of “Oh your name means frog!” And I’m like “Yeah, okay.” So maybe I’d like to see what life would be like if I was a frog.

Serena: I think I would be a bumblebee because they seem to be the only other species that we’ve figured out have a language going on. They do this weird waggle dance to tell the other bees where the food is, and I think that would be really interesting. And what would it be– Oh actually I would be the queen bee because that would be really cool. Yeah of course, the queen bee, yeah.

What activities did you like to do as a kid in high school and college? And just anything you’d like to share.

Tim: I did start playing music when I was relatively young, probably when I was 12 or so. I started playing the guitar, which is a very common thing, and certainly at that time in the 1970s. And I had the experience that I think some people who go on to be musicians have had, which is some realization along the way that you have some sense of music and that this is something, if you actually applied yourself to it, you could actually be good at. And so music has been a really important part of my life from that point on. And aside from science, that’s been one of the main things that I really love doing.

Rana: What instruments do you play now?

Tim: I play many different instruments. So still guitar, but of course guitar means many different things. So I have a whole bunch of kinds of guitars. There’s also other things that are fretted instruments. So things like the mandolin and banjo, also French accordion…not the piano accordion, which is what you think of when I say accordion. So you think the big thing with the piano keyboard–[it’s] not that, actually. It’s the ones with the buttons that you push to play the instrument.

Let’s see, I also played wind instruments–so saxophone and clarinet for many years, less so now. [And] I have something you may have heard of–but most people maybe haven’t, although they’ve heard the sound–and that’s called a theremin. You know what a theremin is? It’s the only instrument you can play without physically touching it.

Rana: Really?

Serena: Do you own a theremin?

Tim: I do own a theremin.

Serena: That is so cool.

Tim: I’ve never learned to play it very well. So if you know what the theremin is, it’s an instrument that makes the sound…if you know the song “Good Vibrations” by the Beach Boys? That is the instrument making the “ooOOooooOO” sound. And it’s very hard to play because there’s no physical cues like there [are] on the fretboard of a guitar or the fingerboard of a violin. There were no physical cues to know how you control the pitch. And so it’s– There’s only a few people really who’ve ever mastered the theremin, and I am definitely not one of them. So I can make it sound like a police siren, but I can’t really play music.

Serena: No, yeah, I think instruments are very hard things to play. Like I played the French horn in middle school, but definitely wasn’t good at it.

Rana: I also– Music has also been a big part of my life. When I was five, I started playing piano, and I still play flute, which [is] my current instrument. I’ve been playing that since I was in sixth grade.

Murimi: Yeah, for me, I don’t think I’m as musical as all of you. I used to or still do play the piano, but I don’t think I’m as good as the rest of the people I’m around. I do have a friend that plays the oud, another fretted instrument. He’s really good at it though. I love listening to him play.

Tim: Oh, that’s really interesting. The oud is related to a style of guitar playing that came from the 1920s and 30s–what’s now called gypsy jazz. There’s a very famous guitarist from the 1930s who was [Romani], Django Reinhardt is his name. And the style of playing with downstrokes and what’s called “rest stroke” picking. And so there’s so many relationships in different kinds of music from different parts of the world and how they relate to each other. It’s one of the great things about it.

Rana: Wow. Just another question: we heard that you really liked motorcycle racing. Do you wanna talk more about that?

Tim: Well, it’s been a long time since I did any motorcycle racing. My father was very into hobbies, and so every weekend we would do some hobby-related thing. And it changed over the years, and he had a motorcycle, and then when I was about 13, I also got a motorcycle. And these were for racing on the dirt, so dirt bike racing, what’s called motocross racing. And then when I was, I think when I was 14, I raced a number of times in actual motocross races in Bridgehampton, New York, which is out on the east end of Long Island. Yeah.

Rana: Well, your hobbies are certainly a lot more interesting than what my parents put me in. But I wish I was doing motorcycle racing and all that fun stuff. I was put in dance classes, such like that. What did you guys do when you were younger?

Murimi: I– As before, it was a lot of piano. My parents also did try put me [into sports]. I was not a very big sports kid. I’m still not a big sports kid. A bit of tennis, golf a bit later, but yeah…I don’t think a lot of them stuck. I think I just became a very science-y person. [I] like indoors mostly.

Serena: Another fun question: what is your favorite way to unwind or de-stress after a long week?

Tim: Of course I still play a lot of music. And I do also love cooking. When I was young, I needed a job to have money. And so I worked in the restaurants when I was a teenager and also in college. And that experience of learning how to cook–first I started as a dishwasher, then I learned how to cook in restaurants–that experience really stuck with me and I still love cooking.

Murimi: What’s your favorite dish?

