Conversations with the Dean
Featuring Professor Shana kelley
Professor of Chemistry Shana Kelley and Dean Adrian Randolph discuss creating new tools to diagnose and treat diseases, the importance of interdisciplinary and translational research at Weinberg College, and the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub: a new and cutting edge collaboration between Northwestern, UChicago, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Dr. Shana Kelley is the Neena B. Schwartz Professor in the Departments of Chemistry, Biomedical Engineering, and Biochemistry & Molecular Genetics at Northwestern University, and president of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Chicago. The Kelley laboratories work to develop new analytical technologies to combat disease and promote wellness & health. |
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Adrian Randolph is dean of the Judd A. and Marjorie Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and Henry Wade Rogers Professor of the Humanities. Dean Randolph's research focuses on the art and architecture of the medieval Renaissance Italy. He joined Northwestern in 2015 from Dartmouth College. There, he served as the associate dean of the faculty for the Arts and Humanities, chair of the Department of Art History, and director of the college’s Leslie Center for the Humanities. |
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Conversation Transcript
Adrian Randolph: Welcome to Weinberg College's "Conversations with Dean." Today we are extraordinarily lucky to be joined by Dr. Shana Kelley. Dr. Shana Kelley is the Neena B. Schwartz Professor in the departments of chemistry, biomedical engineering and biochemistry and molecular genetics at Northwestern University and president of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub in Chicago. The Kelley Laboratories work to develop new analytical technologies and bioengineering platforms to combat disease and promote wellness and health. In today's event, we have the opportunity to learn more about Dr. Kelley's work as well as interdisciplinary research in Weinberg College more generally. So Shana, thank you so much for joining us today.
Shana Kelley: My pleasure.
Adrian: Shana joined the faculty at Northwestern in 2021 after moving here from the University of Toronto and Shana I'm so proud you chose Northwestern. So my first question is, you know, what led you, I mean, we all have complex careers and things and I'm sure there are many, many reasons, but what led you to choose this place to come to Evanston, Chicago? What is it you were thinking about and what have you enjoyed thus far in your time here?
Shana: Yeah, well great question and it's really a pleasure to be here today. So I trained in the United States. I had my first faculty position in Boston. I ended up moving to Canada for 15 years. My husband is Canadian, and it was just what worked at the time for us. The pandemic came along and all of a sudden there wasn't just a border between me and my family, but there was this impermeable barrier and it really felt like time to come back. And there were many reasons to come back to the United States, above and beyond that, the US is the best place to do science in the world as an academic researcher. And so my husband and I just started thinking about where in the US we might wanna land. And Northwestern was at the very top of that list. I've known Northwestern and the excellence of the chemistry department and other departments across campus for years, have a lot of good colleagues and friends in the department. And we were very fortunate that they were able to kinda set in motion a plan to recruit us. And so it wasn't just a matter of getting me to Northwestern, but also my husband. And we have just so very much enjoyed the two and a half plus now years that we've been here. Northwestern really is just one of the best places to do research, it's very collaborative. People are incredibly interdisciplinary, love to work together, really, you know, pushing frontiers in new areas and it's just an incredible place to be running a laboratory.
Adrian: Yeah, you mentioned your husband a couple of times, Ted Sargent, colleague of ours here's also in chemistry and engineering. And both of you exemplify this spirit of interdisciplinarity and in fact, your work spans multiple disciplines, beyond the names of departments. Your actual work is at the intersection of several axes. I have a list in front of me, nanoscience, materials chemistry, chemical biology and engineering. Could you... This is a difficult question I know for an expert, but could you offer some introductory overview of these topics? Perhaps, how you translate it to me, a humanist dean or to friendly listeners at a cocktail party, and then elaborate on how these fields intersect in your research?
