0:09  
Jim: Welcome back to Pantopia, the plant health podcast produced by the American Phytopathological Society. I'm Jim Bradeen, professor of plant pathology and Associate Vice President for strategy at Colorado State University. And I'm very excited to talk with Matt Kasson today. Matt is an associate professor of microbiology and forest pathology at West Virginia University. He's also the director of the international culture collection of vesicular arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi or INVAM. And INVAM, is the largest collection of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi in the world. Matt's research is really quite varied and focuses broadly on mycology and forest pathology but also includes work on fungal arthropod interactions, the biological control of invasive plants and pathogens and the biology and ecology of both historic and emerging forest tree to seasons. Matt teaches plant pathology courses both at the undergrad and grad levels. And he's a longtime APS member. And I've known Matt for some time and can attest that he's a constant advocate for justice, diversity, equity and inclusion in our profession. Matt is also what I'm going to describe as a power user on social media, leveraging Twitter in particular for science, communication, and public engagement. And Matt, thank you so much for taking time to be with us on Plantopia.

1:32  
Matt: Thanks for having me, Jim.

1:33  
Jim: So I want to start today with a bit of a controversy. I guess that controversy centers around Peeps, whether you love them or hate them, the sugar-coated marshmallow candies and garish colors and shaped like baby chicks, or bunny rabbits, make an annual appearance every spring in the US and Canada and maybe other parts of the world. Now, Peeps has really had something of a following in recent years on various social media platforms. There have been efforts to document the destruction or maybe the indestructibility of Peeps, everything from dipping them into acid to putting them in the microwave. And Matt, you leverage this trend in a really creative way to introduce the idea of mycology, the importance of fungi, as well as the scientific process. In March of 2019, you launched what you call fungal Peeps. This was I think, a Twitter-based effort that really really got a lot of traction, lots of likes, lots of retweets, a lot of interactions, but also was featured four days later on March 29 in the New York Times. What the heck is fungal Peeps?

2:42  
Matt: Oh, I think what fungal Peeps is now and what it was then I don't know if they're the same thing. So one day, I'm in the grocery store with my young boys. And of course, they want to go to the seasonal candy aisle, as most kids want to go to. And there was just shelf upon shelf of Peeps. And I think I was going to the lab afterward to water the plants in them or something like that. And I thought, "Oh, wow, I could do something with these in some kind of experiment." Of course, as you said before, I spent a lot of time doing SciComm on Twitter, trying to engage in general public conversations on fungi.

3:15  
Jim: SciComm is sort of short lingo for "science communication."

