Mentoring the Next Generation of Diverse Scholars : Dr. Mike Summers

Dr. Michael Summers is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Robert E. Meyerhoff Chair for Excellence in Research and Mentoring and Distinguished University Professor at UMBC. He is also an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Research in his laboratory is aimed at understanding how HIV-1 and other retroviruses assemble in infected cells and package their RNA genomes. He was an instrumental figure in the success of the amazing Meyerhoff Scholars Program!

Transcription

Transcribed by Mika O’Shea (she/her)

JP Flores: What’s up y’all, it’s your host JP Flores and welcome to From where does it STEM?

Mike Summers: Sure. Yeah, it’s not like I had any really major plans. I was raised mainly in Florida, in St. Petersburg. But I spent every summer on dairy farms in Wisconsin. My grandparents were farmers, and so were my uncles, and I love that outdoor lifestyle, and my grandfather really wanted me to take over his dairy farm. And so when I graduated high school, I did not even take the SATs because I decided I was, I really wanted to farm. But my dad had put himself through college on the GI Bill after World War II. And he was raised in extreme poverty with only a single parent in a coal mining town in West Virginia, it’s an amazing story what he did. I mean to go from that to actually getting a college education. He really wanted me to at least go to college for a couple of years. So as I was driving to Wisconsin, I had, I decided maybe this was a mistake. Maybe I should go to college first. And so when I got up there, I called a friend and said, can you register me for some classes? Just the basic math and science at a community college.

So I came back after that summer after my senior year in high school, and I started at St. Petersburg Junior College, and at that time, Florida had lots of lower two-year univers- colleges that only serve freshmen and sophomores. And then they had a separate group that only served juniors and seniors. So I started at St. PJC, and it turned out that I had a really good organic chemistry teacher and she was tough as nails, and you know, if you weren’t happy with your grade, you can always retake another exam. She had a whole file cabinet full of exams. So I worked at a pizza hut, and I was constantly studying for organic exams because I was just trying to make that A so I would just keep taking exams over and over and over. And it turned out that she saw some potential in some of us, and told us that she thought we would do really well at the University of West Florida. That was one of the upper two-year schools in Florida. So she drove us, so my organic chemistry faculty member put us all in a van, there were about 6 of us, it was a 10-hour drive back then, to get to Pensacola. And we spent the weekend in Pensacola, and I interviewed there and decided to go there for my upper 2 years, and that’s where things really changed for me, because then I was surrounded, I was in a small cohort, but surrounded by people who knew what they wanted to do. They wanted to go to grad school. I didn’t know what grad school was. They knew how to study and make As. And so that was a real learning time for me. They all applied to graduate schools. And so I decided, well, I may as well do the same thing. I got into Emory, I didn’t get into several places that I had applied to. And so, and actually, because my friends got into schools that didn’t accept me, I decided I need to do more. And so it’s one of those things. And I advise people the same thing. When you’re transitioning from one state to another, like undergraduate to graduate school, that’s a really good time to look in a mirror and say, how do I want people to perceive me in this new venue? And for me because I was always real young looking, and I was trying to be popular, I decided when I went to grad school. You know, I’m not gonna joke around all the time. I’m gonna actually really be serious, and I’m gonna take all of my study habits and add to them to do even better if I could. And so when I got to Emory I did well, and you know, I published quite a few papers. I was in a lab with Luigi Marzilli, he’s a bioinorganic chemist, and he really taught me how to be a critical thinker, and how to express my ideas and all the things that you really need to learn in graduate school, you know, how to be a scientist.

And so when I decided to apply to graduate- to, for a postdoc, I decided, I really wanted to do it in NMR. And so it turned out that I, at that point I was dating somebody who had one more year of school in the Maryland area, in the Baltimore area, and so I got a postdoc position at NIH in NMR. And so that’s that’s where I really took a deep dive with Ad Bax and to, you know, biomolecular NMR spectroscopy. So I had this training as a bioinorganic chemist, training in NMR, and then when I decided to apply for faculty positions, it turned out I got no offers. Zero. I didn’t get any interviews. I was applying for inorganic positions, because that’s what I was trained in, that’s what I could teach. But at NIH I was applying NMR and working with this brilliant physicist, but I wasn’t a physicist. And so when I was applying for jobs, I just wasn’t getting anything. And I, finally, my PhD advisor reached out and said, you know, I know Mike applied to your university, why didn’t he get a look? And what they said is, you know, he’s applying for an inorganic position, but he wants to use all of our NMR time. And back then, there weren’t a lot of superconducting NMRs, and you know that may have been the reason for other places, too. I don’t know. But my PhD advisor then told me that I should look at UMBC. And he had a former college roommate who’d been at UMBC as a faculty member. I hadn’t even heard of the place. It’s only right up the road from NIH, you know it’s only 20 miles away.

JP Flores: Oh really, it’s that close?

Mike Summers: It’s that close, yeah, maybe maybe 30, but 25-30 miles away. And I hadn’t applied, I hadn’t heard of it, and so he contacted them. That’s why you never want to burn your bridges. You will realize at some point that you know more about your project than your PhD advisor. If things go well, that’s the way it should be. And it can be tempting when your PhD advisor wants you to do something that you know is dumb, you know, you know, you just want to be able to have a professional conversation, and then, if they insist, you do what they tell you to do. Down the road, you may need their- you will very likely need their help. So here my PhD advisor said, you need to apply. And I applied, and they interviewed me, and eventually I got the job. And so, but I thought this would be a stepping stone, because this was a smallish school. It did not have a big PhD program. I had just come from the NIH where, and even at Emory, they had really high rate science, and I wanted to do good science.

JP Flores: And how big is UMBC, if you don’t mind me asking?

Mike Summers: Yeah we have about 14,000 students, maybe. Well, maybe a little more than that now, probably we have about 13,000 undergraduates, and maybe 2 or 3,000 graduate students now. So it’s not a big school. When I came here it was still more of a commuter school with a very, very small graduate program. Chemistry didn’t even have its own graduate program. We were umbrella’d with the medical school downtown. And so you know, the only NMR they had here was an 80 MHz NMR that you had to actually spin the sample tube in order to get it to start spinning because it just- it didn’t work. It was 10 years old. You know, I wasn’t gonna be able to do science with that. I hope I’d be able to come up with ideas, make some samples, and then maybe borrow time somewhere else until I got a grant, and I thought if I could just get an NIH grant or an NSF grant, then I can move someplace that had more resources.

JP Flores: But you’re still there.

