Weinberg College
of Arts & Sciences

Waldron Career Conversation with Danny Ginzburg '14: PhD Student at Cambridge in Commercial Hydroponics

This episode of the Weinberg in the World Podcast features a conversation with Danny Ginzburg ’14, who is currently starting a PhD in plant sciences at the University of Cambridge through the Gates-Cambridge Scholarship after Graduating from Northwestern with an Earth and Planetary Sciences Major and an Environmental Policy & Culture Minor.

Danny shares insights on his Northwestern experience, Greek life, undergraduate research opportunities, his first job in data analysis, Academia, Scholarships and Grants, and the value of an Arts & Sciences education!

0:45: Northwestern Experience
4:25: Finding the right major
6:45: Research at Northwestern
11:05: First job after graduation
14:30: Academia and the Gates-Cambridge Scholarship
17:30: The value of Commercial Hydroponics
22:10: Scholarship Program at Cambridge
26:20: Future plans after Cambridge
28:05: The value of an Arts & Sciences education

Cassie:
Welcome to the Weinberg in the World podcast, where we bring you stories of interdisciplinary thinking in today's complex world. This episode is brought to you by the Waldron Student Alumni Connections Program, a resource in Weinberg College where we help current students explore career options through making connections with alumni. Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Danny Ginsburg. Danny graduated from Weinberg College in 2013 with a major in earth and planetary sciences and a minor in environmental policy and culture. This fall, he'll be starting a PhD in plant sciences at the University of Cambridge through a Gates Cambridge Scholarship. Thanks so much for being here with us today, Danny.

Danny Ginsburg:
Thanks for having me, Cassie.

Cassie:
We're so excited to hear more about this PhD, but before we get there, we'll start with your personal Northwestern experience and what you were up to when you were on campus in Evanston. So what were some of the impactful classes, internships, extracurriculars, things you did while you were a student in Evanston that impacted you in your post-grad path?

Danny Ginsburg:
As the years go by, I feel like I am able to reflect on all the things that I did in Evanston, and as the years go by, some of those things seem to have been more important or impactful as my life goes on. So I guess from now as I look back, I can think to, for example, my membership in API, a fraternity on campus, some of my best friends to this day, I met through API and a lot of the networking, a lot of just like the social cohesion and sense of belonging that I felt, at least for most of my time as an undergraduate was due to my membership in API. And I actually joined as a sophomore my freshman year. I kind of struggled socially living on North campus and being around so much Greek life, but not really wanting to be a member.
It was a bit isolating, but I fortunately in retrospect made the right decision to join as a sophomore and one of the best decisions I made in terms of just the quality, the people that I made and the friendships that I still have today. Things that I did outside of that, the two, the major that I took and the minor that I also got were attractive to me because I was of generally interested in natural sciences broadly, but biology and environmental sciences more specifically, and at least as I remember it, at the time at Northwestern, most of the biology classes that were readily available were kind of pre-med focused classes, and I wasn't particularly interested in that as a career path. And so I had to mix and match and find a program that would allow me the flexibility to take classes from various departments that would kind still count towards making progress towards graduating.
Earth and Planetary Sciences at the time allowed me to take environmental science classes and physics classes, some natural science classes. So I was able to put together a whole compendium of classes that really broadened my perspective on how the natural sciences integrate with society, with politics, with agriculture, with nutrition, with public health. As a whole I totally feel that that experience, that Weinberg experience really opened my eyes to what I would later go on to do professionally. And so things related to that, I was a member of, I don't know if they still have, but I think it was called NU Seed. It was like a organic gardening club and a environmental organization. I was the head of Green Cup one year, which was really fun. My junior year I was API's representative for Green Cup, and fortunately most of us were pretty engaged in it, but I went kind of crazy. There was one day when I just secretly took out all the light bulbs on half the floors in the building to try to save electricity much to the annoyance of some of my brothers. Those were definitely some meaningful times.

Cassie:
Yeah, absolutely. And I love hearing your perspective on the coursework. Now, looking back on it, if you can put yourselves back in your shoes, when you were starting at Northwestern, how long did it take you to figure out what you just described, how to mix those courses, mix and match? When did you figure out, okay, bio might not be right, if you're thinking back to your 18-year-old self?

