Interview

Dr. Christopher Quick
Texas A&M University

1. What is your background and education?

My educational background is a bit unusual, taking several odd twists and turns. I went to high school in Upstate NY, where the winters are cold and the snow is deep. I was good in math, liked to read, and was really fascinated by biology. When thinking about going to college, I wanted to prepare for a career where I could use both math and biology.

So I made two choices. First, I was going to go to College somewhere warmer, and ended up at the University of Pennsylvania . Second, I chose to major in bioengineering. Once I was there, I really did not enjoy the engineering classes as much as my fellow students, until I took a class taught by Professor Abraham Noordergraaf . I had a chance then to take part in a research project, and found it was the most fabulous thing ever. Research is different than engineering. With research, we try to find out how things work, rather than building things. What Professor Noordergraaf showed me is that we could use math and physics to explain how blood flowed through arteries. He also showed me that you could use engineering principles (such as making a system very energy efficient) to explain why different mammals have very specific circulatory system adaptations.

By the time I got out of college, I wanted to be a scientist, using computers to simulate blood flow through vessels. I went to Rutgers for graduate school to earn a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering (even though it was engineering, Ph.Ds spend most of their time doing scientific research). I spent 7 years simulating the arterial system and heart, to explain why certain kinds of hypertension occur. That is, the focus was on how vessel properties affected blood pressure and blood flow. This is a view of blood vessels like hoses. If you squeeze a garden hose, and the diameter decreases, the amount of flow through it can decrease. I spent most of my time in front of a computer, and quite frankly, never saw an actual blood vessel. I suppose you could have described me as a theoretical scientist. After I graduated (they call you “Dr.” when you get a Ph.D.), I spent 6 month in Virginia learning how to hunt raccoons, and wondered if all that education was going to be useful.

I then was fortunate enough to get a postdoctoral position at Columbia University in NY, working with neurosurgeons and neurologists. They were interested in blood flow in the brain, and needed someone to develop a computer model of the brain, and help them understand how blood flow changes when certain vessels are blocked. This is a treatment for a ruptured vessel, or to route blood away from vessels that look like that they would burst. They were medical doctors, interested in solving problems that were very applied and could impact real people directly. This was very different than my experience working with a computer in graduate school. My advisor moved to the University of California at San Francisco , and I followed. For three years I worked with a different group of neurosurgeons. When I was there (there was no snow), I finally thawed out and started changing what I was studying. Instead of looking at how blood vessel size and shape affected blood pressure and flow, I started viewing blood vessels as dynamic machines that change their size and shape over time. For instance, with regular exercise, vessels can grow larger diameters, allowing more blood to flow to muscles. I learned that changes in blood pressure and flow can actually cause vessels to grow larger or smaller. Again, as in grad school, most of my work there was done on computer, simulating how networks of brain blood vessels adapted over time. I would have liked to have done some experiments, but there are some serious restrictions on the kinds of experiments you can do on humans (would you let someone open up your head and take out vessels to study?). In fact, such experiments are almost impossible in most animals too, since the act of performing surgery to see the vessels makes the vessels behave strangely. Also, if someone wanted to see how vessels changed over time, you would have to open up the animal over and over again to look at the same vessels. There are extremely strict limits for letting scientists do those kind of repeated experiments on animals. So I was stuck, since my computer models could predict all kinds of things, but there were no experiments I could do to test the computer results. Some people think that computers can replace actually measuring things, but that is not yet the case—to make the computer model tell me things like how vessels are expected to grow under specific conditions, I have to assume things, like how sensitive they are to flow, how they are connected to each other, what shape they have. If you assume the wrong things, the results are not useful. So what do you do when you can't do any experiments to test your theories? You get a new job.

That is when I decided to work for Texas A&M University , four years ago. The department of physiology was looking for an assistant professor who was trained in engineering, but was interested in how the cardiovascular system works. This was perfect for me.

2. How did you come up with the idea to use the Pallid Bat for research?

After I was at Texas A&M for 6 months, I was sitting in the office of Dr. Michael Davis, when I made a discovery. Dr. Davis is a colleague who is a well known experimental physiologist. I remember explaining to him that I use computers to predict how networks of vessels adapt over time, and he did not believe some of my results. What was different, is that Dr. Davis also did not believe that it was impossible to do experiments to test the validity of the computer models. It was during this conversation that I saw a picture of a bat wing on the wall. I asked him about it, and he said he did experiments on bat wings for years (I had forgotten about his important work at the time), and told me about how great they are for studying blood vessels without doing surgery. Their wings are so thin, you can put a sleeping bat under a microscope, and see blood vessels and even red blood cells flowing in them.