Mike Summers: I’m still here, and the reason I’m here is because of Freeman Hrabowski. So, you know, within a couple of years I got that first grant, and I got another grant, and research was going great. And my lab was starting to take off, and people came around to start recruiting me. And you know, some opportunities, really good opportunities came up, and one place, I wouldn’t have even had to move. It came from Johns Hopkins, and you know I wasn’t interviewing for a job, but they, I was out giving a talk, and they were trying to talk me into coming, and I remember a faculty member saying that I was building a really nice nest in the wrong tree. Nest in the wrong tree. So, but it caused me to really sit and think about what I wanted to do with my life and my career, because, you know, I could go to a place that attracts really well prepared graduate students and had all these resources that I didn’t have at UMBC, but it was about that time that I had met with Freeman and I started working with Meyerhoff scholars. This is a program that he conceived and started, and it- the whole premise is inclusive excellence. That we have high expectations for everybody. So I met with Freeman Hrabowski, and I remember he called me up to his office once, and we just had a conversation. It was the first time I had been called up to the administration building. And I remember we talked about just general things, and I remember leaving his office thinking, what was that about? And you know, maybe a month later, or two, a young Black girl came into my office and said I’d like to work in your lab, I’m a Meyerhoff scholar. I said what’s a Meyerhoff scholar?

JP Flores: What did Freeman say in that conversation? What was- do you remember what was said?

Mike Summers: I think that he was just wanting to get to know me. And so he didn’t ask me about my views on teaching, or research, or diversity, or anything like that. It was, I think he was trying to get a sense for who his allies could be at UMBC if he started something like this. And I wish I could remember all the things we talked about. It was a short, it was a half an hour, but it was just a conversation that we had, and we both went away feeling, you know, I felt good about meeting him. He wasn’t president at the time he was a vice provost, and shortly after that he became president. But- so, you know, this student came in. She was a Meyerhoff. She started on a research project. I had already had African-Americans in my lab, but they weren’t part of this program, and you know, maybe he wanted to learn about that, too. I really don’t know. But pretty soon there were large numbers of Meyerhoffs and other undergrads that wanted to work in the lab because that first student ended up helping solve the structure of a protein from HIV, and it made, it’s in biochemistry textbooks now, it made the cover of this annual book on all the structures solved that year, and it was on the cover of that book. So she got a lot of publicity, and then a lot of students wanted to work in the lab. So what happened is almost overnight. I started having large number of undergrads who wanted to work in the lab, and because of the Meyerhoff program, you know, many of them were from diverse backgrounds. A lot were women. Historically, now, from then until now I’ve had about 340 undergraduates do undergraduate research in the lab. And of them about 42% are from underrepresented groups. And about 64% are women. And so it’s been terrific because those students have gone on to MD-PhD programs, and graduate schools, and quite a few of them now are faculty members at different places around the country.

JP Flores: That’s amazing. I know a lot of Meyerhoff alumni as well, it’s a very prominent, foundational program.

Mike Summers: It’s a, yeah, it’s not just alumni that are different places. Kizzmekia Corbett, who helped lead NIH efforts for the Moderna vaccine, she was that, you know, they’re just in leadership roles. I think there are 4 or 5 former Meyerhoffs who are now on the faculty at Duke. Including one guy who was just elected to become an HHMI investigator, and he’s also elected to the National Academy of Medicine. I mean, they are doing amazing things. One kid that worked in my- I called him a kid, one guy that worked in my lab is from California, he turned down Stanford to come to UMBC to be a Meyerhoff scholar. His name is Isaac Kinde. Did his PhD with- did his undergrad with me, published a few papers, went to Hopkins to do his MD-PhD, and after his MD-PhD, he decided not to do a residency. Instead, he started his own company. And he’s developed a way of identifying several different types of cancers in women between the ages of, I think, 55 and 65. And basically, he’s revolutionizing healthcare for women. I mean, these Meyerhoff scholars are doing amazing things in all different forms of STEM research.

JP Flores: That’s amazing. Yeah, so the Meyerhoff Scholars Program. So diversity in science is something that I’m very passionate about. And I know that this program laid the foundation for UNC Chapel Hill’s, Chancellor Science Scholars Penn State’s Millennium Scholars Program, and these programs have also proven to be successful. In fact, I think you’ve mentioned that, at least in the research I’ve done on you, that the success is actually published in Science, right? So I have a question. We have a lot of different types of schools out there. I’m a product of a small liberal arts college called Occidental College in Los Angeles, California, where I was born and raised. Do you think the Meyerhoff model will work there? Like, do you think it’s amenable to different types of institutions, like community colleges and big 4 years versus liberal arts schools?

Mike Summers: Absolutely. So that was the big question. So you know, I remember when I was visiting UNC Chapel Hill and Holden Thorpe was the Chancellor at the time, and I was in his office and Holden is, he’s about my age, and he’s also a chemist, and so we had a lot in common.

JP Flores: I’m interviewing him in a couple of weeks, I’m excited.

Mike Summers: Awesome. And you know, Holden, you know, he said, you know, have you thought about moving someplace else and trying to replicate Meyerhoff someplace else? And I said, you know, I’m- you know, I think I can have my biggest impact where I am, I said, why don’t you try to do this at UNC? And, like everybody else I talked to, they said, well, we don’t have a Freeman Hrabowski. In other words, what people thought was that you have to have a dynamic minority leader to do this. And when Holden I started talking about it, he said, he asked me, do you think it could be done at UNC? And I said, I’m convinced it can if you have like-minded leadership. And he actually got tears in his eyes when we were talking, and said we can make that happen here. And so he’s the one that got the ball rolling, and I came down with Meyerhoff staff, and then we came down with our Parents Association, with students to help them recruit. I gave talks. I stayed at the dorms there for a while to help them get the ball rolling, and it’s incredible what they’ve done. At Penn State, the challenges were even greater in some respects, because there was tension between their honors college, which wanted to be the structure that handled all honors programs, and their science departments that felt that they weren’t doing enough to be inclusive. And so when the people at UNC, the leaders there said we’re gonna do this, there was tension because some place- some groups on campus didn’t want to see, you know, this honors program run out of something other than the Honors College. And another point was that they had a Dean of their minority outreach, you know their, this individual said that you could never have a Meyerhoff program at Penn State because the parents of high achieving Black kids wouldn’t trust us with their children. Basically, it’s a very isolated campus. It’s a huge campus, you know, UMBC is about, at that time, was about 15% African American. At the time we started this UNC was about 7% African American. Penn State was a huge school and was only about 4% African American, less. And in science, an even smaller percentage. So there was a lot of reasons to think it wouldn’t work there.

JP Flores: So how’d you overcome it? That’s, I’m so interested to hear this.