Danny Ginsburg:
It took a while. In some ways. I would actually say I never really even figured it out because what I studied in terms of the actual knowledge that I gained from the core earth science classes, I don't think I've ever used since, which I don't see as a failure because I'm still very happy that it allowed me the flexibility to take a wide variety of classes. But for example, when I came in, I think I was a declared biology major, but I soon became disillusioned with the pre-med track, and I interestingly actually switched over to be a physics major. So I was a declared physics major for a while and I was taking bunch of physics and math classes. And then I also kind of lost interest in that. I feel like it's kind of like you pick up a book, you're not interested to pick up a book, not interested, and then eventually you find something either due to practicality sake or you find one really great class and you're like, okay, great, I'm just going to go with this.
So it was, I think maybe latent to my sophomore year, maybe even early in my junior year when I realized that the earth and planetary sciences track, I had already accumulated so many prerequisites for that major from just taking the 100 level chem classes, the physics classes. I had enough kind of math credits from high school. So I had already made a lot of progress there. And there were enough interesting classes of different types of natural sciences in that track that I'm like, okay, cool, let's just go with this. And in retrospect, I ended up being able to finish after three years and a quarter. So for anyone who's unsure about what major might be right for them in Weinberg, just take the common classes that are applicable to number of majors because they're going to be helpful for you regardless of what you end up graduating in.

Cassie:
Absolutely. That's great advice. And I love hearing it back from that perspective of when you were a student, because it is easier now in your career to connect the dots of how it all worked out. But for students who are going through it right now, it may not all add up until later, and that's okay.

Danny Ginsburg:
Totally. Totally.

Cassie:
That's great. And out of curiosity, I know you're going to start a PhD this fall. Were you exposed to research opportunities at Northwestern?

Danny Ginsburg:
I was. I was in two labs. I think in between my freshman and sophomore year I worked mostly full time that summer in a physics lab. Jim Halprin, I think, I don't know if he's still there, but it was a low temperature physics lab and I got some great experience just doing research learning from graduate students and had a lot of great independence in terms of solving problems. Even though in the end I didn't study anything like that, it was great just to just become familiar with a laboratory space being presented with questions in a real kind of world setting outside of a textbook or outside of a classroom. And that actually extended for about a year in total and ended up with me getting a third author publication that now is on my publication record, which is great. And then as part of my major in Earth and Planetary Sciences, I was actually required to do a quarter of research and I was working in an organic geochemistry lab looking at the global carbon cycle in terms of how carbon cycles through different natural systems.
So for example, we were looking at the various types of compounds in the shells of crustacean, so like crabs and lobsters, and trying to understand their components to see why it is that they are so recalcitrant. But it takes a very long time for those compounds to break down, which is relevant from an environmental perspective, but also as we try to understand how to potentially capture and store more carbon further understanding how it's done. So in natural systems could really help figure out how to design maybe bio engineer ways to suck carbon down into the ocean and keep it down there.

Cassie:
Fascinating. So did that experience in that lab around your major play into your decision to pursue this PhD? Obviously it's almost 10 years later, but I'm curious if there's any direct impact from that experience.

Danny Ginsburg:
I would say a hard no, actually. I really didn't actually like that research at all. And it could have been whatever. I was about to graduate and I had senioritis and I just wanted to be done with it. I would went on to do an urban agriculture fellowship in Berkeley that summer, and I was just kind of ready to be out in California. But as I kind of think back, so I went on to get a master's degree a few years later, and I only did that for the sake of making a career change or a slight shift in career change. But I had really no interest in being in academia and doing research. And it's because when I thought back to the limited research experience I did have, it wasn't particularly interesting or inspiring to me. And it was actually only because I then found a really great, formed a great relationship with my graduate advisor and found research that really was interesting to me that I found this newfound interest and desire to be in academia and to do academic research. But that experience that I got in Northwestern, it wasn't a bad experience at all. It didn't reinforce within me any desire to pursue academic research at the time.

Cassie:
Yeah, and we talk about it a lot in our Waldron connections program where sometimes it does take getting to know what you don't want to do and what you don't like, to find what you do like.

Danny Ginsburg:
Absolutely.

Cassie:
And I'm sure there are students on campus right now who have a similar experience, like maybe didn't figure out the research that's really hitting home with them yet. And that's okay. And who knows, you may kind of find your way back to it eventually. And Danny, I know you mentioned this internship or what took you out to Berkeley. Let's hit on your first job. There's so much stress and pressure on the first job, which we try and hit home to students that it doesn't have to be perfect, but I'd love to hear more from you about your personal experience in that first job and how it impacted your career path from there.

