Interview with Louisa Wood

 Where were you and what were you doing before you joined the Institute?

I was a professor at the University of Leuven and VIB, in Belgium. I set up my lab there in 2009, and spent the last 10 years growing a research program and setting up two core facilities. 

What has the relocation experience been like so far? Best bit and worse bit?

I might plead the fifth there! Problems are for solving, not complaining about. 

What’s your research about?

I've always admired scientists who chose one problem and spend a career on solving it at a deeper and deeper level, but that isn't my personality. I love the creative process, hearing about a problem and them coming up with a spark, a creative way to tackle that problem. It has been a fun way for me to work, and we've made major contributions in different fields - basic immunology, clinical immunology, endocrinology, microbiology, neuroscience, genetics, bioinformatics - but I've generally avoiding asking the follow-up questions. I think as my career has matured, I might be ready to settle down with that one special question through: what is the adaptive immune system doing in the tissues? 

Any advice from what you’ve learned from setting up your own lab?

There are different routes to success, and you need to find one that works for you. From my perspective, the key to my success (survival? I guess they mean a similar thing in academia) has been rapidly building a diverse portfolio. Key here was my first hire - James Dooley (still with me 10 years later, having relocated over to the Babraham with me). He came on as an experienced research assistant from a small lab (an amazing training ground, since techs in small labs are expected to know how to do everything). Having someone that I could trust in the lab let me write grants. I wrote and wrote and wrote - I brought in 22 grants and 19 fellowships over my 10 years in Belgium, and must have submitted one a month on average. The whole time I saw James develop as a lab manager and then a senior scientist, and saw that he was actually much better in the lab than I ever would be, so the relationship turned into a partnership, with each of us taking the lead in our area of expertise. So I guess the key advice would be to hire James - but he already has a job, so hands off! Seriously though, hire the best, give them your trust and support, and let them take on responsibilities as they grow. It means making a serious commitment to their careers: senior staff grow more valuable every year, and this should be reflected in their salary and job stability.  

Do  you  have  any  words  of  wisdom  for  those  starting  off  in  a  scientific career? What do you know now that you wish you’d known then?

First, attitude matters when you hire someone. Unfortunately, not everyone is in science because they care about it. I've had people with very competent CVs join my lab for the wrong reason, like wanting to get a PhD. Ultimately, if you don't really care about the science, you won't be a good scientist. Skills can be taught, but I've never found a good way to mentor someone who didn't have a positive attitude, so my advice to a younger me would be: when you see those warning signs, give that person their notice. Attitude also matters in the other direction: when we needed to hire a mouse technician we passed over people with experience to take on Jeason Haughton, a Jamaican life guard with no experience in science at all. Why? Because we could tell that he was ready to listen, ready to learn and ready to work. Jeason has now been with me for 6 years, and there was a long line-up from other labs desperate to take him on when I moved over to Cambridge!

Second, peer review is over-rated. There is a degree of "reviewer roulette" at play that you can't take too personally. Great grants get rejected all the time. My first small grant to a Belgian funder was rejected - a few months later I submitted more-or-less the same thing to the ERC and gained a €1.5m grant that led to great papers. Papers will get rejected at one journal, and then accepted at a better journal. Why? Reviewer roulette. Oh, there have certainly been occasions when a reviewer's suggestions improved a paper, but more often it is just extra stuff for the supplementary material. My advice is to accept it is a game, and win through numbers. Why invest all your emotional energy into one grant, when you can write four or five? If a paper is rejected from one journal, resubmit to the next that day. Start juggling with as many balls as you can competently handle (the trick is working out how many that is), and make sure they are always in motion. 

Who has inspired you? Why?

David Attenborough. From the youngest age, watching his documentaries guided me into thinking like a scientist. To try to understand life through the prism of evolution, to understand living systems as complex positive and negative feedback loops. I still find that I bring a very ecological style of thinking to understanding immunology. He also shaped by ethics and my politics - because of him, I am a lifelong vegetarian and ardent environmentalist. For an inspiration from an immunologist, I've also admired the work of Gitta Stockinger (now at the Crick). Someone who is prepared to do a deep-dive into a question, and not just crop off the easy big hits: her work on Th17 cells and the aryl hyrdocarbon receptor are some of the best reads in the field. I'd also add: I think it is important to tell people how much you admire them! Science is a tough business, and even the most senior people deserve positive affirmation. I had the pleasure of successfully nominating Gitta for an EFIS-IL award in 2017, and it was a pleasure to introduce her award plenary and describe her to everyone as one of my scientific heroes. Just recently I sent a letter to Sir David, thanking him for his influence (and received a nice reply too). 

What has been your proudest personal and/or scientific achievement?

Here I would bring up two post-doctoral fellows who joined my lab back in Belgium - Stephanie Humblet-Baron (joined 2010, as her first post-doc) and Susan Schlenner (joined 2012, as her second post-doc). Both are amazing scientists, Stephanie as a clinical/translational immunologist and Susan as a molecular immunologist, who took on slow-burning projects. For Stephanie, it was six years between her starting in my lab and getting her first paper - but since then a big hit every year! Susan not only started ambitious projects but also set up a CrispR facility at the University of Leuven - a job that has helped many labs, but is not exactly a career builder. In both of them I saw future leaders. They were already at an amazing level scientifically, so my mentorship was to help build their understanding of how a lab works, strategies for writing grants and papers, discussions on how to manage staff, advice on how to build and maintain a portfolio of projects, and guidance through the tenure-track application process. So among my proudest scientific moments were when they were both made tenure-track professors at the University of Leuven - Susan in 2017 and Stephanie in 2019. Two outstanding scientists from my lab who are now independent. I don't think I could have left Belgium without knowing that my lab and Core facilities there would continue to flourish, now under their leadership.

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