Mike Summers: Yeah, it’s all about mindset. So what we did- and also partnership. I think partnership and mindset are the key things. If the upper administration says it’s important, and they’re willing to take advice, there’s, there, you can do it. So what we did is we told them just to look at their pool of applicants, identify those that they thought would be appropriate. Now, that’s not just minorities, but people who have something about their applications, or their background that suggests, even a white guy from the South, suggests that they care about social justice. And then invite them to campus for a selection weekend. Tell them about the program, and then see what happens. And so what Penn State did is they had 72 applicants that they thought would be appropriate. They invited all 72 high school students and their parents to come to campus. They got 70 to show up, and the other 2 had a virtual visit. So at the white tablecloth dinner, after, at the end of all their activities, one of the parents, a Black father stood up and said, when will I find out if my son gets in? I would pay for him to be in this program. So they knew that historically, UMBC only gets about 50% of the offers we made at the time, it’s more now, but a lot of the students they go to, you know Duke or UNC, you know Harvard and other places. These are strong students. So they made offers. They only had enough money for about 18 slots. So they made 22 offers, hoping to get about 11 or 12, and then they would make more offers. They made 22 offers, and they had 20 accepts. So now they have a problem. They gotta raise money because they didn’t expect to get all those applicants. And it turns out that every year since they started their program. They’ve never had enough declined students to use as a comparative group to assess the impact of their program. So it turns out, there are large numbers of high achieving minority students in Pennsylvania that are willing, or want to go to an isolated, huge place like Penn State if there’s a program in place and faculty there. Even, you know, white male, white female, doesn’t matter. If they’re a faculty figure that are trying to understand the issues and give a damn, and then they have a structure in place, not just that, so that the expectations are high, but to make sure that they can reach those expectations.

JP Flores: That’s awesome. Yeah, it kind of reminds me of sports recruiting in a way. But you know, it’s kind of-

Mike Summers: It’s very similar, you know, people say to us, well, you know, should you, you know, really be doing something special for these students. So we have a summer bridge where they come in before their freshman year, and they have all these activities during the summer. It’s actually pretty brutal. But part of it is teaching them how to deal with stress so that they can learn the tools to deal with stress before they’re in a really stressful situation when they’re taking 5 classes, and they’ve got 3 exams in, you know, you know, in 3 days, and or whatever. So that summer bridge is designed to do that. But it’s also designed to help them work together to support each other. You know, it used to be look to your left, look to your right at the end of the year, you know, one of them isn’t going to be there. Well, our view is, look to your left, look to your right. If one of them isn’t there, then we’ve all failed because you do have the ability.And so part of this- I’ll give you an example. In the summer bridge, they have to take a math class. It’s a calculus class, some opt out of it, because they’ve already had calculus and even differential equations in high school, but the vast majority take calculus. So it’s a 6 week course that covers the entire book. It’s super stressful. But the students are told you have to study as individuals and study in groups. And most high school students have never studied in groups, and they don’t really like it. But what we do is we tell the students to self organize into groups of 4 and study in those groups. And then in the first quiz, they learned that the group gets the average grade of the group. So you know what happens, if you’ve ever taught, and you ever say to students, get together in groups, the well prepared students, they know who they are. They get together. Everybody else is stuck, right? So what happens is they take that first quiz. They find out, you know, they all, they get the grade, the group gets the average grade, but then they learn that the class, the entire class gets the grade of the weakest group.

JP Flores: Oh, wow! So there’s like a big accountability piece there. Really a team effort, collaborative.

Mike Summers: That’s right. And so, even though they’re, this is a pre-matriculation program, the calculus course goes on their grades. A lot of these students have never earned a B or they’ve had very few B’s in their high school experience. They want those straight As. And so after that first quiz, they’re all looking around who needs the most help. They’re allowed to reorganize one time. So now the groups will reorganize and they’re smart about it. They wanna make sure there are some strong people working with people that have, that don’t have the same preparation. You know some of the students have high GPAs out of high school, but they come from high schools that we know from, historically, don’t provide the same level of education as other high schools do. And so you know, the students, on their own, look to be supporting each other, and then we try to maintain that approach throughout their time at UMBC.

JP Flores: That’s amazing. I’m curious as to why, you know, that hasn’t made it into normal pedagogical, you know, techniques? Like, why isn’t that a normal thing, that classes in higher education don’t do? It seems like there’s data to support this. I’m surprised that more people-

Mike Summers: So there- it turns out that this has been experimented with even before our program. So Hal White- yeah, Howell White at Delaware made student centered learning a part of an experiment he did that was funded by the HH- Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Even these replication activities at UNC and Penn State were funded by HHMI to see if they would work. And so Hal White showed that student centered learning is a great approach where you put students in groups and have them solve problems as a group. And so based on what we learned from others and what we learned from our own summer bridge, we have re-designed all of our freshman STEM courses, so that that is incorporated into our freshman training. So once a week, our freshman chemistry students get together in this classroom, that was built with help from the NSF, and they work in small groups. And each week, you know, one student has one job as part of the group, and they have different jobs, and they work together to solve these problems. And honestly, the students don’t like it when they start doing this, they don’t like to be told they have to work in groups, and they have to work together, and all these things. But then, by the end of the semester what we see are their attitudes change, and we see GPAs went up, and we see larger numbers matriculate to organic chemistry than did before we started these activities. So you- yes, we have learned what we can take and apply more broadly. One of the other things is that the students went to the, went to Freeman and, you know, Dr. Hrabowski, and said, hey, you know you tell us we should work in groups, and then we go to the library, and we’re not allowed to talk. And so he actually rebuilt the whole first floor of the library. So that gigantic room, and it has sort of soundproofing, and it’s all glass enclosed. And so, students, you have to have a student ID to get in, and students can go in there. And so if you go in there like before finals or before exams, you’ll see that room packed with people sitting on the floor and working at tables. And you know, working together on problem solving. So yeah, it’s changed a lot of things that we do for all students, because of what we’ve learned by working with this smaller cohort.

JP Flores: That’s awesome. Yeah. So I think a big question I have is, what are you seeing with students after the COVID-19 pandemic, you know? Has it been hard to carry out the community building aspect of the program? And also, do you see students in general, you know, having a hard time building community nowadays? Or how has that affected everything?