Danny Ginsburg:
Yeah, sure. So my first job out of Northwestern was I was working as a data analyst is more appropriate. I think I was actually technically hired, the job title was an sustainability consultant, which I thought was very cool, but it was quickly changed away from that to just be like a sustainability data analyst or something like that. It was for a company called Goby, which I believe is still around. It's G-O-B-Y. And we had this beautiful office right on the river across from the merchandise mart on Weicker Drive. And I found out about this company, I don't remember if I saw the posting online, but at the time there were a number of recent Northwestern grads who were working there. So that was a funnel to regularly get soon graduating seniors to apply and hire for that job, which was great. These are people who I kind of peripherally knew, but just having that being a recognizable face I'm sure was helpful.
Yeah, I mean there are certainly a lot of positives about that job. I obviously don't do anything like that anymore, but your first job, you're getting so much real world experience of how am I supposed to communicate professionally with peers, with clients? What are the appropriate ways to form expectations and to communicate goals and professional timelines? And there's a lot of growing pains. I remember there was this one conversation where this account manager I was working with who I learned so much from, sometimes uncomfortably, she came up to ask me a question of when do I think this project would be done? And at the time I was, I was trying to go through my head trying to calculate it quickly and I wanted to give her an answer. She looked anxious and I said, I don't know. And only at a six month review later on, I found out from my boss, I was like, oh, that was not the right answer.
You're supposed to just say something so that this account manager can go tell, said client some number. And if anything, I just had to learn how to decode, how to communicate with peers, with superiors, but also just basic things of how do people generally like to look at an Excel spreadsheet. Obviously students probably even from high school if not earlier on or working in programs like Excel, there's so many ways that it's used in the business world that I learned to just make things cleaner, more organized, that to this day I still use. So definitely a lot of valuable takeaways. And one last thing is from that job, I actually still have a really good friend, we both started around the same time, and so many years later, we actually both live out in the Bay Area now and we still see each other. So even if you don't like your first job, you might meet some great people.

Cassie:
That's awesome. Absolutely. Hitting on the skills and the professional language and decoding that, and even friendships, there's so much to get out of a first job, even if it's not the one you stay in or even the career path you stay on, which is great. And so now you're going into academia. We heard a little bit about how you didn't necessarily consider that as a path when you were a Northwestern student. What shifted your mindset and can you share just a little bit more about the Gates Cambridge scholarship that you earned specifically?

Danny Ginsburg:
Sure. So even at Northwestern, and I mentioned briefly how the summer before my senior year, I went to Berkeley to do a three month fellowship in urban organic agriculture. I was really fascinated in urban agriculture. And I actually applied my junior year to the Circumnavigators grant, which if anyone's listening to this, is a super cool grant that one northwest, I think unless it's changed, one Northwestern student every year gets this grant and it's a grant to essentially circumnavigate the globe studying a topic of interest. I didn't get the grant, but it really, the process of researching organic agriculture further solidified my interest in this space from a sustainability perspective, from a personal nutrition perspective, from a public health perspective. And I'll make a note that I actually, there was this one class called I think environment in society. It was a sociology class, which was probably my most impactful class at Northwestern, which really just opened up my eyes to the ways in which different aspects of society are intersected from economics to policy to environment.
And for me, my interest in biology, I narrowed down on agriculture as this intersection of all of these disciplines. So even when I graduated Northwestern, I still had a very strong interest in agriculture, but I had to get a job and I was in the general world of sustainability. I was working on lead certification projects and I got to contribute to urban sustainability, which was really great, but I couldn't really ignore, after a couple of years, I really felt like I wanted to pursue more specifically a career path in agriculture. So I then went and got a master's degree at Hebrew University, which was outside of Tel Aviv, and that was a two year international program, so it was all in English. And I really got to learn both through classwork and through research hands-on plant science agricultural experience, which was awesome. And I actually did that because I wanted to work in, like I said, urban agriculture and in this case specifically controlled environment agriculture, which means either growing crops in a greenhouse or in a vertical farm.
So a lot of nowadays you see all over the internet, these pictures of blue and red, purple lights and these multi-story grow houses where people are growing lettuce and strawberries and stuff like that. And I was so enamored by that. That was my dream thing. And so that's why I went and got a graduate degree, and I was very fortunate to get a job working in commercial hydroponics out in New York. So I was kind of still in that world, in that industry. Sorry.

Cassie:
Okay. Danny, commercial hydroponics. Tell us a little bit more. I feel like this is the futuristic stuff that I've seen in shows where I'm like, no, that's not, people aren't doing this growth and planting things like this, but you're so ingrained in this space. For students who may not know, tell us a little bit more about what you mean.