Shana: Yeah, so I was trained as a chemist originally and not the kinda chemist that makes molecules, but the kind of chemist that measures molecules, measures their behavior and their dynamics and different properties. And the area that I ended up kinda launching my career in was to turn approaches to measure molecules into tools that we could apply to real world problems. So for example, searching for proteins in a drop of blood that might tell us whether someone was developing cancer or cardiovascular disease or some other issue. And so we kinda used our ability to search through the billions and billions of molecules that you might find in a drop of blood to see if a characteristic marker was there. So that was kind of my launching point. And then along the way it turns out that in order to make practical tools to do this in the clinic, you can't just measure something, you have to build a system to do the measurement so that you can give that to clinicians or put it in a hospital lab or put it in the home. And so increasingly I was able to recruit engineers into my group to help with that building process. We started working extensively with clinicians, also biologists who would understand why certain proteins or certain molecular markers might be associated with a disease. And then before too long, my group went from being a bunch of chemists to being lots of different kinds of people. And this kind of comes back to why Northwestern was such a perfect place for us, because there's really no boundaries between one department and another at Northwestern. The students kind of float back and forth. The facilities are there and accessible to all. And it's really a perfect place for somebody that is doing something that doesn't fit neatly into one field. So that's one of the things that we've done over the years. And we've developed quite a few methods that now can be used to diagnose disease. We've had startup companies that have spun out of the lab and taking things into the clinic. We're also now using the same type of approach to develop therapies for disease. So we have a measurement platform that allows us to find very rare immune cells that can be used to treat cancer. And we have a company incubating down in Fulton Market that's taking that to the clinic. And so this has really been a pipeline of projects and ideas that we've been able to take from idea to application.
Adrian: That's terrific. And I'm assuming we didn't mention before, at least I don't think I did, the hospital. So we're part of a network of the medical school linking to a hospital. So there is a sort of an ecology here for this type of work, which I assume is not at every institution, which is terrific. So you really are a pioneer. I think maybe, I don't know. It feels like you're a pioneer, but you are from the outside, much of your research exists really at the edge, at sort of the frontier of science and innovation. Could you give us a sense, and you already did, you started alluding to particular projects. Are there any particular projects you're working on now that you feel, you know, I mean, are still in the incubation process or still coming into sites that you might want to elaborate on?
Shana: Sure, and I should comment, I mean, you mentioned our medical school and my lab's there. We have labs in Evanston, we have labs downtown. And so we really do span, you know, both campuses and take advantage of those interactions. And that's been key for us at Northwestern. You know, something that I'm personally very excited about is a new class of sensing devices that we've developed while we've been here. And these are our very simple sensors that can actually be put onto a tiny microneedle that you can, for example, just put into the interstitial fluid. If you've ever seen somebody who has a continuous glucose monitor, right? It's just a patch that sits on the arm, same idea, there's a little needle that goes into the arm and you measure glucose. We've been able to develop sensors that instead of looking at glucose, can look at any protein biomarker that's of interest for monitoring chronic disease, all kinds of things. And so this is something that we've been testing in animals, we have some really great data, we're now looking at how we're gonna commercialize that. And it's really exciting because if you think about it, if we had the ability to just get a better handle on our physiology, there's so many diseases that could be prevented, right? We are faced very often with diagnosing disease when it's at a really advanced stage. And if we had better tools, I mean, a lot of people use continuous glucose monitors now just to get a handle on how their diet affects them. What if we could get a handle every day on levels of inflammation or kind of how we're responding to food or our environment or stress or all kinds of things. It would help us kinda get things under control and then not have to bear the brunt of advanced disease in many cases. So that's something I'm very excited about.
Adrian: Yeah, that's extraordinary. And we're gonna get to the interface between sort of foundational science and clinical science. And I think what you just said is one of the things you wanna get ahead and you've gotta get ahead almost of the curve when it comes to basic science, in order to affect the clinical results we want. But my next question actually is gonna turn to the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub and you mentioned inflammation. So it's a perfect segue to at least some of the ideas at the core of that. Could you tell us more about the mission of the Biohub, its placed within maybe the broader Chan Zuckerberg network and also about how does it work with the Northwestern partnership and your role as president? What does that mean? I think people would be really fascinated.