Mike Summers: So during COVID there were obvious problems. Now, I’m not- I don’t run the Meyerhoff undergraduate program. I work with large number of undergraduates in my in my lab, and so I can tell you about how COVID affected undergraduate mentoring in my lab in terms of the entire Meyerhoff program, I think that there are challenges that go beyond what I can talk about, but my lab, you know what happened is, there were students that that finished their freshman year. They said they were gonna join my lab that summer. But then I couldn’t take students because UMBC, like a lot of places, put restrictions on how many people could be in a facility based on square footage. And so, you know, if I have 6 graduate students and 2 or 3 postdocs, they take up all the allotted space, and there was no option for me to involve undergraduates. And then, when we were allowed to start bringing undergraduates in, the only way you can train people in a wet lab is to do it, one on one, side by side. They have to see you pipetting. They have to, you have to be able to look at each other’s gels. That’s not something you can do remotely. So there was a period of a couple of years, maybe 3 years, really, where the mentoring of undergraduates in a research environment really was hurt at UMBC, anyway. But now we’re in, as far as I can tell, for at least a year now, maybe two, work fully back to normal. I mean, I’ve got, right, you know, this past fall, I had, I think, 22 undergrads back in the lab again, working with the grad students that you know, they’re shoulder to shoulder. All of our plexiglass shields have been removed. And yeah, we’re back to business now, and I don’t see any lingering effects for the students that are in the lab. What I what I worry about are the students who were, you know, sophomores and juniors, who didn’t get the same experience. And you know, will that impact their ability to get into graduate schools, or MD-PhD programs, or affect even their, you know, their ability to do science. In a way, they’ve lost that training that we provide here.

JP Flores: Yeah. Do you have any insight on what schools can do or what schools should do, or what they’re doing about, you know that gap in research experience? Because I feel like the pandemic, it was 2 years, but I’m sure that schools have been able to accommodate that and be understanding of that situation.

Mike Summers: Yeah, I don’t know that- what we can do for the students themselves. I know that there were policies about grading, and you know, testing and things like that. And in our graduate program we’ve relaxed the requirement for research experience that we always looked for because of the COVID. We couldn’t, you know we couldn’t look for that. It’s had a big effect on graduate students who normally would have a certain number of papers, but their numbers of papers are lower because they had to be out of the lab. And when they were in the lab, they didn’t have the students to work with. You know there were all kinds of effects there. So I would say, at the undergraduate level, at a place that emphasizes undergraduate research like ours, it did have an effect. But nationwide, you know, most places, you know a research lab might have 1 or 2 undergrads, you know. Maybe they’ll bring them in over the summer, you know. Here in my lab the undergrads have to work, to join my lab they have to commit to full time in the summer, 2 summers in a row, and to be in the lab 3 days a week, 3 hours a day, minimum during the academic year. So it really is a major commitment, you know, immersive commitment to research. But for most undergrads, their research experience they get might be a summer REU or something like that. So I don’t know that COVID will have the same impact on undergrads is, it does definitely impact them, more at some places than others, but I think the bigger impact is on, you know, graduate school and do those- maybe it’s on do those students have opportunities that they might have been better prepared or more competitive if they had had those research opportunities.

JP Flores: Right, gotcha. So going back to the Meyerhoff Scholars Program, Chancellor Science Program, the program at Penn State. So these programs have been in existence for a little bit. So are there things that you think that can be improved with them? What are they? And how would you do that? So, I’ll be doing a internship at the NIH starting this Friday like, do you incorporate peer mentors, you know, when doing these these programs like, what? What can you-

Mike Summers: Absolutely. So there are about a dozen things that we think are critical to the program, and a lot of people come to us and say, well, what are the most important things? Because we don’t have a lot of money. And you know, people call them, they build programs that they call Meyerhoff like, and they don’t seem to have the same outcomes that we’ve had. You know, you’ve got to do a lot of things if you’re really going to implement what we do, you know. And it starts with assessment. So with any place that wants to do this, what we require, if you want to partner with us is you have to look at the past 5 years. And look, what are your outcomes? You know how many minority students are applying to your university? How many are being accepted? How many of them are initially expressing an interest in being a STEM major? How many of them are in stem after your freshman and sophomore years? You know, how many of them are leaving? And then, with all that data, how many of them actually graduate with a STEM degree, and of those that graduate with a STEM degree how many of them go to graduate school? How many go to professional school? How many of them do other things? So that’s a lot of data that universities really should have if they care about assessing their performance as an educational institution. Within that data, they should also be looking at how their women and how their minority students are doing. You know, how you know if you look at general losses out of STEM year by year, compare your white students versus your minority students. Okay, are there differences there? So it’s interesting because a UNC and Penn State both places said, well, we don’t have a diversity problem. You know, and they all, and the people I talk to say, well, I can look in my class, and we’ve got several minorities, and they’re doing well. I said, great, all right, let’s look at the data. And then, once their institution collected the data and they saw the data, then they said, oh, there is a problem, and I think that’s the key to the genius of Freeman Hrabowski. The key to his genius was not getting people like me into a room and saying, Mike, you know you were raised in the South, you you don’t have a lot of experience with minority students. You have deficiencies that we’re going to fix before you start mentoring students. And that’s what most places do. And what Freeman did was he said Mike, look at the data. So it’s a metrics based approach. It’s a data based approach. He said Mike, look at these data. We’ve got a problem. I said, oh, I didn’t think we did but wow! You’re right. We do. Freeman said I have this idea about what might work. Nobody else has tried it. Are you in? Yeah, of course I’m in. And he didn’t do it that way, but that is effectively what he did. So the way it really happened is, you know, these Meyerhoff scholars, they have to sit in the front row of their class and they’re taught how to ask questions. They have to be in class 10 minutes before class starts and they have to ask questions in class. So if you’re a faculty member like me teaching freshman chemistry, you walk into the class 10 minutes early to get all set up. The classroom, this huge classroom is empty except for 25 Black kids in the front row. Oh, who are you? Oh, we’re Meyerhoff scholars. Oh, we’re, you know, and you start talking. You’re getting set up every day. You’re having that conversation as soon as you start lecturing. One of them raises their hand right? And it turns out that before long they are, you know, on their tests and quizzes, one of them typically is scoring the high grade. They’re doing really well. That changes, overnight, the expectations of the faculty. It changes the expectations of all the other minority students who are in the class, who are sitting in the back kind of in the shadows. You know they might now earn a C or a D on their first quiz, and rather than thinking, I don’t belong here. Society was right. They look in the front row and say, well, wait a minute. How are those guys doing so well? You know, what is it that they have that I don’t have? And so a lot of students get retained- our retention in STEM went way up big- and when we started Meyerhoff, and I think that’s a big part of it. And then think of all the white kids in the class. Now they’re seeing in the front row all these students who are at the top of the class, and they don’t initially think, oh, look at all those Black kids together. They must be part of the basketball team. You know, they look at them in the front and say, wow those are our very best students, and that is the key to changing campus climate. It wasn’t Freeman taking that faculty member into a room and saying, why aren’t you holding your expectations at the same level as you’re holding them for all the other students? It was just giving the students the tools they need to do well, but then intentionally making them visible. And I know that, maybe it’s an unfair burden. But the students don’t see it as a burden. They realize that all they have to do is show up to class early and ask questions and get in a lab. And if they do all those things, they’re going to be very competitive, and in the process of doing that they’re changing their campus. And because they’ve changed their campus, they’re changing the world. and that’s- they don’t view it as a burden. So anyway, it’s so Freeman’s real genius was number one using data to convince people why we need to do something. And then using data to show that the things he’s doing are effective. And so you know, these 12 or 13 things every year. It seems like we’re evaluating, trying to decide what’s important, what needs to be changed. It’s a program that’s constantly evolving because we’re constantly evaluating and deciding where our greatest needs reside on a year-by-year basis.