Danny Ginsburg:
So what I mean, at least in my case, well commercial hydroponics, we can break it down. Commercial just means this is a for-profit company who is doing this, and hydroponics describes the way of growing plants in which you're not using soil. The plants are not being planted in the ground. They are kind of being irrigated in a number of different kind of specific ways with a nutrient rich water. So the way in which we did it at the company I worked at, which was called Gotham Greens, is you would have essentially these long plastic gutters with holes evenly spaced out and cut into the gutters, and they were slightly tilted so that water could trickle down and be recirculated, and in the water was all of the nutrients that a plant would need. So it's a misconception of what we teach children of what is a plant need to grow. It's like it needs sunlight, it needs water, it needs soil, it actually doesn't need soil, it just needs water and nutrients and light. So you just kind of put it in some sort of substance that can hold the roots upright and then they can grow very happily. So that is what I meant by commercial hydroponics. And there are various different kind of ways to do that, whether it be entirely artificial lighting or greenhouse supplemental lighting and different ways to irrigate and whatnot. But in general, that's what it means.

Cassie:
Help us understand a little bit about the benefits of this. It seems super fascinating, interesting. What does this implication have for broader society?

Danny Ginsburg:
Great question. This is something that after years I kind of perhaps became jaded about. But the reason why I was so interested in it, and the reason why I do believe it is a valuable idea, at least I think it's still to be determined whether it can really make a serious impact at scale. But the value of hydroponics, for example, in least in the way in which it's being implemented by many companies, is that in theory, it should allow you to grow crops with a much smaller water footprint, meaning you don't have to use nearly as much water, mostly because the systems that are being used are recirculating, meaning most of the water that's being used to irrigate the plants are actually emptying into a reservoir and then that's being pumped back up to irrigate the plants. Whereas in compared to field crop production, even if you're using very water efficient technologies like drip irrigation, that water, once it hits the soil, it's in the soil, you're not getting it back.
So by reusing water you're allowed to grow plants with much higher density, which allows you to get more crop, what people call it in the field of more crop per drop, you can use much less water to get much more yield. That's kind of one of the big aspects. I know a lot of companies now as well like to say, and I think perhaps legitimately, that every, I don't know, year or two or so, you hear about an e coli outbreak in lettuce or something. That generally only happens in field agriculture in plants that are grown outdoors. And I'm not an expert in exactly the sources of what would cause those contaminations, but generally when grown indoors, whether it be in a greenhouse or a vertical farm, if the right kind of food safety measures are taken, you should never be able to get any sort of breakout like that.
So the quality of the food should also be a lot higher. And in the case of the company that I worked at and many companies who are kind of similar, they cite themselves either in or very close to cities. So as opposed to having to ship most of our crops from California out to the rest of the country, you have these companies who are opening up greenhouses or vertical farms in the cities where the food is going to be produced. So in terms of the footprint of shipping the food to those places and the time- shelf life, you're eating a much fresher crop as well. So that means more nutritious, and you're also reducing food waste because you're not going to have to throw anything away that is no longer of good quality.

Cassie:
Super interesting. Yes. I recognize also you saying in theory, all of these things are true. And I'm guessing your experience here impacted what you're hoping to research at Cambridge. So I stopped you, I interrupted you at the commercial hydroponics, but I am curious to hear more about what you have planned next.

Danny Ginsburg:
Yeah, totally. So I will be studying plant sciences at Cambridge. That's a pretty big umbrella term within the field. Specifically, the lab that I will be in, my PI is an expert in plant circadian rhythms. So all life as we know it has a circadian rhythm. Life evolved on our planet, which has a approximately 24 hour rotation around its own axis. And so all life got used to being okay, we have some amount of sunlight and some amount of darkness, and also seasonality as well, longer days in the summertime, shorter days in the wintertime. And that affects the development of all life. And particularly with plants that can't move, they have to, it's really important that plants know what time of day it is and what season it is. So they know, for example, when to flower, when to essentially hibernate, so to speak, when to expose their leaves to the sunlight and when to potentially retract them to conserve water loss.
And so we're aware that plants have these rhythms in their movements and their metabolism and their development. But a lot of the molecular specifics, meaning what genes and what enzymes and what proteins are involved in the process are still being worked out. But from a more applied perspective, going back to connecting to all the work that I've done in terms of controlled environment crop production, one of the potential things or directions we could go in, and I know if I will, but one of the potential connections between studying plant circadian rhythms and controlled environment crop production is take for example, the space station or let's say a colony on Mars where plants are not exposed to a 24 hour cycle of light and darkness.
The question is there going to be potentially a gap in terms of what the plant can produce in terms of total leaf area, or let's say a plant has some sort of medicinal compounds in terms of the amount of medicinal compounds that plant is producing when it's being grown in this artificial environment that is different from the kind of natural cycles in which it evolved in. And can we potentially engineer the plant's genes to be more in sync with whatever rhythmicity or lack of rhythmicity you expose to the plant where you're growing it. Whether it be on a space station, whether it be in a vertical farm on earth or elsewhere. So that's one potential application.

