From left: Shawn Yoshida (CWR ‘21) places a sample on a nanoscale microscope built by Lydia Kisley’s lab group. He completed his award-winning undergraduate research under Kisley’s mentorship. Photo by Roger Mastroianni
Life came full circle for Lydia Kisley when she started mentoring students in her Case Western Reserve lab. This university, after all, was the first place she ever found a genuine mentor for herself.
At the time, Kisley was a senior at a Cleveland-area high school—Mentor High School, as it happens. Through a program that enabled students to explore possible career paths, she spent time in a pathology laboratory at CWRU School of Medicine. Kisley remembers going in with tempered expectations; she wasn’t sure how she would be received. But to her surprise, her mentor—a fifth-year graduate student—immediately engaged her in the lab’s mission.
“I was just a high school student,” says Kisley, now the Warren E. Rupp Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics. “My mentor could have sent me to the corner to read papers and do nothing. But the first thing she said to me was, ‘Let’s go grab a coffee!’ She got me some Starbucks, and we started talking about the project. I thought that was so cool.”
The experience had a lasting influence on Kisley. “I consider undergraduates to be true members of my lab group,” she says. “That’s part of my mentoring philosophy. I spend time with mentees and converse with them, and we reach a point where we can be on an equal footing.”
To Kisley, an egalitarian style of mentoring seems especially suited to the realm of science. “Research is about exploring the unknown,” she explains. “I don’t have all the answers, just as students don’t. A mentee might start out thinking that a mentor knows everything, because of the mentor’s title or the difference in their ages. But that’s not true.”
Two recent CWRU alumni have benefited from Kisley’s approach. Shawn Yoshida, who graduated this May with a Bachelor of Arts in physics, and Hannah Messenger, who graduated in January 2021 with a Bachelor of Science in physics and a Bachelor of Arts in music, carried out their senior research projects in Kisley’s lab. When they presented their work at Intersections—the undergraduate research symposium hosted by SOURCE (Support of Undergraduate Research and Creative Endeavors)—in December 2020, they won first and second prize in the physical sciences category.
“I felt Shawn and Hannah really deserved that recognition, given how hard they’ve worked and the grit they’ve shown,” Kisley says. “It’s been very rewarding to see them grow as researchers.”
Yoshida and Messenger, in turn, give Kisley much of the credit for their achievements. “She’s very interested in each individual student,” Yoshida says. “She makes us each the best we can be.”
“She made sure I had the help I needed when I needed it—and not just for my senior project,” Messenger says. “I felt very comfortable coming to her with anything, whether it was questions about life after college or asking for recommendation letters. That was huge.”
Yoshida’s connection with Kisley goes back to Spring 2019, when Kisley, then a new faculty member, was starting her lab. He had heard she would give students the chance to work on their own projects, not projects already launched by graduate students or postdocs. “At that point, I knew I wanted to do something on the experimental side,” Yoshida says. “So this looked like a great opportunity.”
In this illustration, based on images Shawn Yoshida produced with the Kisley lab’s microscope, molecules diffuse through the extracellular matrix—the space between cells.
Born in Tokyo and raised in Illinois, Yoshida found his nascent interests in physics and biology dovetailing into experimental biophysics once he began his studies at Case Western Reserve. “Physics lets us see the mathematical backdrop behind things we see in everyday life,” he says. “And biology is a way to make a day-to-day impact in the real world through health and medicine.”
Before he met Kisley, Yoshida had worked as a lab technician assistant for Associate Professor Brian McDermott in the Department of Otolaryngology at CWRU School of Medicine. Coming in with this training, Yoshida joined Kisley in building her lab from the ground up.
“When I first joined the group, we didn’t have an actual lab to work with, so we kind of commandeered a lab that wasn’t being used,” Yoshida recalls, laughing. “We did a lot of setting up equipment.”
“Shawn was actually my first group member,” Kisley says. “He was there when we were working in a temporary lab environment, trying to hunt down clean water we could use. He was still there when we moved to my current lab, and then during COVID, when he adjusted to working on computer-based simulations instead of collecting experimental data. He’s seen it all.”
For a student with Yoshida’s interests, Kisley provided a stimulating research setting. Her lab group blends physics, biology and chemistry to study soft materials—a category that includes liquids, polymers and many biological materials—at the nanoscale level. This work has the potential to address challenges in both industry and medicine.
Yoshida’s work focused on the rich biophysics of the extracellular matrix—the squishy space between the cells that make up all of the body’s organs and tissues. This matrix, a critical but fairly understudied part of human physiology, has a significant part to play in diseases such as cancer. For instance, a build-up of material around tumor cells can make it more difficult for drugs to reach and kill them. “We know once the drug reaches the cell, it’s going to work,” Yoshida says, “but we don’t know how to get the drug to the cell.”