3. What is the main way you use math in your occupation?

I use math almost every day—but in ways that surprise me. First, I use math to calculate important things like how much blood is flowing in a vessel. Our equipment will only give us velocity of blood flow. Like 3 mm/sec, and radius of blood vessels, like 60 micrometers. Flow is the velocity multiplied by the cross-sectional area (2* p *radius). I also use math to calculate concentration of drugs to put on the wings of bats, so that I get the correct dose to the vessels. Or I use math to derive an equation that describes how blood flow changes with constriction. I also use math in computer programs, when the math gets too complicated to solve by computer. This kind of math involves differential equations, which can be quite complex, Equations like this are all about rates of things—how fast blood fills a vessel, the rate that fluid leaks out of small blood vessels, etc. My students now are doing more math, so I often use math to test their results, to make sure they make sense. For instance, when a student says that flow of fluid in a vessel is 3 ml, min, I can estimate what I think it should be with a little arithmetic, or maybe algebra. I also do a lot of math dealing with costs. Running a laboratory and paying people their salaries can be expensive, and I have to make sure that I do not run out of money by the end of the year, or else I have to fire someone. If I have $220,000 dollars, and I pay 5 students $1,500 each every month, will I have enough? What about 3% raises after month every six months? What if the normal $1.20 per day per bat cost increases 10% this year, but of our 46 bats, 2 bats die of old age every 2 months? I also do some probability calculations, in order to assess risk. If there is a 50% chance that an experiment will fail, and a 50% chance that if it works, it will be uninteresting, what is the chance of having an interesting result? What if it takes 2 hours to do the experiment, how many hours can I guess it will take to get an interesting result? And how many students will get mad at me for making them do a lot of failing experiments?

4. How has the Bat Lap changed and grown since it began?

The bat lab has grown larger than anything I had imagined possible when I started my lab in 2002. In part, this came from re-imagining what a lab really is. At first, I had a room and a microscope. By August 2003, I had a room, a microscope, and 14 bats. Within 3 years, I had 4 microscopes and 46 bats. But the important part is the people who make up the lab. At first it was just me. But really, I have only a limited skill set, and the problems I was interested in exploring require many different skills. So I brought in several graduate students. I started with 2, and then increased to 5. But it was hard to find graduate students that had the right experience in college to prepare them for the lab. Then I realized that undergraduate students had some good skills and an eagerness to participate, so I brought some undergrads in the lab. At first, I had only 3 or four. But by 2004, I had 20. Last Spring I had about 36 undergraduates in my lab. With a large number of students, the lab really is productive and fun. Although it's unusual to have so many people in a lab, they are what makes it work. [not sure if you want to talk about all the faculty and RET collaborators here too?]

 5. Was it fun to collect the bats and what unexpected problems did you run into?

I must admit that of the 3 times that bats were collected—I only went the first time. The problem we first ran into is finding them. We had to find a place where they regularly roost in the day, and most people try to get rid of them if they start living in their attic—the best place to catch them. So we called and called, asking if people knew where the bats were. The particular bats we needed were “Pallid bats”, which do not normally live near Texas A&M. We finally asked my colleague, Dr. Davis, where he got his bats, and we went there—to a small schoolhouse in West Texas . Missy, Eric (a vet student), Dr. Davis, and I had to rent a van, drive 10 hrs, get keys to the school, climb a ladder up into the attic, and walk around on the unfinished floor without falling through the ceiling to a certain death some 25 feet below. Once we found a group of bats upside down, I would call to Dr. Davis (who came with us), and held a step ladder while he grabbed the bats. I held a pillowcase open for him to drop them. It was great fun for someone who spent most of his work day in front of the computer. I think the most difficult thing was finding a group of bats, and catching them before they came out of torpor and flew off. Actually, the most difficult part was my fault, because I would let them see me coming, and so Dr. Davis could not get to them fast enough before I scared them off. But my team found a way to solve this most difficult problem—they made me stay home while they got the bats the next time.

6. What excites you most about eBat?

There are three reasons I am excited about eBat. First, I like showing people the cool stuff under the microscope for the first time. Also, I really like getting more people interested in this research, and eBat is a great way to do it, since it includes both live connections to the microscopes and bats, as well as live connections to the people who make the lab run. The biggest reason, I think, is that with eBat, I might be able to make the largest life science laboratory in the world, where anyone with a good idea can change the direction of the science. I wish I had been a part of that in school—I might have known what I wanted to be sooner.