I don’t think I would’ve been better off being a biologist to begin with

No such thing as a standard career path – an interview with Karen Liu

Karen Liu is Professor of Genetics and Development at King’s College London, UK. She did English and architecture as an undergrad and worked in an architectural firm for a couple of years before deciding to pursue a scientific career. We had a chat with Karen to find out more about her switch from architecture to science, and how her own experience has influenced how she guides early career scientists through their career journeys today.

Can you briefly tell us about your career path so far?

I’m currently Professor of Genetics and Development at King’s College London, and I’ve been here my entire independent career. I started here as a lecturer in 2007 and before that, I was at Stanford for three years in the labs of Michael Longaker and Gerald Crabtree as a joint postdoc. Prior to that, I did a PhD at UC Berkeley with Richard Harland. Before my PhD, I was a technician at Columbia for two years, in a mouse lab with Argiris Efstratiadis and that was where I started in science. I was the only tech in the lab, so my duties included washing the dishes, lab management and a lot of mouse work. I barely knew what DNA was! I’m still astounded that I now have this job as a biology professor, because as an undergraduate, I went to Columbia University and studied architecture and English.

Let’s wind back the clock: you started out training as an architect. How was that experience?

The architecture degree I did was very theoretical. I knew during the degree that I didn’t want to be an architect. Like science, architecture is a creative field but it’s very much about the funding pressures. To be a famous architect, you need a lot of resources backing you up, and the field comes and goes with the vagaries of the economic situation. I was at university in the early 90s, when there was a major economic crash. When I got out of university, I managed to get a job at I. M. Pei. This was a very exciting period in architecture – they had just done the Louvre Pyramid, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and other amazing buildings. But I didn’t work as an architect. I had an English degree as well, so I worked in the office where we put out press releases and wrote grant applications. I did a lot of architectural writing and putting together proposals.

What influenced your decision to pursue a scientific career?

Because of the economic situation, it was not a stable job. I didn’t want to stay in architecture, but I had to think hard about what to do next. I had a fair amount of science background in high school. When I was working at I.M. Pei, I was ill for a while. I thought I needed to do something useful for humans, but I also want to do something fun. With biology, there’s an infinite number of questions out there. I thought if I could become a biologist, there will always be something I could be excited about. I didn’t know anyone who was a research scientist; it just seemed like a fun thing to go to grad school for.

Your entry into the research world was a lab technician job. How did that come about?

I didn’t take any biology in college, so initially I was looking around for night school. Then I found out that at Columbia, where I’d done my undergrad, offered employees two courses a term for free. So, I decided to find a job at Columbia. I was talking to the HR person at Pei, and she mentioned she had a friend who ran the sequencing facility at Columbia. After talking to them, they in turn mentioned that the lab of Argiris Efstratiadis was looking for a technician. I went to talk to Argiris, and amazingly, he gave me a job based on nothing. I think he liked interesting people who had done different things and who genuinely wanted to be in biology.

I started out washing pipettes and bottles and making media in the lab. In the meantime, I took some undergraduate classes, like genetics, developmental biology, and biochemistry. Biochemistry included organic chemistry, which totally kicked my ass! By the second year I worked there, they said I could take the first year PhD seminar course in the genetics department. It was during this course that I read about all these famous and wonderful genetics and development papers. The tutors included Gary Struhl and Iva Greenwald, and Ginny Papaioannou taught us mouse genetics. They made a developmental biologist out of me!

You’re currently a Professor of Genetics and Development at the Centre for Craniofacial and Regenerative Biology, King’s College London. What is your research about?

My lab works on the neural crest. It’s a vertebrate-specific population that arises in the embryo. The neural crest is multipotent in the embryo. The neural crest cells are born at the neural crest border, and then migrates. We are interested in the migratory properties of these cells and how they interact with their surrounding environment as the embryo develops. Because the embryo is changing dramatically during those stages, the neural crest cells need to crawl through tight spaces and navigate complicated environments. We’re interested in the molecules and the proteins that are important for human development and the phosphorylation events that control the interactions between cells. That’s the fundamental basis of the lab. On the other end, we’re identifying new gene variants from human patients who have congenital neural crest anomalies. Our focus is on head structures because the crest forms most of the skeleton in the head and some cardiac tissues. We collaborate with people who work on other neural crest derivatives, like the enteric nervous system. From a migration perspective, we’re also interested in a neural crest cancer called neuroblastoma, which arises from the sympathoadrenal system. We try to keep our work rooted within human anomalies, and that’s an active decision that I made when I started my lab. I wanted to make sure the things I do are relevant to the human condition.

Are you involved in other research initiatives?

