Welcome to our first ever scientist spotlight! I thought it would be fitting to have a shark scientist as our first spotlight guest. It is my pleasure to introduce to you Dr. Toby Daly-Engel. She is one of my favorite scientists and I’m honestly still pinching myself that she agreed to talk with me for this post. If you watch Shark Week, you may recognize her from her 2018 special where she had an all-female manned shark research boat. She is currently a professor at Florida Tech and runs the Shark Conservation lab studying the molecular evolution of sharks with a focus on reproduction. We chatted over skype for just over an hour and it was an absolute joy. Everyone, meet Dr. Toby Daly-Engel!
Alyssa: What made you want to become a scientist and when did you know you wanted to be a scientist?
Dr. Daly-Engel: I was one of those super weird little kids who was obsessed with sharks. Nobody knows where that came from exactly. I’ve asked my parents and they were just like, “uhh I dunno you started liking sharks from birth and then we got you some books.” I am one of those freakishly lucky people who always had sort of this vague inclination, and I didn’t know what it meant to be a scientist or any of that, but as I made my way through I managed to find something that I am at least good enough at to get by. It didn’t start out that way, though. I am actually more of a better writer; better at creative writing and English than I ever was at science and math. So I have always wanted to be one, but it took me a long time to figure out what that meant and now I just feel really fortunate that I am one of those rare people that started out wanting to do something and now I've actually been able to do that. A lot of people grow up not knowing what they want to do, but I was oddly always like, “I’m going to be a marine biologist and I am going to study sharks.” I didn’t know what that meant, but it's what I always wanted to do.
Alyssa: What did you do to become a scientist?
Dr. Daly-Engel: When I was younger I was really into school. I was always kinda that nerdy kid, which, ya know, is cool now. But I was also a huge tomboy and really into sports. My family was not super well off, so when it came time to apply for college I wasn’t going necessarily marine science-oriented. I knew I was working toward a biology future, but I ended up going to school in Ohio because I got the best financial aid there and they didn’t have a marine bio department. I’ve sort of been limited in that sense in all of my moves by who’s offering me a salary. I’m not independently wealthy and that actually touches on something that is a huge problem in marine science, which is that it is incredibly white. We have so little diversity partly because this profession oftentimes selects for affluent students because internships are unpaid. You’re expected to go into debt to go to South Africa to cage dive and somehow put it on your resume like it’s work experience. So, I have a lot of degrees. None of my diplomas say the word “marine” because one of the things I think that people don’t realize is that you’re not expected to specialize as a scientist in one system until later in your career. I just kind of went where I got the best opportunities, which ended up being Oberlin College in Ohio, which I loved. During my junior or senior year I got to do an internship back when internships used to be paid. I realized when I got to do that internship at Duke University Marine Lab, that I was actually not bad at being able to sort of do creative lab science. I loved Oberlin, but it was a really hard, small private school, very challenging, and my grades were not fantastic. Like I said, I was better at things like English and writing, but science, math, chemistry, physics, those were always really challenging for me. I think if I had wanted to be anything else or had been any less stubborn, I may have chosen a different profession. But once I got to do an internship, I realized that the less structured, non-class based part of research was something that I could actually do, including fieldwork.
But I was super burned out when I finished Oberlin because it was a really tough school. I learned a lot, but I graduated and I needed to get a job. I wasn’t ready to go to graduate school. I knew I wanted to go to grad school someday because the profession that I wanted meant that I needed grad school, but I was totally burned out and I wasn’t qualified at that point because my GPA wasn’t fabulous. So I ended up taking two years off, just off of school. I lived in Boston for two years and I worked as a lab technician in a biomedical lab. Biomedical science is so well funded that they have a lot of those positions for those young technicians, which is like a stepping stone between undergrad and grad school. I worked at the Harvard School of Public Health. Since I was an employee at Harvard, I took a couple of classes and I took a marine bio class for the first time, and I got to add that to my CV. Then I just sent grad school applications all over the world, and again, I went where I got the best financial offer, which was the University of Hawaii. I did my masters and my Ph.D. there.