JP Flores: Yeah, I didn’t realize how data driven it is. But I guess you know, I think that is- we are all scientists, right? It makes sense to follow the data, based off the data.

Mike Summers: If you just make decisions based on what feels good, you’re you know the- and that’s what, historically, this country has done. You know, it sounds like, it feels like this is the right thing to do, you know, and if I’ve been discriminated against you know, I would want to educate people about, you know why it’s wrong to do that. There are ways of doing that that make you, that make people want to be part of the solution rather than pushing them into a corner and then trying to pull them back out. It just makes your work even harder. Freeman used analytics and positive messaging to change the campus. And that really are- those are the 2 key things to him, not just building Meyerhoff but to changing the whole campus it was analytics and positive messaging.

JP Flores: Yeah, so do you think the same can be done in society today? So like some listeners out there, hopefully not a lot of them, may feel uncomfortable with the acronym DEI, right? We’re seeing some wild things unfold in Cambridge right now. Why do you think diversity matters in science?

Mike Summers: Yeah. Well, diversity is really important. I mean, there- there’s lots of papers that show that diverse teams, and whether defining diversity in lots of different ways. But diverse teams are better problem solvers. So that’s true. But at the heart of the matter, I mean, we go into science because we want to make the world a better place, not because we want to make it a worse place, right? And so, if a fundamental premise is that we’re all trying to make the world a better place, then it’s easy to look at how diversity is in many cases is creates problems in our society. Because we see how people in one group might be marginalized or people in, you know, historically, there’s been not just marginalization, but there’s been abuse, obvious abuse. People don’t even realize, and I didn’t know this until just a few years ago, a lot of people know about Tuskegee right? There were these terrible, terrible experiments done in Alabama where, you know black men were, some of them were given medicine to treat syphilis, and others were given placebo to see what went on. And wow, that’s a terrible thing. What I did not know until recently is, those experiments were funded by the NIH and the doctors that were doing those experiments, when they realized that there was definitely- it was detrimental to not be treated, and syphilis was leaving to birth defects and other things, they went to the NIH and said, we need to put these other people on you know the treatments. And the NIH said no. The NIH said, if you stop those, we’ll take away your money, because that’s not what this experiment is intent. We want to know what the outcomes are gonna be at the end of the period. And it, you know, NIH doesn’t do that anymore. But people don’t realize that this wasn’t just rogue, you know, Nazi-like scientists who are doing these crazy experiments. This was something that our government was sanctioning. And so there are many many things. One of my former students is now a physician scientist, but she’s also a pediatrician, and what she talks about is the fact that one of the most commonly used protocols in her clinical practice is one that was developed and discovered and developed by a slave owner who bought slaves so that he could do experiments on them, and that’s why he, how he figured out that this certain treatment would work best for you know, for all women right? And so, you know, there’s a lot of things. Our country has a history of treating minorities different from the way they treat each other, and there’s a lot of memory in minority communities. And so you know there are ways to educate- I mean, scientists want to know the facts. You know, we want to know facts about history. And so there are ways to educate people about our history. One way to do it is just say, you know I- we had lecture on, you know, why aren’t African Americans getting the COVID vaccine? Scientists like me want to know the answer to that. And so, as part of that lecture, we learned about some of the history of medicine and minority groups in the U.S. and so, and there, there’s ways of educating people and making them wanna learn more without starting by saying, you’re a racist, white male and you’ve got problems, and we’re gonna try to, you know, fix you, you you need to go to all of these training activities and it it’s a turn off. And so it pushes people away. It’s unnecessary, because those same people probably really want to know the history of medicine in the U.S. and how it was different for different groups.

JP Flores: Yeah, so do you propose that we should probably add these to our undergraduate and graduate curriculums? Like, maybe that is one way that we can, we can do that. I mean, I know there’s bioethics courses out there, but I don’t know if they discuss things like this, because I feel like if they did, you know, we’d be more aware of it. But I just learned this from you, just now.

Mike Summers: My feeling is that this should be part of every class. There shouldn’t be a course on bioethics. There shouldn’t, there just shouldn’t. I have really good friends at Columbia University, and they’re thinking about redesigning their graduate program from the bottom up. And most graduate programs, PhD programs, you know, they have certain courses you gotta take and how to write grants, how to be a good scientist. You know, what is ethics. But things are add-ons to a program. I think that understanding the role of science in society should be part of every science class we take. And so if something was developed by studying a minority group, then that should be part of the class. You know, Henrietta Lacks, that history should be part of every biology class. Right? And this isn’t, this isn’t to, this wouldn’t water down a class. This would actually enrich the class. It would make people help people understand why certain groups are upset about certain things that are going on in our society, right? Help people understand in a way that’s- now you might just say, why do we need to be worrying about what white people think? Well, we want to, we want to be developing allies, not pushing people away. And so the best way to do it is build inclusion. It’s not even necess- it’s building history into our science classes, and building it in in a way that people will better understand our society today and why it thinks the way it does.

JP Flores: I wholeheartedly agree. So I just interviewed the historian of the NHGRI, and we had a great conversation about the history of eugenics and scientific racism, and how it still persists today, and I tried to get him to to give a talk at UNC, and we’re still in the works on that. So I’m so glad you said that because I wholeheartedly agree.

Mike Summers: Yeah, but it- but these things can’t just be one off classes, you know. You invite-

JP Flores: No they need to be integrated, they need to be-

Mike Summers: That’s right. Every faculty member should be looking for ways to incorporate these things. You know, it could be organic chemistry, and they’re talking about an organic molecule that is an anti cancer agent. Right? Well, they can talk about the, even if that wasn’t developed, you know, by studies with minorities or whatever they might be, finding out that you know, Blacks have a 30% higher chance of dying of certain types of cancers than white people do. And so you know, clearly, there, you know, there’s ways of building in societal problems and health disparities into our basic science classes and ways of doing that in a way that’s constructive for the class, you know, and you know, regardless if somebody voted for Trump or didn’t vote for Trump, it doesn’t matter. They’re gonna leave that class understanding that there are health disparities. They may learn a little more about sickled cells in biology, and how CRISPR is going to actually help cure people with sickle cell disease. And how that’s gonna disproportionately help African-Americans in this country. You know, those kinds of stories need to be incorporated, even as importantly or more importantly than memorizing every single little you know-

JP Flores: Amino acid or something.