Shana: Sure, so let me just tell, I'll tell a short version of the story of how we won the Biohub and what it's all about. So in January of 2022, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, this is the non-profit organization that Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan have put the majority of their wealth into, CZI opened a competition that would identify the next site for a Biohub. A Biohub is a freestanding research institute that is tightly linked with partner universities. There's one in San Francisco, it's partnered with Berkeley, Stanford, UCSF, was established six, seven years ago, viewed as a very strong success for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. So that they wanted to replicate this. They had a competition. Every major metropolitan area in the United States put in one if not several applications. We responded to that by joining forces with the University of Chicago, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, put forward a really exciting application focused on developing new technologies that would allow us to study inflammation and the dysregulation of the immune system. And that application coupled, I think, with just how well we were able to show off the capabilities of our universities. Also, the fact that we're located in a city that's really on this wonderful upward trajectory in the United States, Chicago and were ultimately successful. And so what that gave us access to is $250 million worth of funding for the Biohub, which sits in Fulton Market, that is where I'm today. And we eventually will probably be 60-70 people, full-time employees of the Biohub, really sitting kind of right, not geographically, but at least conceptually in the middle of our three partner universities. And really trying to catalyze research that is work that would probably be difficult to fund with traditional sources. The National Institute of Health, which is the place where most people like me, biomedical researchers get their funding. It's a wonderful source of support, but they don't usually fund very nascent ideas. That's what we're here to do. Things that are truly kinda wild and crazy. You know, if we're successful, we'll have a huge impact, but not clear, you know, whether we're gonna get there or not. So we'll really be using that high-risk, high-reward approach. We'll also be partnering with the universities, running projects in partnership and collaboration. So that's another very exciting element of what we're doing. And I think the Biohub brings something to Chicago and to these three Chicago based universities that we didn't have before, which is what you find in many of the very successful ecosystems in the United States. You have this place kind of outside of the university where research is just done differently. You know, we're not training and teaching and doing research, we're just doing research. And that gives it a very different feel. So, I was asked to be the president of the Biohub, I absolutely jumped at the opportunity. I mean, this is for me is like the opportunity of a lifetime to build something from scratch, build a great research organization, help chart the scientific directions of the Biohub. So it's been about a year and it's been, I can't tell if it's a year, that felt like a long time or went by in a flash. It was kind of both at the same time, if you can believe it. But what a great opportunity and I'm also very thrilled to be part of the work that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is doing. I just think it's extraordinary that people that have accumulated such wealth are putting it towards science and helping us make progress.
Adrian: So there's a couple of questions in the Q&A and I have a follow up question as well, but I'll ask the ones in the Q&A first. First of all, who owns the intellectual property created by you and the Biohub?
Shana: Great question. So if the Biohub sponsors the research, funds it, the IP is assigned to the Biohub and that was done primarily to speed along the process of translation. So if a discovery is made, a patent is put together that us, you know, as a small, nimble organization, that we can quickly get it out there to make impact. We have the same kinda revenue sharing arrangement that you would find at a university. So it all kind of, if there is, you know, any profit that comes through, it kinda flows back down to the people that invented the technology. When we partner with our universities, it is a true partnership around the intellectual property and depending on the particular situation, the particular investigator that's involved, then we figure out where the IP should sit and where it can most quickly be deployed to make an impact.
Adrian: And a follow up question from the same questioner is, which institutions fund high-risk, high-reward concepts?
Shana: Well, that is a great question. I mean, in the United States where you're likely gonna go with ideas that are untested, where you don't have a huge pile of preliminary data are places like DARPA, like the Department of Defense, they will place bets on really risky ideas. Not the easiest, so once you get a DARPA contract or grant, you then talk to your program manager every month and you tell them exactly how much progress you've made. So it's a process that funds high-risk, high-reward research, but it then doesn't necessarily allow you to kind of, you know, iterate around and find the most interesting path to a goal. It's a wonderful funding agency, but we're different. We're just, you know, funding great ideas and then letting people discover along the way, 'cause it's really those serendipitous discoveries that tend to be the ones that are most interesting.
Adrian: Well, and maybe I'm gonna flip now to the question I had, which was about sort of foundational versus translational research. And I'll just say, I mean, in answer to that question, how I feel, and maybe this is a bias thing, that in university situations like, I obviously, just basically focused on foundational research and not on translation, and more or less we certainly have people who are, Rick Goldman, of course, and others who have had enormous success in translation. But the intellectual inquiry and the discovery you were talking about and the ability to sort of change directions is really who we are, right? I mean, because we are not as dogged at saying, "Oh, you said a year ago you were meant to be doing this and following up and saying why aren't you there?" We're rather letting people pursue questions which are a little bit more conceptual and creative at the beginning end of research. I don't know if that resonates with you, but that's certainly what I say about our sciences at Northwestern or at Weinberg College.