Cassie:
So interesting. I was going to say, it seems like that would be helpful for the vertical farming indoors where you could just design whatever system you want based on some of this research. How long is your program at Cambridge?

Danny Ginsburg:
So average PhD length. Well, I think minimum PhD length is probably more appropriate is four years, which is, by the way, very distinctly different from the length of a PhD program. At least in plant sciences in the US, the US programs are generally five to six years, but US programs don't require a master's degree, whereas at least in the UK, and I think generally in Europe as well, you are required to have a master's degree before you go in to get your PhD. And so those programs there I think are shorter for a couple of reasons. One, because you generally don't really take any more classes. You've already done that as a master student. And at least for me, I don't know what it's like for other programs. I won't have to TA any classes either. So it's really just four years of full-time research, which seemed on top of all the other reasons for choosing Cambridge a very attractive program because I get to go, I get to focus on my research. Not that I don't think additional classes or teaching might be valuable, but I really enjoy kind of doing independent research. So that was a great selling point for me.

Cassie:
Totally, totally. Absolutely. And so four years, and then you mentioned some of the ways you could apply this research. What would you hope to do? Are you going to stay in research in academia? I'm sure you'll find out more as you get going, but do you have a plan for after at this point?

Danny Ginsburg:
Yeah, I mean, for anyone who's still listening, if it's not clear that you might want something at one point in time and plan for something at one point in time, it's going to change. I had no idea that I would move abroad. I had no idea that I'd get back in academia and then go back in industry and then back into academia. So it would be foolish for me to say what I'm going to be doing in four years. I will say that I chose to do a PhD for more than just the reason of staying in academia. If I were to, let's say I worked going to Cambridge and I were done with my current job as a research scientist out in California, and I said, okay, I want to work for a company in this industry in plant sciences broadly, and I would look at the jobs that seemed most interesting to me.
The ones that seem like the ones that would be a great fit or the ones that I'd want are generally PhD level jobs. So even if I didn't want to stay in academia after my PhD, postdoc faculty position, something like that, I still think that on top of the credible experience I hope to get in terms of just learning how to conduct research at a really high level, I think it'll be a valuable and in some ways a necessary prerequisite to get some of these kind of maybe scientific research director level positions at certain companies in the field.

Cassie:
Very cool. The world is your oyster, and I'm sure it'll evolve from your first year to your second year, third and fourth and whatnot, which is great. And Danny, it's been so interesting hearing more about your research and your experience at Northwestern and what you've done since. I'm curious how the arts and sciences background more broadly has been an asset to you. Because we've talked quite a bit about some science heavy topics. How has the broad education from Weinberg College helped?

Danny Ginsburg:
So I think this is where it gets a bit more abstract. I think given that I have chosen a career path that relies very heavily on quantitative analysis and doing science, so to speak, I do think that in terms of my worldview, how I understand the world, how I wish the world would work or look like, a lot of that came from my perhaps soft science classes, so some history classes, some sociology classes. I remember taking a class, for example, on US environmental law. I took a class on environmental history. The class that I mentioned, it was a sociology class called Environment and Society. None of those classes, I didn't draw from those classes any hard skills that I use professionally, but those classes were really fundamental for how I came to understand the world and the problems that I thought were most pressing, which was really great to then pair with the hard science classes that I was learning, and then the skills that I developed professionally.
Those kind of ideals and ideas are still what motivate me today to try to improve upon, in this case, in an industry that contributes so much to global warming in terms of its water footprint, its land footprint, resource footprint. I only learned about those issues from my law classes, sociology classes, history classes. And I don't think, well, there are many times when I think I might've benefited, maybe had I been an engineering student or whatever, I surely would not have had those classes to help me form this worldview that I have now. So in retrospect, I'm actually incredibly grateful to have that opportunity to have such a wide ranging liberal arts education that Weinberg gave me.

Cassie:
Absolutely. That's great. The mindset and I can't wait to hear how your research transpires over the next couple of years. It's been really interesting chatting with you. Thanks so much for talking with us and sharing so many insights with students. We really appreciate you for joining us.

Danny Ginsburg:
Yeah, totally. It was a pleasure.

Cassie:
Thanks for listening. If you want to hear more of these conversations, links to the full videos and podcasts are below. For more information about Weinberg College and this podcast, visit weinberg.northwestern.edu and search for Waldron. As always, we would love to hear your feedback. Please email us with your thoughts on the program. Have a great day. And go cats.