Episode 6: Paul Cohen

In this episode, we meet Dr. Paul Cohen, a physician and Head of Lab at The Rockefeller University whose research studies how different types of fat cells contribute to metabolic diseases and obesity. Beyond the lab, we learn about Dr. Cohen’s scientific origins in medicine, how he fosters a collaborative lab environment, and why the best scientists aren’t the “mad” scientists–they’re the communicators.

This episode was hosted and recorded by Lelia, Mark, and Lukasz.

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.

Mark: Yeah, okay ready? How do you want to be remembered?

Paul: Oh my goodness…

Mark: Ok, yeah I told you they were big.

Paul: Planning my funeral already!

Mark: Hi everyone, we’re Mark and Lelia and this is…

In unison: Beyond the Lab!

Mark: …the podcast where we discuss all things not science with the world’s leading scientists

Today we’re honored to speak to Dr. Paul Cohen, head of the Cohen Lab at The Rockefeller University. Dr. Cohen is an associate professor, Head of Lab and senior attending physician. His lab aims to study how fat cells influence health and disease with his ultimate goal of developing therapies to reduce obesity-related complications. Outside of Rockefeller, Dr. Cohen is also a consulting cardiologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

Lelia: Thank you for joining us, Dr. Cohen.

Paul: Thank you for having me.

Mark: Yeah, of course. So our first question is a little bit of a doozy, but it’s going to be interesting. As teenagers ourselves, we don’t exactly have the luxury of retrospect. We don’t really know what the little moments are that we’ll look back on later as defining or impactful, but as someone who can look back on those experiences and who’s already lived through that, can you tell us about what stands out? What has led to your interest in science?

Paul: Sure. Candidly, I think at the time, everyone used to say, they probably still do, that if you want to go to medical school, you need to work in a lab. And so that was the depth of my decision process at the time. But I had that first experience after my freshman year of college and really fell in love with the lab. And then later, during my undergraduate, the lab I worked in for a couple of years, where I did my thesis, I was directly mentored by a physician scientist. And that was my first kind of awakening of the idea that you could do both and seeing how closely science and medicine tied together.

Lelia: How do you think you became attached to the idea that you were going to practice medicine in the first place?

Paul: Oh, well, that, I guess, goes further back. So my late father was a doctor. He was a surgeon. And my mom, who’s retired, was a nurse. And so medicine was in the family. My parents and me are also immigrants, so I think culturally there was a high value placed on medicine at the expense of almost any other career. So I think that that certainly shaped me. But then I did still go through high school and entered college pretty undifferentiated and open to a wide variety of things before I ultimately settled on medicine and science.

Mark: Yeah, you mentioned that you had a mentor in undergrad.

Paul: Yep.

Mark: Could you talk to us about how that shaped you and the impact that it had?

Paul: Yeah, so I’m lucky to have had a few really impactful mentors in my career. But this, I guess, first formative mentor was in my undergraduate lab at Harvard. And I worked in a large lab where I didn’t interact a lot with the head of the lab, but the postdoc I worked with directly was a physician scientist who had just finished his clinical training and was now doing his postdoctoral fellowship in the lab. And so, seeing his path and the fact that he was obviously older than me, but not so distant, it was easier to imagine myself in his shoes. And that’s where I really became excited about the career path of doing both medicine and science.

Mark: I wanna go back to something else you said. you mentioned that both your parents were in the medicine field, your mom being a nurse and your dad being a surgeon.

Paul: Yep.

Mark: Was there an expectation for you to go into medicine?

Paul: Yes.

Mark: (chuckling) Yes?

Paul: So, yes. I think jokingly, I say this partly jokingly, but I think growing up many of the other career options I entertained…let’s just say they weren’t met with the same approval as medicine. But ultimately I never felt pushed into it. Maybe because I did feel that pressure I perhaps rebelled if you want to call it that and thought I would do something else more in the humanities. But then as I got into college I realized that I was happiest doing things in the area of science.

Mark: Was there a particular moment that comes to mind? Like one moment where you’re like, “That’s what I want to do.” Or did it happen kind of gradually without you really noticing?

Paul: I think probably more the latter. You know, it’s tempting to look for these aha moments where suddenly everything is clear to you. But I think for me at least, and everyone’s different, earlier in my life and in my career, I didn’t make decisions thinking many years down the road. It was more just what do I think I would enjoy at that particular time. So I think it was more of a gradual thing, honestly. And as you all are probably experiencing already, until you actually spend time in a lab, it’s hard to know if you’ll like it or not.

And medicine I’d say even more so because if you’re interested in medicine you can go and shadow a doctor and watch what they do, but it’s still rather distant from actually being a doctor. So to some extent you’re going with the idea of something that you think you’ll like, but until you’re really in it it’s hard to be certain.

Mark: That’s a really good piece of advice for a lot of high schoolers going through that time. You’re applying to colleges and you have this expectation of declaring a major right away. So it’s definitely a really great piece of advice. I’m sure a lot of our younger audience will take it into consideration.