Mike Summers: Yeah. Well, you need to know the amino acids. But A Michael reaction, or whatever there’s, there’s so many different types of reactions people memorize, you know. Maybe you just learn a little bit more about, you know how this impacts society along the way.

JP Flores: Yeah, so what are some major barriers that stop us from implementing that in curricula? And what are some major barriers that stop us from diversifying the scientific workforce? Ao barriers to changing classes and and also barriers to the workforce.

Mike Summers: Well, I think if you change the classes, you’ll eventually change the workforce. You know, originally, I’m- when I started my faculty position in 87, we felt that it was TV shows that was hurting us because scientists were always sort of presented as being nerds. Really nerdy people, right? And we get a lot of minorities now who are saying, I wanna be a CSI scientist. And so, you know, people, scientists nowadays are on TV are represented more as being kind of cool, interesting, maybe quirky. But you know people that you might aspire to be alike rather than shy away from. And so I think television is helping us these days. But I do think that in those freshmen classes, it’s still too easy to treat them as weeder courses. And if a faculty member already has an implicit bias, and we all have them. I have them. If we already have an implicit bias against a group based on our history, not based on anything imagined. But you know, in my 20 years of teaching this class, I’ve only had X number of Blacks earn an A right or something like that. So their expectations are lower. Maybe their hopes are high, but their expectations are lower. How do we help that person, help the students in the class? And so what my colleagues at the place where I went to school, the University of West Florida, did. They don’t have the resources for a Meyerhoff program. But what they did is they started reaching out early on to the students in their class and just, they started by reaching out to the minority students who had done well, as you know, as sophomores and juniors. And they got them all together, had some pizza, and they said, you’ve done really well, you know, we know we’re a majority school, but in our freshman classes there are a lot of minorities. Why did you do well, but we lost so many? And do you want to be, do you want to help us build something? And they wanted to. And so they got, they started getting together on a regular basis. They started a program. Those students started serving as tutors, paid tutors for freshmen, freshmen when they come in right away they’re made aware of this group. So they get involved in that group before they get way behind in their courses. And so it’s a matter of I think, helping faculty to be more comfortable having those conversations. To telling faculty. It’s okay to invite some students in and maybe start with the better students who you maybe interacted with them, and they’ve gotten good grades in your courses, you know maybe you’re comfortable talking to them, invite them in and say, hey, I wanna show you some data. We have a problem and not just you, but a few faculty. Just say, we’re a group of faculty. We have some money, not a lot. We think this is important for our university, and what can we do? Help us. You know, and look to the students for advice. And then the students may want to be part of a solution as well.

JP Flores: That is, that is amazing. So that is one way that we can train good mentors. What are other ways that you know of that in which we can train good mentors and faculty members specifically? I think it’s more than just cultural awareness and unconscious bias training, right? Like, there’s definitely a lot more tools out there.

Mike Summers: Yeah. And I think that it just depends. I think that there’s no such thing as a good mentor for everybody, a good mentoring style. I think that the best mentors are those people that know how to identify the different needs in a broad group of students and give all those different students what they need to be successful. And there are students who, if I even look like I was unhappy, would shrink away, or there were other students that were so self confident that I almost had to hit them over the head before they would listen to me, cause they had the answer before they even walked into my office, and so figuring out how to be a good mentor and how to be a good advisor is a tough thing to do. And so I think that you know there can be tools developed to do that. But I think you have to be really careful, because as as soon as you start talking about training, use the word training, even there have to be better ways than saying we’re gonna do training. Title 9 training. It’s very common. Every university has Title 9 training. And what does that involve? It involves, some places there will be professional actors who are brought in for a day, and everybody has to go to a Title 9 training course. And you sit and you listen to these conversations. And historically, I think that they probably do less good than more good. There are Title 9 training courses online. And of course, man, I’ve done all these things. Those have been helpful in some ways, because you learn where your university resources are, and you learn how to deal with issues that might crop up in your lab, and you learn, you know, certain things about what to say and what not to say. But the truth is, you might learn all those, but then that’s information that you know you’ve done your 2 or 3 hour online course. And then, you know, it’s- does it really change who you are as a mentor? I don’t know if it does.

JP Flores: I feel like we need to take a page out of Freeman’s book and think of an innovative way to kind of do it unconsciously, you know.

Mike Summers: Yeah, the way Freeman did it, it really works. So one of the things I like to do is, so I run a graduate program, a graduate training program, we call the Meyerhoff Graduate Fellows program. And one of the things that I recommend, and we we’ve done this sometimes in the past, is if a minority graduate student wants to work with a mentor that we, that hasn’t mentored a student in the past, there are some books that we send along, and we just say congratulations, we just found out that so and so wants to join your lab. You know, as a Meyerhoff graduate fellow, this person will have to participate in certain things. You need to be aware of that. We hope that you will participate in some as well. We’re sending along a book that might help you understand some of the issues that are sometimes faced by students from diverse backgrounds. And one of the ones I like most is Whistling Dixie. Oh, no not Whistling Dixie. Whistling Vivaldi, where is it? Oh, I must have I must have handed it out to somebody.

JP Flores: Do you remember the title at all cause I can definitely-

Mike Summers: It’s called Whistling Vivaldi. I bet I loaned it to somebody now. But it’s a-

JP Flores: by Claude Steele? Claude Steele.

Mike Summers: Yeah. I loaned it to somebody else. Okay, so there are textbooks. Now, you know, I wouldn’t send somebody, you know the 1619 project. It’s a little more controversial right. And you know even the definitions of the language used in that text. It really should be reserved for people who are trying to understand society in general. It’s not something you would use necessarily to try to pull people in who don’t understand the issues. But you know Whistling Vivaldi gives you first hand the perspectives of somebody who, you know, wants to try to disarm people around him rather than,they look at him, he’s walking down the street, and he’s whistling Vivaldi as a way to disarm people around. You know there are things people do to try to fit in and not stand out, that I don’t have to do right for all these things that people in minority groups do to try to make others feel more comfortable with them, so that they’ll feel more comfortable. And you know, and a lot of us don’t know about this. It all gets back to implicit bias. And so these kinds, there are textbooks like that, not textbooks. But there are books that can help people, and if it’s given as a gift-

JP Flores: Yeah no and then they’ll read it. It’s not intimidating, like that makes perfect sense to me. Man, I wish I could like, just create a handbook of all the little tips and tricks that that you have, like, I feel like you have so many that’s so interesting.