Tim: Hmm. Well, you know, I would say that has changed over time as well. I worked when I was a kid on Long Island. I worked at a Spanish restaurant, which was really the kind of traditional food of Spain. So things like paella and various seafood dishes. And I still make some of those, you know, when I have the time to do it. So I really love the food of Spain. I really like [it].

Serena: Did you ever consider going to culinary school if you decided that you loved cooking so much?

Tim: Well, you know, I have to say that when I was a kid, the notion of cooks being a fancy thing and being called chefs, that didn’t really exist. And I didn’t know of any culinary school. So, you know, the notion that that was a thing that one might aspire to wasn’t around then, but I did enjoy it and I learned a lot. And I worked in a number of restaurant kitchens.

Serena: We’re going to move on to some of your current work…but we actually know your secret.

Rana: You know, yeah, your big secret. So let’s talk about JASON.

Tim: Oh! (laughing)

Serena: For listeners who don’t know about JASON, could you explain what it is and talk about your experiences and this organization?

Tim: Well, JASON is…it doesn’t actually stand for anything. So the letters are not an acronym. It was from Jason and the Argonauts, which is a tale of old. And I think it was the idea of the spouse of one of the early JASON members that this organization could be called JASON. And it started in the early 1960s, and it was from scientists who realized that the government wasn’t getting the kind of advice it really needed from scientists on matters of science and technology, particularly as they’re related to national security. And so the sense was if there were a group of scientists who were sort of broadly knowledgeable about different areas that were of interest and concern, and they had security clearances, that this could be very useful. And so that all started in the 1960s. And I’ve been part of that for more than 20 years now.

Murimi: What are some of the more interesting things you’ve talked about or discussed in JASON? If you can talk about them, that is.

Tim: Well, you know, in many cases, one can’t talk about them. That’s the nature of it. So I will tell you a little bit about the way that it works, which is that the government comes to this group of scientists with problems that they want these scientists to study. And we do this every summer in La Jolla, California. And so I just got back from being there a couple of weeks ago.

Serena: Beautiful place.

Rana: Yeah.

Tim: It is. Although we are toiling away inside of a rather non-descript building most of the day. And the kind of problems they reall…they vary a lot. And on the unclassified side, there’s people who’ve made freedom of information requests, and then they put these studies up on the web. [I’m] trying to think of one where there’s public information…

And so one is that the National Science Foundation came to JASON to ask what [they should] do about what was a perceived problem starting about six years ago, in 2019, about the sense that there was foreign influence on research in the United States. And this was part of a time when there was sort of this…I would say it [was] really concern about China and their investment in science. And the feeling was that China was taking unfair advantage of some aspects of the U.S. science ecosystem. And so we were asked to study this issue for the government. And this was an unclassified and then publicly released report to the NSF.

And in that report, we made what I think is a really important point, which is that we have benefited, the U.S. has benefited, tremendously over many decades now from getting the very best scientists from all over the world to come here to train and then in many cases to stay after they get their degree. And that’s been hugely beneficial. If you look at U.S. scientists who’ve won the Nobel Prize, very many of them are actually people who came here from other countries to the U.S. to study and then to stay and do research. So there were many other parts to that report as well, including acknowledging that there were some things that were problematic about the relationship and there were things that could be done. But we did stress this really important point that science really is an international endeavor. And even if you take the U.S.-centric view of wanting to promote the U.S. interest, we’ve done tremendously well by having people from many countries come.

Serena: What aspects of JASON or the whole organization in general drew you in or motivated you to have this impact on other people or contribut[e] to the government in some way?

Tim: Well, one of the things that’s most fun about it is that when one is a professor doing research, typically you have a laboratory and you work with people in your lab and you work on a specific problem. And that’s wonderful. And you have to really love that problem and you have to want to solve things related to that problem and to motivate the people who are in your lab to work on those things. But you know, there’s this whole other world of science and technology that [is] happening all around us all the time, and as a professor working in, typically, a regular university, you’d be working in a department. Let’s say… I was in the Department of Biology at Stanford for many years. And it’s a relatively narrow experience. You work on a certain topic, your colleagues work on topics that aren’t so far removed from what you work on. And you don’t get the experience of getting to know other scientists and what they do outside of your discipline and to really think about those things.

Now, I think a lot of people think, “well, that’s actually what universities are all about, right? Don’t professors sit around talking about, you know, their research with people in totally different departments? Isn’t that what really happens?” And the answer is, actually, no, that never happens. Almost never. And that’s because everyone’s very busy doing their own thing.

But [it’s] in the context of this JASON organization, which has scientists from all different disciplines and studying many different, really interesting problems, that you really get to stretch your mind with respect to thinking about science or technology. So for me, it’s been tremendously useful, partly as an educational experience. You know, I get to spend the summer with physicists and chemists and engineers of various sorts and computer scientists. And I learn a lot just from participating in studies where I’m not an expert.

