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| Bobby Nakamoto, UC Merced Castle Lab 2013 |
“Are
you his mother?” nurses asked in the emergency room of Mercy Hospital in Merced
California. I was sitting in a chair across from my student Bobby Nakamoto, who
was undergoing evaluation for what turned out to be a collapsed lung. His long
dark hair was swept up in a surgical cap. It was a tense situation.
“Uh—yeah,
I guess so.” I answered, not knowing how to explain to these folks the complex
relationship professors, in particular female professors, have with their
long-term students. Bobby is half Japanese, half Caucasian. We look nothing
alike. The medical people were a bit puzzled why I wasn’t sure how to answer.
Earlier
that morning, when Chris and I arrived on campus, Bobby was leaving the Science
and Engineering building looking green. He and I had spent the end of the previous
day diagnosing problems on the mass spectrometer. He appeared healthy at that
time. On his way home twenty minutes later, he experienced chest pains and
headed to the ER thinking he might be having heart trouble. Mercy Hospital is
not at the forefront of medical care. After spending 8 hours with a chest x-ray
and blood tests, Bobby was sent home with a “clean bill of health”. In the
morning, the attending physician who had just come on duty noticed the x-ray
showed Bobby had a collapsed lung and ordered him to come straight in. When I
heard the news, without question I drove him to the hospital and spent the day
as he suffered through several invasive procedures to treat his problem. Everyone
needs an advocate when they are in the hospital. I was happy to take on that role.
Finally, when I heard his father was on his way down from Northern California,
I took off.
 |
| Bobby, UCM, New lab 2015 |
I
described earlier how I met Bobby in my first UC Merced Ecology class (see **
below). Since 2013, we’ve been working together and I’ve had the pleasure of
watching him mature from a funny dapper undergraduate to a talented senior grad
student who can fix a mass spectrometer, run complex statistical analyses on
data, and digest the most complex ideas and theories. Along the way, I’ve asked
him to take samples out of the dumpster, pick through coyote shit, work in the
105°F sunny, dry environments near UC Merced’s campus, and re-calculate hundreds
of data points and write them down with pencil and paper. On the plus side, he’s
also gotten in on the ground floor with hydrogen isotope amino acid
measurements, something I originated previously and which will eventually have
a substantial impact on the ecological field. He’s had a fully funded PhD
project working with a collaborative team from UC Davis as well as UC Merced,
and I’ve sent him around the world to present his work.
 |
| Marilyn Madness (l-r) Dan Toews, Marilyn, Jon Nye, Liz Wiliams, Joy Stewart, Bobby, 2016 |
In
return for the positive things, Bobby has provided my “eyes and ears” on the
ground in the lab, when I am not there. His judgment in assessing a situation
is pretty good for a young man of his age—almost 26 years old. As his major
professor, I review his manuscripts and tests and encourage him when he has
seemed overwhelmed. Recently, he had to write and submit a 15-page, double-spaced
examination to qualify as a PhD candidate. He was required to do this without
my normal editing and advice. For months, he moped around the lab. All of us in
my lab group could see he was suffering from a lack of confidence, as though an
albatross was hanging around his neck (see The
Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Coleridge for the analogy). At the
eleventh hour, I glanced at the penultimate version, added a couple of verbs to
incomplete sentences, flagged a few commas, and said it looked great. With very
few critical comments, he passed the exam on his own merit and hard work. What
puzzles me sometimes is how such a talented person can have swings of feeling
“not good enough.” I’m hoping that I’ll see continued progress in his learning,
skills, and confidence as he passes through the next phase of his PhD work.
Bobby’s
research originally focused on using stable isotope tracers at the natural
abundance level to learn about how organic matter—from both algal and bacterial
sources—affects the food web in one of California’s river systems. The majority
of rivers in California have been dammed to control flow for agriculture and to
prevent disastrous flooding. Our research team, in which Bobby is a member, has
been studying one of California’s undammed rivers, the Cosumnes that flows
towards the San Joaquin-Sacramento Delta near the city of Stockton in Central
California. Although the river has not been dammed, its banks have been levied
with berms of soil to hold back floods during high rainfall events.