Mike Summers: Well, you know. These are all things that I’ve learned, you know most of them from Freeman. I mean, he’s an incredible guy. He’s no longer our President. He retired last year, and our President now is Valerie Ashby who was the chair of chemistry at UNC, and then became Dean of Arts and Sciences at Duke before we got her here. So yeah, she actually helps set up the Chancellor Science Scholars program at UNC.

JP Flores: Yeah, I’m so jealous. But I’m actually interviewing Dr. Freeman Hrabowski in April, after he does all of his like commencement addresses and all of that. And you know, I wanted to ask you about his mentorship. Right? So I can definitely attest to having a life changing or career altering mentor, mine being Dr. Francis Collins. He’s someone that I, you know, reached out to cold email. We hopped on a call to talk about DEI and stem. And I ended up publishing that interview on this podcast. But it didn’t stop there, right? He helped me practice for my candidacy exam. He just wrote me a letter of support for the HHMI Gilliam fellowship this year. Can you talk to me about Freeman’s mentorship style, and how it worked for you? Like, how did that mentor mentee relationship start? I know you, you know, had a conversation with him at the beginning. But you know, how did it start? And how has it grown? Like, I’m sure you’ve learned so much about yourself as a mentor. So can you reflect on that?

Mike Summers: Yeah. So it started with that conversation in his office. A conversation about nothing is what I call it. But then, I started having students join my lab, and the university started highlighting me and the students in, you know, press releases and in university flyers and things like that. And then it was shortly after that that Freeman asked me to give a presentation to a group of students that he brings to campus every year, and we still do this. And at the time it was called Talented African American Achievement Day. And so what he did is he, the university would pay for PSAT scores, and then he would invite a hundred African-American high school sophomores and their families, including siblings, to come to UMBC for a day, visit the campus, learn about all our things. And then in the evening there was a dinner, and after the dinner there were 2 talks by Meyerhoff scholars. Well, there was a talk by Freeman, a short talk by Freeman, 2 talks by Meyerhoff scholars, and then I would give the ending talk of the evening, and he said, I would like for you to come in and give a talk about research. And you know I’m just a scientist in my lab. I’ve had minorities in my lab. I had a conversation with Freeman, you know, but that was it. And I took this really seriously. I knew it was going to be in this fancy room in the library, and I was going to be meeting with about 100 students and their families. And so I said, I’m not just going to walk in and sort of in a cold way, say, this is research, right? So I put together a presentation, and I highlighted the work of a couple of the Meyerhoff students. But I started off by talking about health disparities, and you know what I said is, I don’t remember exactly how I started it, but I said, how many of you are here because you want to be a doctor. And probably 3 quarters of the students raised their hand. Back then, all the people that were interviewing wanted to go to med school.

JP Flores: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s still like that today.

Mike Summers: Well, not here. Actually, it’s changed. So and then I said, Okay, how many of you parents aspire for your kids to be doctors, and they all raise their hands and everybody. And I said, I said, it’s great to wanna go back and give to the communities you came from as a physician. But because you’re here tonight, you’re not gonna just be among the smartest Black students when you go to college. You’re gonna be among the smartest students period. And you’re going to have the opportunity to do more than just use existing technologies to help people. You, if you want, could be in a position to create newer, better things and to help the government make policy decisions about what kind of research gets done. And I said, why should this be important to you? And I said, you know, and I showed a slide. If you’re, I said if your dad is Black, look at your dad. And they kind of smirked and looked at their dad. And I said, If your dad’s black, he has a 30% greater risk of dying of coronary heart disease than his white friends. And then the room just got completely silent. I said, now look at your mom. And same for her 30% higher. I said, if your mom is African-American, she has, I think, a 1 in 3 chance of developing diabetes when she hits 44, and I talked about lupus and other things. I said, you will have the opportunity as a scientist to actually try to, if not develop cures, at least direct the NIH to do research that’s going to affect your communities. And then I talk about the research being done by students. And so after that Freeman wrote to me, and he said I didn’t know you were a motivational speaker. I have to tell you I was scared as hell because I you know, I had this talk all prepared. I walked into this room, and I’m probably one of 3 white people in this very small room with a hundred students, and probably a total of 300 people, because it was both parents- more than that, because some of them had siblings there. And so you can tell people, you know, imagine what it’s like to be a minority. Alright. So what. They try to imagine. But you walk into a room having to give a talk. And I’m gonna talk about health disparities to, you know. And it was scary to me in the beginning, because I didn’t know how it would be received. And so that was another part of Freeman’s genius. He had ways of bringing people in. He didn’t say, you know, Mike, go learn about health disparities. It was, would you give a talk on this? And what I do now is, I invite my colleagues to give a talk, and I say you might talk about, this is what I did at UNC and Penn State. I said you might talk about health disparities as a way of letting your audience know you understand issues. But what that really does is it’s them to go back and look at the issues themselves and learn for themselves what they aren’t.

JP FLores: Yeah. So how does it feel to be a mentor now, and almost like a Freeman Herbowski for others?

Mike Summers: Haha. Yeah, it’s a lot different I think. Freeman is a, I would say he’s a genius. I mean, Freeman has abilities that nobody I’ve ever met has, so I’ll give you an example. I have a Black graduate student in my lab, and he worked with Meyerhoff undergrads who were twins in one of the early cohorts. Every time Freeman came in with visitors, senators, whatever, he always introduced them to the undergrads and not to the graduate student. The graduate student complained to me one time that, you know, Freeman doesn’t know who he is, you know. He only knows the undergrad. So the grad student got his PhD, went and did a postdoc in New York, came back and did a second postdoc at Hopkins. And while he was there he decided to come back and visit the University, was walking down campus, down the middle of campus. So this is 2 and a half or 3 years after he graduated. Freeman was walking down the middle of campus with a group, and he said, Mike Messiah, what are you doing here? Come here, so you know, out of nowhere, out of context.

JP Flores: He knew the whole time.

