By Jaimi Gray
I recently sat down with NoCTURN member Chris Zobek (ORCID) to chat about his research, and his tomography journey. Chris is a PhD student in Casey Holliday’s lab at the University of Missouri. His current research involves looking at snake jaw muscle architecture.
“When I joined the Holliday lab, one of the big things that they’d been developing from the late 20-teens was using XFiber to track muscle fibers in diceCT data, so we can get at things like pinnation and fiber lengths… Since then, I’ve become the person in our lab who’s most involved in working with XFiber and pushing what we can do with it”
Chris’s dissertation research involves looking at snakes, and looking at how the muscle architecture in their palatal and jaw muscles has changed across evolution to allow palatal kinesis – the pterygoid walk that snakes use during feeding – and macrostomy, or extreme gape. He summarized his snake research and other projects.
“When you eat something bigger than your head, how do your jaw muscles need to change to allow that? How can these muscles power such complex movements, and how can they accommodate being stretched so far? How have muscle fiber lengths changed, how have their orientations changed, and how have these things evolved across snakes? That’s my main dissertation research. I’ve also been working with an undergraduate researcher, Lillian Porter, to model the fiber architecture in a pangolin’s tongue, a muscular hydrostat.”
I asked Chris how he first got interested in snakes, he explained:
“It really did start a very long time ago, I don’t know how… My family has always been very supportive of me but there’s nothing about them that would’ve pushed me in that direction. My Grandmother was terrified of them. My mom was encouraging because I liked it, but that was probably the only reason. I guess I got a little lucky though because I almost grew out of it, and I sort of fell back into it in undergrad. At Cornell we had a Herp Club and I was like ‘Oh, I still like snakes, I’ll join that!’, and I think that partially, as well as getting involved in research helped me realize, ‘Oh wow, I could have a career studying animals that I’ve always loved’ .”
I asked Chris how he ended up working on tomography data. He explained that it was somewhat of a happy accident.
“When I first started as a freshman I knew I wanted to do biology related work, but I wasn’t quite sure of the direction I wanted to go in . When I was younger, I always wanted to be a zookeeper. But we had this meeting for biology majors my freshman year, and they told us ‘you should try and get into a research lab because it will help you, no matter what you want to do’. At the time I wasn’t really interested, so I was a little late in pursuing research labs and didn’t have any initial luck. Then I did a field course over the summer, and I met someone who was doing research with Casey Dillman at the Cornell University Museum of Vertebrates. He said he could connect me with his advisor to set up a meeting. So I told him the sorts of things I was interested in and that I wanted to study reptiles, snakes ideally, but was open to doing more. I always knew I didn’t want to do a genetics or molecular project, I wanted to do more of an organismal morphology based project. He told me ‘I’m teaching a CT class in 30 minutes, you can come to it, and we’ll get you into it if you like it.’ And I joined, and it was great!”
Chris went on to describe how that was the moment he realized he wanted to get into tomography…
“Before that time I didn’t really know the words for what I was looking for, but it just really felt like this is the kind of research I’m looking for. These are the aspects of my study system that I’m interested in, and this is how I can get at them. And that became a small research project that I was able to continue for all of my undergrad, and continue into my PhD, and it’s been pretty great!”
I asked Chris how it feels to be part of NoCTURN and what he has gotten out of his experiences as part of the network.
“I feel like I’m getting a view behind the curtain. This is how these big projects actually get done and how these huge collaborative efforts work. I’ve been able to see how you can look at a major field of science, and try to look at it from a sky high view, to move it in a better direction or guide it in a certain way. I hadn’t had that sort of experience on something of that scale before. From the people who are extremely invested and know all the ins and outs of CT, to the people who just know how to look at their data and get the thing they want out of it, we can all work together to take our field and improve it, and push it in the directions that we want to see it go in. I think just seeing that process in itself is very fascinating, and being involved in that has given me a great perspective as an early career researcher.”
Chris said that it’s felt great to be able to help in whatever capacity he can, and that it’s been very impactful to be a part of something that is bigger than his own research, that is very directly and obviously helping the field of tomography.
Chris has a lot of experience doing outreach with a wide range of people, all the way from kindergarteners to the general public, and has played a very active role in the Education and Outreach Community, helping us put together our education kits. We are very grateful for Chris’s support!