Shana: Yeah, very much so. And it's a wonderful part of the way we do things in academia, and it is very much at the heart of how we attack problems at the Biohub. I think we're just maybe limiting ourselves to, you know, when we're scoping new ideas, even if it is basic science that we're working on, we kind of already know that if we're successful, here's the application, here's a big breakthrough. Whereas in academia, just because of, you know, we're training, we're doing a lot of different things, we can get funding that really does support just the very basic exploratory tinkering, you know, even if there's no application on site. And that's very important, that feeds the entire pipeline. But at the Biohub we're a little bit, it's also that we're biomedical. So, you know, the application is pretty much always…
Adrian: No, I mean we love the application. It’s also interesting how many times discoveries are made that are, let's say, tangential to the original thrust of the research. And so in some ways, in order to have a really good R to support the D or an R&D, you need to have this broad, slightly messy area of research, that possibly could bring up unexpected responses. And I think that's how, you know, the garden approach to research. You need to have a good ecology for it. There's a question which takes us a little bit off, but I think it's interesting. So I'm curious what you think. Not sure if this is in your area of expertise, but what do you think of the Elon Musk micro brain implant technology? I don't know if you know anything about that, but I thought I'd broaden the question to talk about implants more generally because you were referring to things which brush up against that.
Shana: Yeah, well, I think it's really exciting. I don't know if they're gonna be the ones to win the race in that area. There's many groups that are looking at this kinda thing. But I personally am very excited about developing devices that we can use to track what's happening in the human body, including the brain, augment, you know, what we can do for our bodies. And we've made such advancements over the last couple decades that we now know how to do this safely, right? We know what the human body can tolerate in terms of introducing something that is artificial and the brain, you know, device, brain, machine connectivity. I have seen some, like, unbelievable things in that area. You know, people that their speech was taken away by a stroke and now with an implant in the right part of the brain, you know, a computer can basically start shaping sentences out of electronic impulses in the brain. So, we are at a really exciting place with this kind of thing. It's just, you know, the technology is really starting to accelerate, and I think we're just getting more comfortable with it and there's just incredible things that devices and, you know, engineering can do for the body.
Adrian: So I'm gonna ask a couple more questions and then we'll flip back in a few minutes to questions from the audience more formally. You mentioned, you touched on this again, it was a perfect segue, the intersection of artificial intelligence, which of course, very different from let's say implants, but nonetheless the two fields are obviously going to intersect in the future, but artificial intelligence more generally in the sciences is really coming to the fore because of course, we can do so much more, an acceleration of things we might do in normal experimental observational science. How do you see this as impacting and hopefully aiding your research in the future?
Shana: Yeah, there's gonna be a tremendous, I think, an explosion of activity in this area broadly and at the Biohub we are really uniquely set up to push what can be done with artificial intelligence in the life sciences for a variety of reasons. I mean, we have incredible people that we can tap in this area, as I may have mentioned. So we report directly into the board of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. So every quarter we sit at the table with Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI is now on the CZI board. Reid Hoffman, the founder and CEO of LinkedIn, Mike Schroepfer, who was the CTO of meta for some time, in addition to Paul Alivisatos, who's the... I mean, the board of CZI is just this incredible group of people and we spend a big chunk of time at those board meetings talking about opportunities at that interface and talking about what's been done so far, how can we take a really big leap, so that we are making discoveries that we couldn't have made just with human intelligence, where the artificial intelligence is absolutely critical. And so, at the Chicago Biohub, what we've done over the last few months, is we've convened an advisory committee across the three universities with all of our kinda best and brightest in this area. And we have a whole kinda strategy now mapped up. We're hiring a director of artificial intelligence and machine learning, and we intend to take on some really big, grand challenges in that area, building foundation models that will describe things like inflammation, but in virtual models that will allow us to do all kinds of virtual experiments. I could go on and on about this, but there's a lot of activity and I think we're very uniquely set up to be a leader in this area. We also have access to computing power that is hard to come by in the academic sphere. So the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative made a significant investment in computing power to be put across their network of institutes. And so that's very helpful to us as well.
