Dr. Jesús Peña

By Lucy Soulliere

Dr. Jesús Peña is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Colorado College Department of Organismal Biology and Ecology. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees in molecular biology from Denver University, and a PhD in microbiology from the University of California, Riverside. Dr. Peña’s area of specialty is evolutionary developmental mycology.

Could you tell me a bit about yourself, the work that you do, and why you decided to pursue biology as a career?

I was first introduced to the concept of evolution when I was seven or eight years old, shortly after the discovery of whale fossils in various landlocked nations in Africa. Whales have been around for a very long time, yet the whales to which the fossils belong looked quite different from our whales today. To seven-year-old me, the idea that all things are ultimately related and have been changing for millions of years was mind-blowing. That's what locked me on the biology path for the remainder of my life.

I started off doing research biology working with freshwater sponges right after undergrad. I was interested in the evolution of multicellularity, which sponges provide a great study organism for because of some interesting cell types they have. I was fascinated by the ideas of evolution and that, through experimentation, we can get a sense of how evolutionary transitions have happened.

After I finished my master's, I decided that I wanted to continue pursuing questions of evolutionary transitions. There's a lot of research that's been done on animals, which is great and a very rich knowledge base to build from, but I decided that I wanted to pursue those questions in fungi. So I did my PhD on fungal developmental biology, with this evolutionary component. Oftentimes, genes are conserved and repurposed across evolution. This process has been heavily studied and proven in animals. I wanted to know if this also occurs in fungi. That question was the nucleation factor towards my dissertation.

What are the most rewarding and most challenging parts of your job?

I think the most rewarding part of my current job is teaching. When we think of the process of science, it's researchers who are looked at as the ones pushing science forward and making discoveries. And it's true, right? They're active players in that process.

But I think that science educators are just as important for that process because it's the educators who are ensuring that there's continuity of knowledge. I get a lot of joy out of interacting with students, and deep down knowing that I'm contributing to that and that one day, the students that I'm teaching will be contributing to this process of discovery. So I really like that, it makes me feel part of the whole.

The most challenging part of teaching is figuring out what those aha! moments are going to be. We've all been in classes where it's a couple of weeks into the term and it's just so much information. Then suddenly you get this one lecture about the thing that's really interesting to you and everything lights up, and you see the big picture. But that link is so different for everyone, and that's what I struggle to sometimes identify. It's certainly the hardest part of the job, especially at a big school.

Now, somewhere like CC, where the last class I taught was 11 students, it's much easier to identify that spark for everybody. It feeds back to the rewarding part of the job because it is so much easier in a small classroom to find what everyone's connecting with and to integrate those pieces into my lessons.

What are some of the things you do for fun outside of STEM that keep you passionate and enthusiastic about your career?

One of my favorite things to do, that I've been doing since I was a freshman in high school, is learning languages. I've had experience with a good amount of European languages. I’m not yet fluent in any, but I have a kindergarten vocabulary in Swedish and Norwegian. If I’m not learning a language, then I’m learning about how different languages are related, so again back to evolution. Etymology and philology are very interesting to me.

As for less academic-oriented fun stuff that I do, I got into figure skating a few years ago. It's fun and it’s a different type of challenge. It’s very fulfilling, kind of almost spiritual even, to just be out on the ice moving around not thinking about anything except your place and space at a particular point in time. It's very mindful.

Why do you think it is important to foster diversity and inclusion in ecology? What do you think the importance of representation is in the sciences?

In ecosystems, biodiversity ensures that they stay resilient and stable over time. I think that very similarly, diversity in the field of ecology and evolutionary biology is important - a diversity of viewpoints is critical to keeping research programs and pedagogies stable, resilient, and most importantly, relevant. If you only have one group of folks doing all the research, it's a very limited perspective that also limits our learning.

Representation has been an issue very near and dear to my heart. I did my undergrad at Denver University, and the demography is very much like CC. It was majority white-identifying students and largely people of high socioeconomic status. That demography was also reflected in the faculty. So there was really no one who looked like me or who could relate to my experience as a person of color in the sciences.

Back then it was not necessarily a deterrent to not see myself represented, I was just very interested in biology. I had tunnel vision blinders, to the point where for a time I was even convinced that your identity in the sciences does not matter, does not contribute to anything, science is objective, etc. Now we know better.

Once I got to grad school and started to see how biology departments function, I started taking stock of who was present, and which students weren’t speaking as much in my classes. Then I realized, oh, these students see themselves in me. I need to put my best foot forward, be their advocate, be their ally, and in some cases, be a sponsor for them. I try to encourage people that I did it, so very clearly, you can too. Representation is super important, and we want folks who are historically excluded or minoritized to feel like they belong, which starts with looking at the faces represented in that field.

But it only starts with representation. Certainly, I could stand in the hallway and advertise that “I’m Mexican and I have all these other identities,” and that likely would help some students find a touchstone to feel like they belong. But then we also have a responsibility to follow up. As professors, yes, we can use our faces to recruit people, but then we also have to find ways to retain them. We have to ensure that they are supported, that their needs are being met, and ensure that we are teaching the whole person and not just the scientist.

What's your teaching philosophy and how do you try to foster inclusion in your own classroom?

So I'll start by saying that I do, metaphorically, try to stand out in the hallway as a way to signal to students that they are safe. I tell them who I am, and that if any pieces of that resonate with you, that part of you is welcome, and all parts of you are welcome. If there's one piece that you may be less confident about, know that the professor is right there with you and I relate to your experience in some way, and I’m happy to provide support beyond just classroom academics. That’s how I set the tone.