Lelia: So we also wanted to touch on present day, and I guess we just wanted to know, yeah, how do you use routine to stay consistent and productive? And are you someone who kind of feels comfortable striking a work-life balance or is it effortful?

Paul: I think life is hectic for my family, but in a good way. My wife is a surgeon at Mount Sinai and also leads a research group. We have two sons and several pets, so there’s a lot going on.

But a day for me usually starts around 6:30 a.m. with my son’s cats, which he’s supposed to take care of, waking me up because they want to eat. I usually work for an hour or two at home before coming in. I try to exercise in the morning as well because I’m an aging man and I’m trying to avoid some of the effects of the diseases I study. And then I spend the day in the lab and then typically I’m here until 7, 7:30 and then home. Try to have dinner with my family. And then sadly, but don’t feel sad because I think this is what we want to be doing, evenings for both my wife and I are typically spent sitting in the living room together each with a computer on our laps doing more work until [we] can’t keep the eyes open.

So that’s the general routine. You might be thinking “oh god, what an awful life,” but I find it to be pretty rewarding and exciting.

Mark: You know, if you think about big exams or maybe a big paper you’re writing, it does kind of feel nice to be able to sit down and really concentrate on one thing. So I can understand that kind of, I guess, oasis of working hard, if that makes sense.

Lelia: Do you think there’s one particular moment that happens every day that you look forward to, or just kind of a small thing that is like a cornerstone of your everyday?

Paul: I think there are several. I genuinely look forward to coming into the lab every day. And for me actually–you asked earlier about decisions and how I knew–it wasn’t an aha moment, but when I was an undergraduate and thinking about things I also, looking back, every day when I went into the lab, I looked forward to doing that. And when I was leaving the lab, I was still thinking about what I was doing there. And so that told me, well, if you’re always enjoying going in each day, maybe this is the right line of work for you. So I still do come in each day looking forward to what I’m doing. And I really also like the variety you have in your day as a scientist, where you’re thinking about different questions and topics. You’re spending some time reading and thinking, you’re spending some time interacting with other people, some time teaching… So it keeps the day the opposite of dull.

Mark: I kind of wanted to ask a question about collaboration in your lab. I feel like a lot of people think that science is very individual. You’re sitting in the lab alone, you’re doing work alone, and you rarely speak with others. But from my experiences of being around Rockefeller, it seems like that’s just not true. People are constantly collaborating with each other, getting other opinions. How do you create a collaborative environment in your lab?

Paul: Well, our work is very collaborative. And I think science in general is more and more collaborative these days, mainly because it’s increasingly hard to do really impactful, cutting edge science in a vacuum or in a team of one or two people. So for us, because our question that we work on is fairly broad and is not limited to a particular approach, we instead anchor our work on a question, which is: how does obesity make people sick? And then we dig a little bit deeper by focusing on the biology of fat. But we use whatever approaches we think will get us answers to those questions. And so sometimes that means collaborating with people to learn an approach they’ve developed for another field, and sometimes it means coming up with a problem we need to overcome but not initially knowing what the right approach is and maybe even working with someone collaboratively again to develop a new approach to solving that problem.

Lelia: Do you think some of the values that originally sparked your interest in, you said journalism or law, but do you think you’ve been able to find some of the things that drew you to those subjects in science?

Paul: Law, probably not. I may have lost my mind when I thought of being a lawyer. But I think with journalism and writing in general, I’ve often, earlier in my life, thought of some career involving different aspects of writing. Maybe it was more of a fantasy, but that aspect of telling a story is something that definitely resonates through science and medicine.

So as you are all probably experiencing, a large part of science is having a great idea and doing the work. But then equally important is how you tell the story and how you explain to people, both in your field and outside the field, how you chose that question to study and why you ended up focusing on what you did. And then in a somewhat different way in my medical practice, seeing a patient’s story and what happens to them over the course of their disease and their life is really something that captivates me.

Lelia: On the subject of stories, obviously you don’t have a ton of free time, but do you have any favorite novels or even books that you’ve read recently that you feel like really hit home for you and you kept thinking about?

Paul: Yeah, I have always enjoyed reading and I make it a priority mainly for my mental health to continue to read. So I generally read two books at the same time, which is probably not efficient, usually one fiction and one nonfiction. So I’m actually currently reading, it’s a series of books from John Updike about a fictional character called Rabbit, who sort of traces this guy’s life from his early adulthood as a former high school athlete star and with the backdrop of American society going from the 1950s till about 2000. So I’m really enjoying that. And then on the nonfiction side, I’ve been slowly reading a book called The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which is a really nice deep discussion of all of the science behind the discovery of the nucleus and atomic energy that ultimately led to the atomic bomb. But that’s a bit more heavy reading, so I take it in smaller doses.

Mark: We kind of want to talk a little bit about the, I guess, philosophical side of you. What advice or things that really make you dig deep.

Paul: Okay.

Mark: How do you want to be remembered?

Paul: Oh my goodness…

Mark: Ok, yeah I told you they were big.

Paul: Planning my funeral already!