3:18  
Matt: That's right. Science Communication. Sorry about that. Yeah. So you know, there's a lot of people out there doing various types of efforts to generate content and to engage broader audiences and conversation of science and science literacy. And as I was walking by these Peeps, my kids said, "Could we have some," and I started to pile them into the cart, and they're getting all excited, I said, "Well, don't get too excited. I'm going to inoculate them with fungi." And of course, you know, like any kid of a mycologist, they kind of shrugged their shoulders inside. And I brought them into the lab with the idea that this would be a really cool visual experiment, because when it comes down to it engagement on social media, whether it's Instagram or Facebook, it's largely driven by photos, and what you share, you know, you can create a lot of content with a lot of good text and, you know, pour your heart out. But honestly, you get way more engagements if you have a compelling picture. But I thought this would be visually stunning to see what fungi could make use of this kind of advanced substrate, because at the end of the day, you know, when we're thinking about fungal ecology, we're just thinking about all the unique lifestyles and unique substrates that fungi are able to degrade. And I thought, well, we could just try a number of fungi we have active in culture in the lab, and I kind of went into the culture room and said, "Okay, who's here?" We had some 
cryphonectria, the chestnut blight pathogen. We had some fusarium, we had some rhizopus, some penicillium, maybe some aspergillus as time goes by I forget all the fungi. We didn't actually lend to these Peeps, but I was able to inoculate them that day. And like you said, I put it out there. And really, this was my first experience with a viral tweet. I think some 3,500 people liked it and retweeted it. And shortly thereafter, I got a DM from Joanna Klein from New York Times who said "Hey, what's this fungal Peeps thing all about? I'm really interested to hear more about it." And before I talk to her, I started to think about like, "Why? Why are people so interested in this?" You know, I've talked about fungi all the time, but they're really interested in this. And it comes back to this idea that we really have to meet people where they are, there's no one in the general public is going to have a Petri plate in their kitchen, no one is going to have a thermal cycler on the kitchen top. But you know, everyone has candy. Everyone has moldy bread, everyone has expired food. And we often see fungi, some of which are plant pathogens growing on those substrates. So when you're willing to meet people where they are, and engage with things that they know, you're going to connect with more people. And that's exactly what happened here. And while I was entertaining them with these photos of these fungus inoculated Peeps, which presented its own challenges, by the way. And I can get into that in a second. I realized that I had an opportunity to teach them a little something about fungi, besides the whole idea of is a Peep indestructible. I could say, "Well, if the Peeps are being consumed by the fungi, like why are fungi able to do that no other organism, you know, and explain that fungi are unique in that they can occur and exist in these really extreme environments, whether it's high salt content, or high sugar content, and they could utilize that substrate like no other microbe can. So I think there was a real nice opportunity to kind of teach the general public that fungi are out there doing these kinds of things all the time. They're just hidden in plain sight, you only catch wind of them or catch sight of them, when they're speculating on your orange that you left too long on your counter, or that fresh loaf of bread without preservatives that you bought from the farmers market that mold that within three days. It's only then that you realize that fungi are all around us.

6:34  
Jim: Very cool. I think your experiment also talked a bit about the scientific process. And I think some of the early comments you got on that tweet about your controls. Was that correct?

6:45  
Matt: Yeah. So what actually ended up happening is, it turns out that the makers of Peeps know what they're doing. The food industry knows how to craft somewhat indestructible products. Now, these products have shelf lives, but under ideal conditions can last far past their shelf life. And what we had to do was actually pre-soak the next batch of peeps in water because the water was so inaccessible. And the moisture was so low in these Peeps, that most of the fungi were basically stopped in their tracks and these inoculations but once we added the water, sure enough, several of the fungi just took off. And that's not a surprise because we know fungi, like a lot of microbes, you know, need and love water and love moist conditions. And this brings us to the next point that if you've experienced severe flooding in your basement, and you keep your Peeps down there, they're probably not safe.

7:29  
Jim: So in your experiment, though, were there certain fungi that won the race?

7:33  
Matt: Oh, certainly, the members of the rhizopus did quite a number on them. I believe the aspergillus or penicillium also were able to kind of grow outward radiate outward and sporting elite quite well. But when you look at some of the after pictures - and we can post some links to those tweets on this podcast - all that was left of the Peeps from the rhizopus was the eyes, which is really creepy because what's in the eyes?

7:58  
Jim: Yeah, some of the pictures on Matt's Twitter account are pretty graphic we should warn you about that. His Twitter handle, by the way, is kasson_WVU. That's k-a-s-s-o-n-underscore-w-v-u.  And the tweet we're discussing actually was on March 25,2019. And you can also search "#fungalpeeps" and there's actually quite a lot out there and we will make sure we put links or pictures on the plantopia.org landing page as well. Matt, I should have asked this upfront, but are you now or have you ever been funded by Peeps or the Peeps parent corporation?

8:37  
Matt: No, there's no conflict of interest there. We tried to get them engaged. I think I tagged them actually in the tweet and it was radio silence. But you know, it was all in good fun, and I really enjoy eating Peeps. I'm in the camp that loves Peeps, because I have 28 sweet teeth. I love sugar. I love candy. Peeps are no exception. So I'm happy to eat Peeps that aren't covered in fungi. But I also enjoy kind of these types of experiments because it gives me a chance to connect with the broader public on topics of mycology plant pathology.

9:07  
Jim: I think this experiment - this social media campaign - whatever we want to call it, really stands out in my mind in recent years as you know, runaway success. I really appreciated the way you integrated that scientific process the knowledge of mycology, but didn't make it very relatable and obviously very timely. too. You want to hit that period when the Peeps are in the stores? Oh, I'm curious if you if you got any hate mail from this experiment?