Adrian: Yeah, I'm gonna ask a question from the questions, but I'm gonna link to my own, sort of my own theme. One just practical question, does the Biohub have postdocs, which is just a practical question, but I was, I guess, I wanted to tell you and others, I think, we've been thinking about, you know, is there room in higher education at Northwestern for certainly an undergraduate or graduate degrees in AI and let's say the interdisciplinary sciences, you know, is there a way to look ahead a couple of steps and say this is going to be a field where you will need researchers, be they postdocs, be they PhD students, et cetera. And certainly, even our undergrads are very eager to get involved with data science. You know, we have a new data science major that's just exploding, but I think it's more than just data science AI, it's data science AI plus, particular areas. And I think the science is generally, there's a huge win certainly in genetics and certainly in some of the molecule creation you were talking about is just gonna be accelerated so quickly by AI. Anyway, the real question was do you have postdocs? But you can expand on that if you'd like.
Shana: Yeah, so yes, we do take postdocs. We have a portal that you can find on our website and people can submit applications to be considered as a postdoctoral fellow. I think this is a great place to be a postdoc. Very different from academia, but very relevant skillset. And then Adrian, I completely agree with you that, you know, AI life sciences is just a very ripe field for training and then also just with this breakthrough potential. But there are huge challenges that we do not yet know how to address. I mean, it's one thing to develop an LLM, right? That can kind of tell you how to barbecue your steaks or, you know, give you a synthesis of some books or various things. And I'm blown away by things like ChatGPT and the LLMs that we have access to now. But when you push these types of systems on science, it's very hard to synthesize science. The data is in 100s of different formats. There's so much that's not actually written down. A lot of it is behind paywalls, right? And so, if we're really gonna put the full power of AI to work, there's a lot of very tricky things that need to be worked out. And then even just developing new types of artificial intelligence, new types of machine learning that can make sense of all the data and start to show us biology, but in a virtual format, I mean, you know, we're gonna see this in the next 10 years for sure. And yeah, training people to be a part of that revolution makes a huge amount of sense to me.
Adrian: So, I think we kind of got to some of this. One question we hear was about interdisciplinarity, but I feel as if you've said a lot about that. But as we discussed disease therapies, do you see a particular role for some particular type of interdisciplinarity or do you feel you already addressed that question?
Shana: Well, I think it's inherent in everything now. I mean, scientists, we don't train the same way we used to. It used to be that everybody just trained in one department, in one field and we were experts in one thing. Now we're trained much more broadly. Interdisciplinary approaches are always a part of that. And back to the last point, if you think about AI playing a larger and larger role in science, right? We won't need to the same extent deep experts in one field, right? We're gonna need people that can think in ways that computers can't for now. And the creativity, right? I don't know when we'll ever reproduce that. And so, you know, being interdisciplinary, thinking about the convergence of different fields, I think is gonna become increasingly important.
Adrian: So there's a few questions here and I'm just gonna turn to them officially. There may be one more question. I'll see if I have time to sneak it in at the end. So I'm just gonna take them in order I see them. What are your thoughts on preventative medicine or prevential medicine and reactive medicine in the future?
Shana: We have to go to preventative. I mean, what we do now is reactive, right? You know, someone gets diagnosed with a stage four cancer and we try to use the tools that we have and we may treat them with therapeutics that give them a few extra months, but that's about it, right? It's very, very hard to reverse advanced stage disease. Whereas if we can get in there even before a tumor is stage one, right? When there's something that is just a bit of a lifestyle thing or exposure or something that's going wrong, that can be dealt with very early and turn it around, that would be, I mean, it would not only help us all as individuals, you know, we all have family members that have born, you know, the incredible brunt of disease or we've dealt with it ourselves, but also our healthcare system, right? Which really has a lot of problems economically because of the presentation of advanced disease. And so it's something that we absolutely have to do to figure out how can we back ourselves way up and intervene early and you know, just help ourselves to the extent possible, know when there's something going wrong in our own bodies.