Mark: (laughing) Oh no!

Paul: Well, I think for me it’s more important to be remembered as a person than for the work I’ve done or the professional contribution–that’s for others to decide what it means to them. But I think at the end of the day, what you really want to be remembered as [is] someone who had a positive impact on the lives of people you came into contact with and that left the world, even in some small measure, a little bit better off than had you not been there.

Mark: Oh, that’s a really great answer.

Lelia: What would you say is an important piece of advice, or something you’ve heard or been told, that you feel like has kind of shaped up your philosophies? Especially like we just talked about–you want to leave the world a little better than you found it. Obviously that’s kind of hopefully a ubiquitous philosophy, but yeah.

Paul: Yeah. I think someone once said to me [to], as you’re planning your own mentorship or leadership style in your own independent career, look back at the mentors you’ve had and emulate the qualities they had that you liked and don’t emulate the qualities that you didn’t like. And then you have to also kind of fold that into who you are as a person, right? So that it feels authentic to who you are.

For me the most enjoyable part about running a lab is interacting with the people in my lab, seeing them develop their science, seeing them succeed in reaching their goals. And on a day-to-day level, it’s seeing them describe their data and look at their data with me and helping them troubleshoot and answer whatever question it has been that they’ve dedicated their time to.

Mark: What do you think is one thing [that’s] very misunderstood about science research?

Paul: Well I still think there’s a bit of a perception in the public that scientists are these super nerdy people with no interpersonal skills who kind of work silently in isolation, toiling away until they make a discovery. And while there might be some aspects of that, as we’ve been discussing so far, a lot of what is really important in science is communication, both communicating your work, communicating your findings within your lab, and then also leading and inspiring others. And so I think the people who do science really well are very good at those things. And so that doesn’t quite fit maybe the conventional stereotype of the mad scientist or the misfit alone in a lab.

Lelia: The reason science works and the reason like…I don’t know about other universities, but specifically Rockefeller, it feels like it’s such an interconnected community. It’s small enough so that everyone knows each other, and it seems like the communication is almost a key to its success as much as it is just a byproduct of people wanting to talk to each other.

Paul: Yeah, I agree. And it’s also…I think a particularly important ingredient is the communication across fields and disciplines, and that doesn’t happen as much in larger, more siloed universities.

Mark: We talked a lot about your advice that you would give, but I also want to talk about when something doesn’t go to plan, how [do] you address [it]? And more specifically in science and also outside of science.

Paul: As you have all probably seen, things rarely go according to plan in science, so you have to be accepting of that. And oftentimes when the results are not as expected, that can ultimately lead to something even more interesting than just proving your original hypothesis.

Lelia: Should we ask our concluding questions?

Mark: Yes. Okay, this is a doozy.

Paul: Alright, you’re gonna stump me again.

Lelia: If we could go back and tell, say, 12-year old Paul that he was a Head of Lab at Rockefeller and a consultant cardiologist at MSK, what do you think he would say?

Paul: Jeez, well, 12-year old Paul wasn’t very talkative. I was kind of a reserved younger guy. So I probably would have answered in like one or two words if I was talking to myself. But I think maybe in hindsight, it wouldn’t have been such a big surprise. Because I think I always took school work seriously, so it might not have surprised me that I ended up in an academic field. And I also like working with people and helping people, and that’s an area that’s covered by both science and medicine.

Lelia: And do you think you’d have anything urgent to say to him?

Paul: Yeah, don’t be a punk. Well, to 12-year-old Paul or any 12-year-old. I have a 12-year-old in my house now. [He’s] not named Paul.

I think the most important thing is: follow your passions. And that’s what I tell the high school students and undergrads who’ve worked in my lab, too. I think for me as a mentor, the most rewarding thing is to see people passionate about what they’re doing. And if that’s in science and medicine, great. But if it’s not, that’s also fine. You only have one go at it, so it’s really important for people to pursue what they love. I’ve been lucky enough to do that in my career and I would want the same for others too.

Mark: That just about concludes the questions that we have. Maybe if you want to take the time and maybe say something? Most of our audience are younger people, whether it be our age or even people that haven’t been necessarily introduced to science a lot. Is there anything you think is important to say or to tell these people about what you do or what science is all about?

Paul: Well, I would say if you’re interested in knowing more about science, look to spend some time in a lab just like the three of you are doing. For me, as a younger person in high school, science was really restricted to the lab portions of my classes, which was, you know, maybe dissecting a pig or something of that sort, but not anything really closely related to what I think being a scientist actually is.

Mark: Very cool. Well, thank you for joining us, Dr. Cohen, or as you want us to call you, Paul. And thank you everyone for listening to Beyond the Lab.

Lelia: Thank you.

Paul: Thank you for having me.

[OUTRO]

Paul: Are there commercials, by the way?

Mark: Uh no, no commercials.

Lelia: (laughing) Yeah our audience is not big enough for that.

Paul: Ok. You guys need sponsors.

Mark: Yeah, we’ll work on it.

Lelia: Yeah, we’ll get sponsors.