I lead the Congenital Anomalies Cluster of the MRC National Mouse Genetics Network. Our overarching goal is to improve the way we model novel gene variants identified from patients with congenital anomalies. There is an infinite number of gene variants, but if you can’t attribute functional changes to them, then it’s meaningless data. The initiative is aimed at modelling these variants in mice. We are loosely linked with the Rare Diseases UK network, because a lot of the neural crest anomalies are rare diseases. We’ve just finished a Horizon 2020 training network called NEUcrest, which is a clinical to basic science PhD training programme spanning 15 students in 10 countries across Europe. That was exciting and rewarding to have a network of people focused on modelling neural crest anomalies. For me, at this stage of my career, I enjoy enabling these kinds of scientific interactions to have a broader impact. I’m also the academic lead for the Crick. I have oversight over all the Crick PhD students who are registered at King’s. I’m stepping down now after seven years. I run a PhD programme at King’s called Multiscale Models for Life, which is a new multidisciplinary programme where the two supervisors are from different disciplines. I also have a role at Kings as a postgraduate coordinator. In general, I think a lot about the different aspects of being a PhD student.

How did your previous roles help you get to where you are now? Do you see any similarities in architecture and science?

I think everyone winds up being the person they are like based on their route. From the architectural perspective, a lot of the themes still go through the research that we’re interested in now – how things are built, how they work together, how they function and what happens when things go wrong. I think the aesthetics of architecture really made me intolerant of bad figures or posters. I like schematics to be clean and figures to be aligned. I’ve not done any bench science myself in a long time, but I still love sketching out ideas and making schematics of our hypotheses. We’re also interested in 3D modelling now, like AlphaFold modelling of variants. Computational modelling in biology has matured over the years. A lot of that arose from architectural drawing and 3D renderings. I appreciate architecture from a distance much greater now than from within.

There’s also a similarity in terms of the collaborative nature of the work. The architectural field is very much about group work. People have their own expertise, but they have to bring all that together to make a building. The same is true in biology. I have people in my lab who love biochemistry and will only run western blots, and people who specialise in dissecting embryos. We need people to come together to build a magnificent story. I like seeing how things fit together and I like helping my people see that.

Anything you’ve learned from switching career paths? Looking back, would you have done anything differently?

It’s a big question! I don’t think I would’ve been better off being a biologist to begin with. I don’t regret the long way to where I am now. For me, being a biologist is an active decision I made when I was in my 20s. I’m really fortunate that I was able to choose that and then move into it and wind up being a professor now. I was pretty terrified when I went into the PhD – I was 28 years old, and I knew zero biology going in. I think I did not take enough advantage of my undergraduate education. I was a really bad student, but one thing I would say to students now is, even if you’re a really bad student, you can come out of that and figure out what you really like, and then slowly work your way there. I don’t know if I could switch careers like I did now. I probably won’t be brave enough. It’s also helpful if you have a safety net. I think a lot of people couldn’t do that. Back then, perhaps I was a bit naïve. I figured if I could pay my rent, I’d be okay. If grad school didn’t work out, I could always get another job.

Do you have any advice to someone thinking of switching career paths? Has your own experience influenced how you give career advice?

I think people who haven’t switched careers can’t appreciate how difficult it is. Some people think that because they’ve just finished a PhD, switching feels like they’re failing. It’s not. You just did this PhD where you became the world’s expert on your topic! I think the hardest part is to get over that feeling that it’s a failure. Then you need to do a bit of self-reflection. What are you good at? Some people think, I’m not good at anything other than running Western blots. That’s so not true. You just wrote a 200-page thesis. You’ve presented your data again and again, coordinated with many people, and put together an entire project with many moving parts. You can ask yourself, am I good at the people part? Or the writing part? Would I prefer to be by myself all day, or would I prefer to spend a lot of time with others? Those simple questions are a really good start.

Then you can talk to all kinds of people and find people who are supportive. This can be difficult, but people are more supportive than one thinks. Looking back, I found that people really made an effort to point out particular opportunities and help me move to the next phase. Like that woman from the architectural firm, she didn’t have to tell me about her friend at Columbia’s sequencing facility, but she was helpful and was excited about my career prospects (I should really write to her and thank her!). So now in my own lab, I always try to point out opportunities to students.

I did work hard to get to where I am now, and I think people should own that. Of course you have to work hard, but it’s easy to work hard if you’re in a nice environment. But certain work environments are not so great, and if you could tell it isn’t the right place for you, then it’s time to take a step back and try to figure out how to get yourself out of that situation. We read these articles about changing careers and how you have to be brave etc. I think people in more senior positions need to appreciate that being able to change is a privilege, and I feel strongly about this. You cannot change if you don’t have a safety net, so we need to be providing that safety net, within the university and within the PhD programme.

Finally, what do you enjoy doing outside of research?

I like good food and I like traveling. I like to do long-distance walking. My husband, who is also a scientist, and I have been trying to do things that are a little bit outside of our comfort zone. We took a pottery class recently. I’m terrible at it, but it’s fun!

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