Adrian: Absolutely. I think that's, you know, one of the great challenges, and I think this is one of the reasons why, whenever we talk about data science AI and things like preventive medicine or predictive analytics of any sort, we also need to start bringing in ethics and the philosophers a little bit because there are some very thorny problems when it comes to getting more data. Early stage means, you know, much larger data sets of people who are not necessarily ill. And that leads to all these questions about privacy, which I think are addressable, but we need to be involved in those as well at the very beginning. So we're certainly thinking that through. Here's a very particular question. Have you collaborated yet with Dr. Douglas Vaughan and the Posnak, Potocsnak? I'm sorry if I've mispronounced that, Longevity Institute of Northwestern Medicine.
Shana: Not yet, but we certainly will. We're still just kinda getting ourselves, you know, launched here, but that, yeah, there's lots to do there.
Adrian: I'll just add that longevity. I mean, there's been a proposal for a longevity institute at the university as well for a long time. And we have some experts, certainly in biology here who just got a big grant for longevity studies, which I think is something really interesting as we will become older, at least on average in the coming decades, it's really important to think about medicine in a different way. Here's a question which may be for me, what opportunities will be available, if any for undergrads, is NU, Northwestern offering new undergraduate majors, melding biology and computer science? But we don't offer a particular major or concentration in that way. But I'll remind everyone that a major is about a third of the student's curriculum and there's plenty of opportunities to have double majors, major, minor and concentrations. We have initiated a master's program in quantitative biology, which is training some people at the intersection of big data and really genomics, a slightly different field than we're one talking about now. But very important and I should mention sort of, it sort of came into being as the same time as the Chicago Biohub, the NSF, Simons National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology, the acronym, the N-I-T-M-B, which rolls off my tongue but took quite a while to get off, which is gonna be in the John Hancock Tower, is in the John Hancock Tower and is really merging area trying to bring advanced theoretical mathematics and life sciences together, which I think is not the same as what we're talking about, but is another piece of the puzzle. How do we get the most advanced, and I'm gonna use very bad language, I'm not an expert, but the most advanced way of processing the data so that it becomes the cleanest and the most useful to us in various functions. Another question, is there any research going on or envisage beyond disease to such areas like hearing loss, which could or could not be disease related? But we have a great, I mean, we don't call it audiology on the Evanston campus, but science communications and disorders unit here, which has really got some great scholars. So I don't know if that falls into your, if you've collaborated with anyone in audiology or in the hearing area.
Shana: Not yet, but that could certainly be in the cards, very interesting.
Adrian: I would, I mean, having heard you speak about this a little bit, I do think the study of inflammation has such broad possibilities. You know, inflammation lies at the heart of so many pathologies or dysfunctions, that you can imagine there being absolutely connections. I mean much hearing loss and some hearing loss at least is connected to early childhood disease. So I can imagine, you know, in the future, applications like yours could be very helpful. Here's another question from me. We've talked about how great Northwestern is, of course it is, we love it. And how great the Biohub is and collaboration across units. Is there anything we could do better? I mean, and I say this both as Northwestern, but also Weinberg College, is there something that you see, you've been, you've come from another institution, you've had your own experiences before. Is that something that we could, you know, challenge ourself to say, how could we really cross-fertilize and do things in even better way than we do now?
Shana: Yeah, it's a tough one. I mean the one thing that comes to mind for me having labs both in Evanston and Downtown, is that there's a bit of a divide between our two campuses and between our basic scientists and our people that are really the ones who can do translation. And I think the extent to which we can really link the two, we can really help our basic scientists know what the opportunities are and where are the white space is and make it easy for people to collaborate. Maybe just easy to go back and forth or have them meet in the middle or something. I think that's just... That's maybe the one area that I've seen at Northwestern, where there's room for us to grow.
Adrian: Yeah, I agree. I think there is a... I mean it's not just a space thing, 'cause we're not that far away from one another, but I do think there's a very different culture of medical schools in general and arts and sciences and engineering, et cetera. And it's also, I mean, to get to the basics, I mean, seeing people are paid very differently and different structure of pay, not necessarily the amount, but you know how one, you know, the expectations of grants support for salary and stuff just makes it very different. It's difficult for somebody to collaborate, but I think the examples like yours show that, there are ways to do it. And I think some of our research institutes also managed to bridge the gap quite well, the university research institutes and centers. So now we have a question, which is a change in direction. What are some of your favorite things about Chicago, since moving here outside of your day job? And I'm knowing your schedule, I'm not sure there is much time outside of your day job, but is there anything you've enjoyed moving here?