Consequently, the ecosystem of levied and dammed rivers cannot and does not
support the food web that it did historically, resulting in the collapse of
some California’s native salmon populations.
To
understand how the Cosumnes river system is currently working prior to major
earth-moving planned to remove some of the levies, Bobby collected and measured
hundreds of samples of riverine “muck” filtered from one liter of water taken
over the course of two years. We call the “muck” particulate organic matter or
POM. Bobby has become Mr. POM of the Cosumnes, a title he’d rather not hold
onto. His primary passion is for the study of fishes. While fishermen in bass
boats ply the Delta bagging their limits of bass, our scientific team was
unable to obtain a permit for any fish collection, because we might have
accidently taken one of the endangered Delta smelts that are in severe decline,
heading towards extinction.
 |
| Kingsley Odigie and Bobby, UC Riverside 2017 |
Mr.
POM took his hundreds of data points, graphed them, modeled them, and wrote his
first paper where he took the lead on writing the document, compiling reviews,
and submitting the paper. After more than 40 rounds of revision, the work is
back in the hands of anonymous reviewers. Meanwhile, Bobby has his hands (well
his analytical hands) on a set of Chinook salmon grown in experimental cages in
rice paddies and the river. Working closely with a UC Davis team, he is
figuring out whether “Dark Carbon” (not to be confused with Dark Matter)
originating from microbial processes removed from photosynthesis is important
for supporting the growth and reproduction of these native fish. Further, he’s
branched out with a new collaboration studying fish and working with an
evolutionary biologist from Texas A&M who has an interesting study system
in rural Mexico. I’m thinking he’ll be moving on to the moniker Dr. Fish pretty
soon.
During
the nearly seven years I’ve known Bobby, he’s had two serious relationships
that I am aware of. As is typical with the difference in age and position, I
don’t usually know what’s going on until after everyone else in the lab does.
As a major professor and a science “mother,” there is a fine line between
knowing too much about a person versus knowing just enough to keep someone on
track to accomplish their work and be happy. For each and every student or
postdoc, the path that I take is different for each, because, of course, we’re
all individuals and no one size fits all. On that awful day in the hospital
three and a half years ago, after two tries, the physician at Mercy Hospital
managed to inflate Bobby’s lung. We were relieved. I could hang up my temporary
science mother role for a while, and put on my more serious, demanding role as
a Major Professor. I’ve got to see this young man launched and will work hard
to see that I do.
 |
| L-r: Bobby, Jeanette, lab folks Riverside CA 2019 |
** “A second student who stood out that first semester was
only a sophomore. On exam days, he wore a tie or a bowtie and dress pants. His
first examinations placed him among the “A” students. His third midterm
performance was sub-par. I wrote to the student, Bobby Nakamoto, asking him to
come in for office hours. After a few days of not hearing from him, I called
him to the front of the classroom after lecture and asked directly when he was
coming into my office. It was the start of a six-year professor-student relationship
that continues to this day.
As my first
semester wore on, I often looked to ecology students Bobby to explain simple
mathematical concepts that some of the students weren’t grasping. He has a
knack for explaining abstract concepts in simple terms, something I struggle
with. Bobby worked as a volunteer for the following semester, then I hired him
as a student assistant. He was assigned nutrient analyses of soils, meteorite
extracts, and waters. Both of us think through procedures sequentially and abstractly.
I could give instructions with a few words and a wave of my hands. He
understood and carried out the work silently. When he was about to graduate,
Bobby looked around at other graduate schools, but no one was smart enough to
bring him into their program. He joined my lab group, now a senior graduate
student, the person who can fix anything and is my right hand now that I’m
physically limited.”
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