Emily Lam and Kaitlin Allen

**Andrew Saintsing** (0:00)
Hi, you're tuned in to 90.7 FM. Hey, hey, Alex Berkeley. I'm Andrew Saintsing, and this is The Graduates, the interview talk show where we speak to UC Berkeley graduate students about their work here on campus and around the world. Today, I'm back in KALX's recording studio for the first time since COVID, and we're trying it out and we're seeing what's going to happen. I think the audio quality might be better, but who knows, I might mess something up. But I'm excited. Today, we're joined by Emily Lam and Kaitlin Allen, both members of the Department of Integrative Biology and members of the Vasquez Medina Lab. You may remember them from that special episode with the Williams Lab. They were both on the cricket hunting trip in Sedgwick, but that's not really what they do for their own research. And we're going to talk more about that. Welcome to the show, Emily.

**Emily Lam** (0:47)
Thank you for having me.

**Andrew Saintsing** (0:48)
So great to have you here. And Kaitlin.

**Emily Lam** (0:50)
Thank you.

**Andrew Saintsing** (0:51)
So great to have you here as well. It's fun to actually finally be doing this. So I guess we're kind of doing, I'm interviewing the two of them, but secretly Emily is also interested in being a host. And so she's going to kind of act like my co-host. I told her that we were going to do a Conan Andy Richter thing, and she said, I don't know who those people are. So I'm feeling good about that dynamic. So Emily, what do you think, how do you think would be a good way to start this conversation? What would you ask Kaitlin first?

**Emily Lam** (1:22)
I think the thing is I know Kaitlin pretty well, but I think she has a lot of interesting stories to tell, I'm sure. So Kaitlin, what is your favorite part about doing research with seals and diving?

**Kaitlin Allen** (1:35)
I think the field work probably. I think the lab work is cool. You get to kind of take an interesting wild system and turn it loose in the lab. But I would say that like excitement wise, it's definitely more fun to be at the beach or kind of outside.

**Andrew Saintsing** (1:50)
Cool. Cool. Good start. So as we established now, Vasquez Medina, all about diving, right?

**Kaitlin Allen** (1:57)
And stress.

**Emily Lam** (1:58)
And stress.

**Andrew Saintsing** (1:59)
And you mentioned seals. And so seals, you study how seals dive, basically?

**Kaitlin Allen** (2:05)
Yeah. So I've studied whittle seals in the past, but I study the elephant seals here in California now. And so they are the best seal diver. So we kind of study how they modify their physiology in order to dive for up to an hour and a half or two hours at a time.

**Andrew Saintsing** (2:22)
Modify their physiology? What do you mean by that?

**Kaitlin Allen** (2:27)
So they're basically like kind of a scuba tank on the inside, right? So if we're going to dive for a long time, we've got to take oxygen with us. And the seals are kind of the same, right? So they're mammals, so they don't have any gills. And so they're bringing oxygen with them, but they don't have the benefit of being able to wear kind of a scuba pack. And so they're basically packing oxygen into their blood and their muscles. And then during the dive, actually, they're using like way more of it than we would tolerate. So if you have blood oxygen levels similar to a seal at the end of the dive, you're feeling pretty bad. And a seal kind of pops back up to the surface, takes a couple of breaths and goes back at it again. So we're kind of studying how they, you know, why do they feel fine at those really low oxygen levels? And, you know, what are maybe some parallels we can draw to why in humans it's not well tolerated.

**Andrew Saintsing** (3:15)
And this is similar to what you study as well, Emily, right?

**Emily Lam** (3:19)
I don't study diving.

**Andrew Saintsing** (3:20)
Oh, okay. What do you study?

**Emily Lam** (3:21)
So yeah, no, I study stress in marine mammals. The overarching theme is anthropogenic stressors. I'm interested in looking at whales, California sea lions, and also elephant seals. And it kind of ranges from whole organism stressors, like the effects of climate change and habitat on the ability for a seal to thermoregulate down to the cellular level. So we know that whales are stressed in their environment. We know that shipping sounds or sonar can affect the way that animals communicate and can cause elevated cortisol. But we don't know if it's biologically relevant. So we're trying to build a cellular model to understand the effects of stress using some tools in cell culture. So we're taking skin cells from these animals. We're reprogramming them to make these muscle like cells. And then we're going to see the effects of stress on a biologically active tissue like muscle.