Now, as a professor, I work at Florida Tech where we’re really good at giving our undergrads credit for working in a lab to do research. Because that experience was so important to me, showing me that I can be an author on papers and give presentations, and much more approximated the professional side of science rather than the classroom, that's really the experience I try to give my undergrads. Now I tell my students, no matter what you want to do, if you want to be an aquarist, you want to do an aquaculture career, you want to go into management, you want to be a veterinarian, you want to be an orthopedist, I don’t care where you want to go to school, research experience can help with that. It is the best thing you can do for your CV or your scientific resume. At each step in my career I sent out as many “ropes” as I possibly could and at each stage I was lucky enough that somebody grabbed and I grabbed back. In that sense you don’t have a ton of control. Looking back I can say that, “oh yeah, I did my blah blah blah in Hawaii and I took a postdoc in Arizona for blah blah reasons” which sounds really good, but in reality I got a job offer and I took it. In the end, I found out that that kind of diversity is actually really helpful. It matters not at all what the words on your diploma are. It doesn’t matter where your creature lives, it's a creature. It’s behavior, or it’s molecular ecology, it’s physiology, it’s life history strategies. My students aren’t coming out of my lab as shark biologists. It turns out that that is a media title. There is no job “shark biologist”. They are going to be molecular ecologists, they're going to be evolutionary geneticists and they can apply those to whatever they want, which is why I was able to go from studying mice with a skin disease to studying sharks. The type of research you do matters not at all, it’s about the process. I was successful in other avenues until I got to the point that I could choose my own system. Tenacity matters more than almost anything else.
Alyssa: What is one area of science that you would never want to study?
Dr. Daly-Engel: Eugenics. Or if you’re looking for something more realistic, snakes, herpetology. I’m terrified of snakes.
Alyssa: If you weren’t a scientist, what do you think you would be doing?
Dr. Daly-Engel: I’d probably be the worst, most obsessive high school science teacher. Or, actually, I think I might be a lawyer. I can argue the fuzz off a peach. I grew up in Woodstock, New York by people who had moved up there, not because they were hippies, because they didn’t have that kind of money, but were very much free thinkers and conscientious objectors and brought us to protests. My dad is a family lawyer, so I think I would have wanted to be a human rights lawyer. Or just be on public radio. I love public radio.
Alyssa: As a woman in science, I am sure you have faced all kinds of discrimination. How do you combat that discrimination and what advice would you give to other girls wanting to go into science?
Dr. Daly-Engel: I think that, fortunately, we are combating that discrimination more and more. Similar to other types of professions, marine biology is starting to get more attention for the lack of diversity and lack of support for female scientists in particular. Not to mention in shark biology, in particular, the near absence of people of color and open LGBTQ individuals. On the one hand, it's pretty much the same as other professions, especially the shark part. The shark part is kind of macho, manly kind of thing. I just try to not perpetuate those harmful acts myself. As a female, like in any profession, I feel like I have to work three times as hard to be in the same place and that could definitely make me bitter. I have some residual territoriality in some of my tendencies that I try not to pass on to my students. With the other scientists of my generation, we’ve all grown up and there are so many more women in my generation than there ever were before. We kind of have numbers on our side at this point, so we, this next generation of younger professors, are starting to usher in more awareness and more change. Like any type of profession, there are silverbacks, there’s a lot of OGs that are totally backward, but it’s becoming better. I feel like my job is to take the bad experiences that I’ve had and not let them make me bitter, not let them make me more competitive, or harder on my female students than my male students because I feel like they need to be more hardened and develop armor. I just try to make it as open and cooperative and joyful of an experience as I can. You know, that sort of traditional trap of Discovery Channel shark wrangler stereotype, trying as much as possible to move away from that. As a white woman, trying to amplify the voices of women of color, and men too, because they’re really starting to come out. Now that I’m in a position of “power”, now that I’m a professor, talking to my fellow white people, because professors are pretty much all white, about how do we change that and how do we make the system better for women, for families. We don’t want it to be a choice between having a family and having a career. I didn’t have to choose, and nobody else should have to choose. I am dealing with my own experiences by trying to actively make the world a place where my students won’t have to experience that.
I enjoyed my chat with Dr. Daly-Engel immensely and I hope you enjoyed getting to read a snippet of our conversation (we are a lot alike in that we tend to ramble and go off on little side tangents about things unrelated to the question, but in the best way possible) and learn about her path to becoming a scientist. She is an inspiration to me, and I hope she can be one for you as well. What is your biggest take away from what Dr. Daly-Engel had to say? I think mine was that you don’t have to take a specific path to end up where you eventually want to be, there are many ways to get there, and the more diverse your path is the better. If you want to keep up with Dr. Daly-Engel, you can find her on Twitter @dalyengellab or on Facebook under Daly-Engel Shark Conservation Lab. Thank you for learning with me and I will see you next month for another scientist spotlight!
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