In my syllabi, I always include a statement on diversity and how we're co-creating an inclusive environment. I list my different identities and mention how those identities give me insight into the student experience and how that feeds into learning.

Once we establish that, the next question is how to structure the content. How do we deliver the content in such a way that all the students can find their puzzle pieces? That puzzle piece could be completely academically motivated. But it could also be more related to these diverse identities that students have. Identifying relevance to our own lives is the most powerful way I’ve found of helping students find that puzzle piece.

In classes I’ve taught in the past, I would teach DNA structure. We'd start the conversation with ways that the structure of DNA has been abused. There's a podcast called “Suspect” about Emanuel Fair, a black man from Washington who was held in jail for nine years over a crime he didn't commit. The crime happened at a Halloween party, and he was the only one accused of the murder. This was because his DNA was recovered at the scene, he was the only black person present, and he had a prior criminal record. The police used all of that information and said ah yes, the smoking gun is his DNA. But there are all these ways that his DNA could have been there; it was a party, and everyone was there.

When I did that lecture, it was shortly after the George Floyd protests, so it was very relevant in everyone's minds. Now not every lecture or class can have that type of example, even if it is super powerful, and it's one of the lectures that I’m proudest of. So we have to find other avenues.

The most recent example that I have with identifying relevance was in my Block 2 ecology class, which I taught through the lens of soil ecology. In that class, the point of relevance was land use in Colorado. In Colorado Springs, we have lots of designated open spaces, which the city is in charge of stewarding. When we went as a class to these open spaces, one thing that we noticed is that there are many cottonwood trees that are adapted to periodic flooding. But the folks managing the land don't do prescribed floods, so now all these cottonwoods are dying out and many invasive species are very happy to be there because there's no flooding.

Additionally, El Paso County and Colorado Springs weren’t the first people to manage these lands. We brought in the perspective of indigenous knowledge and the history of the tribes that have acted as stewards of these lands before colonization. So I’m trying to take this more holistic view by using many different points of relevance and bringing them together to frame and explain science.

What advice would you give to young minority students looking to go into biology and ecology?

Even though I've been interested in biology for a very long time, one of the underlying interests that pervaded that was chemistry. I almost majored in chemistry in undergrad, but was deterred by individuals in the department and their evaluation of minority students. It was a rather toxic environment, which put me off from that field of study, although thankfully, biology is equally fulfilling for me.

If there's one piece of advice that came from that experience, it’s that if you are interested in something, chase after it. If you're very passionate or even just somewhat interested, go for it. Even if there are external voices, saying it's not the right fit for you, there's no money at the end of this, or whatever else, ignore those. I think we've come a long way in supporting the idea that if someone's passionate about something, they should not be kept from pursuing it. Just something I would tell all students to internalize.

The other piece of advice I would give is to find mentors. I give that advice from the professor side of the career, knowing and having experienced the value of mentors. But I know that for students, particularly minority students, finding a mentor is scary. It can be very daunting to ask someone to be your mentor.

But find a mentor. You don't have to stick with that mentor forever. Maybe they don't support you in a particular way that you need. So find another one, find multiple. Just find someone who's going to help support you and guide you through your career, whatever stage that may be.

My last piece of advice is to embrace being a learner. This is something that I have been grappling with since grad school. You’re not expected to know everything, and you're gonna make mistakes. You can go off to grad school and run experiments for months and get a result that doesn’t mean anything. It feels bad when that happens, but this is where adopting and embracing the learner mentality comes into play. Yes, that didn’t work, but now let's think of what we can alter to a more ideal result. Certainly don't manipulate your data, but do change your perspective. Appreciate that failure or mistake as an opportunity for growth rather than as the end of your career, because it’s not.

How inclusive do you think the current workplace culture is in ecology and biology and what do you think still needs to change?

I think that biology has made a good deal of progress. There are increasingly more initiatives to bring new voices into the field and to retain them, which we’re seeing play out in many working groups and organizations. All of these groups have recently, since the George Floyd protests in 2020, been more proactive about bringing in new voices and perspectives. So I think we're in a good spot. We've made progress, but there’s still clearly more that we can do.

Some of the barriers that we may still see could go back to representation. Is there a familiar face in ecology? The field is increasingly diverse, but I may also be experiencing an echo chamber effect in regard to what I see. My little slice of it is very diverse, but it could have more to do with the affinities I have towards certain groups. These networks are self-sustaining, which is kind of the whole point, to have a community within the broader field that's going to act as your support network.

But now we need to expand those networks, making it so that even people who don't have any minority identity can contribute to that work. We need them to contribute to building these many networks within a broader network and even integrate into them, be a part of and an ally to those groups.

Another thing that I wanted to share in response to this question is something that came up during my ecology block. As a class, we read this review article that tries to summarize many contributions of indigenous peoples to ecology. It was a great article that inspired lots of good discussion. But one thing that the article did was establish this dichotomy between indigenous knowledge, comparing it against Western science. The article went on to say, that from here on out, we will refer to indigenous knowledge as indigenous knowledge and Western science as a science. It felt very two steps forward, and one step back.

I appreciate what they were trying to do with the article, and obviously, they didn't set out to make that dichotomy. It's just that our language is limited. We’re working within the bounds of the available language, and we have to appreciate that nuance. So if there were things that needed to change to make the field more inclusive, I think it has to go back to the evolution of language. We need new terms. We need new ways to describe different forms of language and not reserve the term science just for Western science. We have to make science the umbrella term.