Shana: Well I love it here in Chicago. When I moved, I moved from Toronto. I thought, well, you know, similar city, other side of the border. But I just think Chicago is just one of the greatest cities in the world. It has a little bit of everything. The food is amazing. The lake is beautiful. You know, I work down in Fulton Market most days, now if I'm not at Northwestern. I live in Glencoe, a block from Lake Michigan. And it's just, you can have the best of all worlds. So we have been enjoying, you know, the nature, the bike paths, the food. I have two boys that are teenagers and in high school now. And they just and the schools are so wonderful and the people most of all in Chicago, I think are just extraordinary. I think it's part of what helped us win the Biohub, you know, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative came here, and people were so collaborative and so excited and excited about the momentum in the city and everything. And I just think this is a very special place. It's not, I don't think it's known, how great Chicago is to the full extent, but I just think it's a wonderful place to live and work.
Adrian: Yeah, and pivoting back to the research, one thing you mentioned before really resonated with me. I mean, one of the reasons I think I embraced moving here when I did as well is the collaboration among the universities. And that isn't always known how much collaboration there is, there's a lot of collaboration with the University of Chicago, certainly less in my world with Illinois. But when you go to the national laboratories, Argonne, Fermilab, et cetera, and then also the collaborations with all of the institutions downtown, the Art Institute, the Field Museum, the Newberry Library. There's a lot of civic collaborations among or between and among the institutions here, which I think the Biohub represents in some way, right? That desire to do something for the city, which in a way, even though, you know, you are foundational to translational science, but you mentioned already there's some spinoffs and I think the idea of making Chicago a center for let's say, biotech broadly is a really, I think that's a great, I mean they're already is in some ways, but we can go further and I think the biotech's a great example of this. There's a question from the chat. First, your work is amazing and transformative. Let's say you succeed in bringing great advances in preventative medicines. Will interventions be available to those only with insurance? Ooh, tough question. Can you comment on the US healthcare? No, I, but you know, what do you think about that issue? I mean, moving from Canada to the US, maybe you have thoughts on the way in which we structure health insurance?
Shana: Yeah, well, I don't wanna get into that specific issue, but when we do technology development, it is always with an eye towards accessibility and cost efficiency. We have some tremendous therapies, right, that have been developed over the last handful of years. Some of them are a million dollars plus per, you know, dose. And that will always just help a very small number of people. And we have a lot of people, you know, that need new tools and new solutions. So I think the key is, I mean, long-term we have to solve the issues within the healthcare system and how healthcare is paid for. But on my side, we have to develop things that can, are just as cost effective as possible.
Adrian: Yeah, and this is, I mean, getting back to, you know, the federal funding, the now private funding that is the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, it really does take enormous investment in research in order to win the health and other discoveries we've made over the last, you know, 50, 60, 70 years, since, you know, the really the introduction of major federal funding in the United States was a model for the world. And I think that's something which we have to fight hard for. We have great government relations, people fighting hard for federal funding. And it's interesting to see how private foundations like this one, I mentioned the Simons. I mean, there's other private entities which are now working with or complementing federal funding in a way that I hope is very productive. There's no doubt some of these things will be very expensive, but if you look over time, then you know, the idea is the expenses come down as they become translated and then made more efficient. So fingers crossed. So I think with that, we're reaching right about the end. I don't see another question and if someone has a question, now is the time to ask it. Otherwise, I see the light dimming outside my window. I don't see it dimming outside yours, you probably see it.
Shana: It is.
Adrian: Yeah. It's getting a little interesting in the Midwest here as we move towards the eclipse. So I'd like to end by thanking so, so much Dr. Shana Kelley for joining us today. We are enthused and excited by what you've done and by what you will do. To all of you those who tuned in, we hope you found this a valuable way to spend 45 minutes with us. And thank you again to our alumni and leadership circle supporters at Weinberg College, whose investments make possible the research like Shana's and other faculty members at Northwestern. So thank you again, Shana, and from all of us at Weinberg College and Northwestern University. Have a great day.