Mike Summers: The whole time, and you know he has abilities. I don’t have anything like that. He has the ability to know people, to get to know them and to bring out their best, to make people feel like they’re family. I’ll tell you one story, tell me another university present that would do this. Maybe 2 years before he retired, Freeman sent me a text and said, Mike, I’m giving a talk at the South Florida. I know you grew up in that general area. Can you tell me something about the campus and the area? And I wrote back and I said, yeah, so you’re going to be in Tampa, right? And he said, no, it’s Saint something I don’t know what. And I said, Saint Petersburg. I said I was raised in Saint Petersburg. You’re probably talking about a satellite campus, and where I, it might even be the place where I was educated. And he texted me back, and I gave him some information, and he texted me back, and he said, does your mom still- cause I said I grew up only 2 blocks from the college, he said, does your mom still live there? He knew my dad had just passed away. I said, yes, he said, let her know we’re coming by to visit her. So can you imagine, President of the University and his wife, after giving a talk, drove to my little house, where I was raised in Saint Petersburg. In this white neighborhood my mom had all the neighbors come over so they could meet Dr. Hrabowski and his wife. It was just incredible. I mean, it just shows you the personal attention that he gave me, and you know it’s not like I was, you know, I went to a small middle school in St. Petersburg, that in my middle school class I’ll bet there were no more than 6 Black kids in my middle school. One of them was Angela Bassett, the actor. I don’t think I ever said hello to her. I don’t think I did. I mean, this was in the you know, the late sixties, early seventies and it’s just who I was back then. Freeman changed me. He changed all of us.

JP Flores: Yeah, that’s around the time desegregation happened right? I think you mentioned this in a podcast. Correct me if I’m wrong. You were, after the Brown v. Board decision, you were like, one of the first high school graduating people to do that or no? Did I hear that wrong?

Mike Summers: No, no, that’s probably something else. No, no, Freeman was involved in a March, a youth march. And at 12 years old he was rounded up and incarcerated. I can’t imagine going through what he- he was spit on by the Governor of Alabama at the time, because he was sort of the oldest of the 12 and under group that was thrown in jail. I mean, had I gone through what Freeman went through, I would be a very bitter person and very angry, and I don’t know what I would do. I can’t imagine, you know, graduating high school early, after all that, you know, being valedictorian, you know, getting, I think he graduated from college at like, I don’t know what he was, 18 or 20, very young age. He’s just an incredible man. I can’t wait to see your podcast on Freeman Hrabowski.

JP Flores: I’m excited. Yeah, if you have any questions you wanna ask him let me know.

Mike Summers: Haha, no you’ll be fine. You’re doing a great job. So you’re gonna be- you’ll be good.

JP Flores: Thanks. Okay, so like science, DEI can move pretty fast as well. So what are you up to next? I’d imagine that the Meyerhoff Scholars program is just- was just a start, right, and it sounds like it’s made its way to graduate education. Do you think there’ll be programs for faculty, maybe, or for postdocs like, what do you think?

Mike Summers: Yeah, I think a lot of places now are trying to diversify their faculty. We’ve been trying for ages and ages and have had very limited success. Biology has done a better job than chemistry has done. You know, part of the issue is that there’s a you know, the numbers of minorities who eventually finish a postdoc, and then wanna stay in academics is a pretty small number. And so those that are out there, there are a lot of places trying to recruit them. And so there are institutions that are trying to lower the barrier for those students to get to, to want to stay in the pipeline. And one of the institutions that I’m super proud of is the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. They started, well, they have a Gilliam program to help with one of the transitions. Now they have the Freeman Hrabowski scholars program, and that’s to help with the transition from postdoc to academics. It’s a lot like an NIH K award, but for diversity. And that program, I’m telling you is going to have a huge impact, not only because of the student, not the students, but the faculty that it’s going to all along, but the NIH and the NSF, they’re all gonna pay attention, just like they always do to what HHMI does. And you’re gonna start seeing similar activities cropping up. Then you’re gonna see universities paying attention to what is important. So with the HHMI Program, building a laboratory that is inclusive and supportive is a key part of what they’re looking for. They don’t just want to identify the next Nobel laureates. They want to identify the next high achieving scientists who care about society and want to have an inclusive laboratory. And so they’re sending a message to all people in academics that you know, if you want my money, this is what you gotta do.

JP Flores: I think that’s amazing. And a and that is exactly why I applied for the HHMI Gilliam. And definitely the Freeman Hrabowski is, that fellowship is also on the horizon as well, and it makes me so excited to know that there’s, you know, a whole award where you know it’s just for people who care about science. And it’s impacts on society. It’s just so encouraging. And and I’m so excited to just like be done with this PhD, not that I’m not having a good time, but I’m so ready to just keep on going. I’m just so excited. Alright, so let’s send the interview with some fun questions, are you ready?

Mike Summers: These have all been fun!

JP Flores: Alright. So, what do you do outside of science? And what are some of your hobbies when you’re not doing chemistry?

Mike Summers: Yeah, I like to mountain bike. There are some great trails right by UMBC. And during the summer typically, I will get out with a bunch of students, and we’ll go mountain biking, you know. They all think they can beat the old man, but I can still hold my own. I was raised in the South, and I used to love to sail and things like that. But now that I’m up in the North, I like to ski. I’ve learned how to snow ski. And so I try to go to keystone meetings and meetings. You know, I love science meetings that have an outdoor activity as a component, because then I can, you know, burn all this excess energy and then sit down and really enjoy all the science talks. And so yeah, so I enjoy skiing, and you know I consider all the DEI work part of what I do, but it’s, you know, in terms of my career. But it’s also something that’s beyond the science. I mean, you know, it’s not, the DEI work won’t get my NIH grant renewed. It won’t get my Hughes renewed if that’s all I focused on. So that’s something that I do out of joy, for, you know, a sense of satisfaction that that you know, I’m having an impact.

JP Flores: It’s like a labor of love, is what I like to call it, too. So let’s say that this current cohort of Meyerhoff scholars all got into their dream schools. What songs are you blasting in your car to celebrate?

Mike Summers: Hahaha, oh, I would take you way back. Grand Funk Railroad, the old Grand Funk songs I like. You know, my favorite album, group of all time is Pink Floyd. I like the messages of Dark Side of the Moon, of Animals. I mean I like music that- where the words have some meaning. You know, and they still apply today, you know, the newspaper holds their folded faces to the floor and every day the paper board brings more. I mean there are certain lyrics that to me are just as relevant today as they were, you know, when I was in middle school and high school. So yeah, I’m kind of old-fashioned.

JP Flores: Do you play any instruments? Because I feel like when you’re into that type of music, you play instruments, you know?

Mike Summers: When I was young, when I was young I played the violin, but then in- and I was actually in the Florida Youth group when you know, I went to all state when I was in middle school. But then, when I got to high school my interest changed and there weren’t enough- the high School dropped the orchestra, so I just sort of stopped playing. I’m terrible now. So now I don’t play a musical instrument.

JP Flores: Yeah, you can appreciate the music, though, that’s all that matters.

Mike Summers: I definitely appreciate the music, absolutely.