For his senior project, Yoshida simulated microscope observations of fluorescently tagged molecules—scientists call them “reporters”—inside a hydrogel, a soft material that conveniently mimics the extracellular matrix. The simulations indicated that microscopy can detect small yet significant differences between the reporters’ movement when they travel near the hydrogel’s boundaries and their movement through the gel’s interior spaces. Being able to capture this miniscule level of detail bodes well for the in-depth characterization of the dynamics of drugs and other molecules in actual tissues.
“Shawn displayed tremendous determination in figuring out what these simulations could show us,” says Kisley. “He has the makings of a strong researcher.”
Unlike Yoshida, Messenger wasn’t thinking of Kisley as a potential mentor when they first met. In early 2019, she invited Kisley to speak to the Women in Physics and Astronomy Club, a student group she’d co-founded, and Kisley accepted. Later that year, when Messenger was preparing for her senior research project, she wrote to Kisley again, this time to ask about joining her lab.
Hannah Messenger (CWR ‘21) studied abroad in Dublin, and made a side trip to Venice, before joining Lydia Kisley’s lab to complete her senior research project. Photo by Kyra Armstrong
“I had a friend who did a senior project with Lydia,” Messenger recalls. “He said: ‘She’s great to work with. She works you hard, but you learn.’ So I thought, ‘Good!’” Naturally, Kisley responded to her request by suggesting they meet for coffee.
When Messenger came into the lab in January 2020, she already had substantial research experience, including a summer internship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (where, coincidentally, Kisley had been a postdoc). Also, she had interned at Quality Electrodynamics (QED), a company founded by Hiroyuki Fujita (GRS ’98, physics), adjunct professor in the Department of Physics. QED designs and manufactures equipment for MRI scanners; Messenger created and built a circuit board to test prototypes of radiofrequency coils. Although she had never taken an engineering class, her physics background equipped her for the challenge. “The physics degree prepares you for anything,” Messenger says. “It gives you a toolset for how to approach a problem.”
From the outset, Messenger found herself integrated into Kisley’s weekly lab meetings, where mentees participated and made presentations about their activities. Messenger was often late, but she had a good excuse: She played in the CWRU/University Circle Symphony Orchestra and other ensembles, and she had to rush across campus from rehearsals. “I remember Hannah had to lug her French horn case to our meetings,” Kisley says, laughing.
By March 2020, Messenger had completed her safety training and started doing benchwork. She was planning to use the lab’s custom-built microscope to study corrosion in industrial materials—a major focus area for Kisley’s group. But then the pandemic hit, shutting down the campus. Messenger, like Yoshida, had to switch to computational research, which she could do from her family home in Belmont, Massachusetts.
Over the next several months, Messenger built a computational model showing that the movements of fluorescent reporters tracked under a microscope can reveal corrosion’s real-time dynamics, a molecule-by-molecule process of breakdown that is poorly understood at such a granular level. “Over these very short periods of time and microscopic scales, corrosion really hasn’t been studied that much,” Messenger says.
“Hannah accomplished quite a bit in my lab after just one year,” Kisley says. “Success in a mentorship is a two-way street, and I’m thankful to have had the chance to work with such good students as Hannah and Shawn.”
While supporting her students through the research process, Kisley coached them on how to present their findings—whether on Zoom or in person. She taught them to write straightforward text for a poster or PowerPoint slide, and to spruce it up with appealing images. She also shared techniques for confident, relaxed delivery. The students applied these lessons to their virtual presentations for the Intersections symposium. In addition, Yoshida took part in several professional conferences, all of which were conducted remotely.
“I wouldn’t have ever thought I’d be able to speak at conferences,” he says. “Lydia taught us so much because she is so good at science communication, not just to scientists but to the general public.”
Yoshida will enter a doctoral program in biochemistry and molecular biophysics at California Institute of Technology this fall. “I was lucky enough to have a lot of options for school, and that’s definitely 99% thanks to Lydia,” says Yoshida. “She’s been infinitely helpful.”
Messenger, meanwhile, has decided to pursue a master’s degree in horn performance at the New England Conservatory of Music. Mentoring is just as important in music as in science, she points out, as many professional classical musicians give private lessons or coach youth chamber groups.
As Messenger and Yoshida someday assume the mentor’s role and tend to the next generation, their experiences with Kisley and others will surely inform their approach.
“Mentoring relationships have been so important for me, helping me grow and figure out where I’m going,” says Messenger. “Helping other people out in that way is something I’m excited to do.”
Adam Hadhazy is a freelance science writer in New Jersey.