Murimi: But back to the East Coast, I guess, and in Rockefeller: what do you think has been the most rewarding thing about being in this international community of scientists? Seeing the many interesting things that 70 plus labs are doing every so often.

Tim: Yeah, so Rockefeller is amazing in a lot of ways. And like I said, I had a very long experience at another great research institution, Stanford University, where I’d been a professor for almost 30 years before coming here. And Rockefeller is very different from Stanford and Stanford is a lot like other great research universities. So, you know, many of the names that you think of when [you think] about great U.S. research universities are places like Stanford or Harvard or maybe MIT, and places like this. And they’re all wonderful places. They’re all very large and they suffer a bit from this problem of having silos, just like we were talking about.

And at Rockefeller, there is none of that. Here, there are no departments. All 72 faculty are just part of [The] Rockefeller University, [and] 275 grad students and about 300 postdocs as well. All with this notion that we’re all here to do great science. I think that the motto of Rockefeller, which is “science for the benefit of humanity”, really is taken as a kind of a motivational thing for what we’re all doing here.

Serena: I think that being here for the summer for a couple of weeks, I’ve noticed that Rockefeller has a really strong community with everyone. Everyone is super kind to each other. Everyone’s willing to talk to each other about research and everyone’s so excited to get to know each other. And I think that’s a really good aspect that Rockefeller has and it kind of makes me feel like a community and a part of the community.

Rana: Aside [from] your time at Stanford, we heard that you created a course with one of your colleagues there called “iBiologist”. Could you elaborate on that and your reason for creating it? [And] what exactly it was?

Tim: Yeah, that was really a great course. That was with a colleague named Liz Hadley, and it was “iBiologist”, and I think there was a colon, “diversity improves the science of biology” or something like that. The idea there was that it was becoming more and more clear from research that people bringing their own thoughts about what were important questions to do research on was really important. Basically, this was saying that your identity as a person in a society and your thoughts about what research was really all about and what you might do as a scientist, that that was actually really important and that science was the better for it if we had that.

There is another course, also very interesting, that I designed with another colleague, Steve Block at Stanford, called “Science as a Creative Process. So that course, the idea was that I think for most scientists, certainly when they’re starting out, they don’t view science as being something creative. They view it as kind of a very strict thing: I got a hypothesis, I have experiments I’m going to do to test that hypothesis, I do experiments in the lab to do those, to test those hypotheses, et cetera. And then you repeat many times over. And that’s all true. That’s part of science; [a] very important part. But the whole thing of how you come up with questions to ask and then answer, and then what approach you take to answering them, that’s a creative process just like things in the arts–like music we were talking about. It’s a creative process just like that. And it’s helpful to think about it that way because it helps you be a better scientist if you’re thinking that way.

And so we had multiple parts. One was that you got a kit of components: an Arduino microcontroller, which is a thing that plugs into your computer, and then a box of sensors that you could wire up to this Arduino microcontroller. The sensors were of a whole variety of sorts– temperature, pressure, a magnetic sensor that would sense when a magnet moved by the thing, the Hall Effect sensor, soil, moisture, all sorts of things. The idea was that you were going to come up with a question (the student), and you were going to build a sensor to answer that question.

So, one student was interested in how many times the wheel of their skateboard rotated in a typical day. So, [they] used the magnetic sensor for that. Another was interested in how many times someone walk[s] down the hallway of their dorm at night and used one of these, you know, laser trip things to sense that. And you had to characterize your device and all of that just in a scientific way. And so that was really a lot of fun. And we also had other parts of the course that were all building towards this notion of science as a creative process.

Serena: I think it’s really interesting that you let the students take their own paths and integrate their curiosity and passions with science, which I think is a really cool aspect.

Murimi: Yeah. I’m a very big Arduino kid. So hearing about that, that is pretty exciting. I would love to have a whole class just on that.

Rana: That’s so awesome. Going back to the “iBiologist” course, with its values being on increasing STEM diversity, we heard that you’d also taught abroad a few times. Would you like to elaborate on your experiences with that? How was that?

Tim: I really enjoyed my experiences teaching outside of the U.S. And they started actually relatively early on when I was an assistant professor at Stanford. A colleague who was more senior than me at a different university, but I knew from my science field, said that he was organizing a workshop in South Africa. And it was gonna be a workshop to teach cell and developmental biology to scientists from South Africa and adjoining countries. And apartheid had just ended in South Africa just a couple of years before. So this was 1996, Nelson Mandela had become president, I think in ’94, and it was a very dynamic time in the country. They were undergoing this huge change. And this would be actually the first science workshop [with] a foreign scientist coming to South Africa in many years because they had been sort of shunned from the science community during the apartheid era. And so I thought that sounded really exciting, and so I agreed to do it. And then that was a fabulous experience, although this comes back to something about your name and frogs.

So at that time, my lab research involved using frog eggs, because the cytoplasm of frog eggs is something that, if you isolate [it] properly, will carry out these reactions of mitosis and other cell biology events, all in a test tube. And I had prepared all of this frog egg extract to bring to South Africa for doing these experiments in the lab course and had shipped it off to the people who were running the course in Madison, Wisconsin prior to going to South Africa. And we arrived in Johannesburg at the university where we’re doing this workshop. [And] I was looking through the freezer, looking for where my stuff was, and there was no frog egg extract.

Rana: Oh no.

Tim: And I said, “Well, what happened?” And they said, “Well, I don’t know. We thought we brought it with us.” And then they called up colleagues in Madison, Wisconsin, and sure enough, it was in the freezer there.

(laughing)

Tim: Now, back then, it may still be true, it [was] not trivial to send things rapidly that far. And so that was not feasible. But some of the South African faculty members said, “You know, not a problem. That Xenopus laevis, that frog is a South African frog. And we can just go out and we’ll be able to catch some in like drainage ditches.”

Serena: Wow.

Tim: So we literally did that. The next day we went out in the area around Johannesburg and caught Xenopus laevis.

Rana: What? (laughing)

Tim: And then [we] brought them back to the lab, amazingly. Now I have to say, the ones that we caught in the wild were a lot thinner than the ones we raised in the lab, which were very well fed.

Murimi: Yeah.

Tim: [They had] eaten a lot of frog chow. But it worked. We got the eggs from these frogs and the experiments all worked.

Serena: Wow.

Tim: I’ve taught other courses in Africa, several times in Ghana and then once in Tanzania, and then once in Chile as well. And in all of those cases, these were attempts to help the people from those areas do the best science on the question that they were interested in that they could do. And it was always amazing to meet the mostly young people who were taking the course, to meet those people, to hear about what their life was like and why they were doing science and what they’re interested in. I think one of the lessons of these kinds of courses is that they’re best if you go back several times to the same place because then you have some– You get to know people there, you have some investment, they feel a relationship with you too, and that can really build something useful.

Murimi: That’s amazing.

Rana: One of the last questions is: if you were to go back ten years, what advice would you give younger Dr. Stearns?

Tim: Oh, well, that’s an interesting question. Ten years. Hmm. Of course for me in my career ten years isn’t even that long ago.

Rana: 20 or 30.

Tim: Maybe 20 or 30, yeah, right. Because I was really starting out 30 years ago. Well, one piece of advice, and I still think it’s true for everyone entering science: don’t be afraid to be bold in choosing problems that are important. And it’s, I think, very common in science to follow a path that seems to follow logically from what you’ve done before. And that’s all good. But it’s often the case where if you sit down and think at junctures of your career and say when you’re starting as a professor, “this is a good time to be doing this,” to really think about what’s the biggest problem in the area of science that you’re interested in and ask “what could I do?” Always think about [that] question and why you’re doing what you’re doing. I think it’s really good advice.

Rana: It’s beautiful.

Serena: Yep. It’s really beautiful. And then one last question. Is there anything else that we haven’t talked about yet that you would really like to mention?

Rana: No pressure at all!

Tim: Well, you know, I would say that for young folks, getting an experience in science and really thinking about science, it’s really important that you seek those experiences that are really going to help you understand what it’s all about. You’re here at Rockefeller, which is great, because you’re really getting a sense of what fundamental research is all about. And I think that’s the most important thing. The bug to do science, it doesn’t arise spontaneously. You have to have had some experience that brings you to that. And again, I want to reiterate just how important it is that people from all parts of life, if they have that bug to do science and they’re driven to study problems that they find important to them, that’s the best thing we could do for making science going forward.

Murimi: Seeking talent, that is great.

Serena: That was [a] very beautiful response and we had a great time learning more about you and everything that you do outside of your job and what you believe in, your hobbies. Thank you so much for all your wonderful answers, Dr. Stearns. We had a great time learning all about you. Thank you for joining us. And thank you for listening to Beyond the Lab. Thank you.

Tim: Thank you so much, good luck.

[OUTRO]

Tim: You know, we could do the reincarnation thing. I actually like tardigrade better. You like tardigrade better? We could go back to that one.

Rana: Okay, let’s do that one. [For] our viewers who may not know what tardigrades are, they’re very small microscopic creatures also called water bears that are very resistant to environmental conditions and they can survive extreme cold, extreme dryness, a lot of things.

Tim: Right.

Serena: Why would you want to be reincarnated as [that] animal?

Tim: Well, you know, I think that description of the resilience of the tardigrade has some appeal. They don’t have the most interesting life, you know, I think, compared to what we see as humans. But I think there’s aspects of a tardigrade that are admirable.