9:31  
Matt: No, no hate mail. I got a lot of offers for old boxes of pizza and things like that. I think the most interesting email to come out of this was after the New York Times article came out, a high school student from California reached out to me and said, "Hey, we're looking to recreate your experiment for a science fair." And the student's name was Jocelyn Swift, and she was at San Jose High School in California. It was a real opportunity to turn something that was just a viral tweet into something more meaningful where we were able to leverage this viral tweet, connect with the media and then connect with students that saw it in the popular media and help to advise her on her experiment, she presented a results. And then we were able to co author a paper together in the Journal of Microbiology and Biology Education (JMB), which is an ASM journal. And that was such a rewarding process. Her along with her teachers were co-authors on that. And we kind of went into this saying that, well, if you want it to write it up in that way, and have an opportunity to publish a paper on how we basically turn social media posts into more meaningful kind of deliverables. And she was really excited about that. And it worked out really well. It was an overall rewarding process. And, of course, that was just connecting with one student. And we'd like to connect with more. And there's a lot of people that are engaging classrooms through like "Skype a Scientist." There's a lot of great initiatives out there where a whole classrooms are being connected with scientists. And those are wonderful. And this is just one example where we made a connection with a single student and we're able to turn into a meaningful experience. For them and for us.

11:03  
Jim: That's really amazing to think about being in high school and you have your first author publication in a peer reviewed journal. That's really, really special. The article that we were just referencing is called "From Hashtag to High School: How Viral Tweets are Inspiring Young Scientists to Embrace STEM." And that was published in 2020 in the Journal of Microbiology and Biology Education, and we'll make sure there's a link to that as well on the Plantopia.org page for this particular episode. So fungal Peeps were certainly a success. And I know you've had a follow up sort of a parallel experiments that also had quite a bit of traction on social media. What was that?

11:41  
Matt: Yeah, this was a little bit different because it was kind of a found item. Colin Purrington, who is a Twitter mutual of mine, posted a picture back in 2020, of an eight year old box of Twinkies he had stored in his basement. And one of them was completely mummified. One of them had kind of a quarter size lesion on it, and he kind of posted a picture and as soon as I saw it on social media, I'm like, we need to isolate from that and see what it is. And you know, of course, wasn't so much as like the viral tweet kind. That wasn't the quest or that wasn't the intention. It was just that was such a fun activity to do fungal Peeps, this was our next thing to do. And so I responded and said we would love to have it and love to see if it's a fungus based on the pictures we saw. It's probably a fungus. So he sent them overnight or two day mail to us. I took some pictures and put up a hashtag Operation Moldy Twinkie up and it went viral almost immediately similar to the fungal Peeps. And now Greenfieldboyce from NPR reached out and said, "Hey, I'd love to follow up on this and figure out what's in there." So we stayed in communication and, you know, went through the Koch's Postulates and isolated from these tissues using both a bone marrow biopsy tool. We have a really interesting video on that it's actually a common tool we use in our lab. About three decades ago, there was an undergrad that worked in the lab whose partner worked in medical sciences, and they had a surplus of these vulnerable biopsy tools. And they're really good for what he tissues like bark and sampling trees because it gives you a very specific sample about the size of a mechanical pencil tip. So we're able to use one of those tools to excise samples from this moldy Twinkie, and from the lesion on the other Twinkie and plate them out, see who grew. And sure enough, we were able to isolate Cladosporium from the smaller lesion, but the mummified Twinkie, I think all the usable food source had been used up and the fungus died. So we're not able to get anything grow out. But we did extract DNA, and we're able to confirm Cladosporium from that moldy Twinkie as well. So that whole process was really exciting, too. And boy, did that bring out people from the woodwork. We had offers of old chicken wings. We had offers of every old outdated food that you can find in the back of a garage parked, you know, abandoned car offered to be sent our way at a moment's notice. And it's not something we wanted. But we became that lab that people wanted to send old moldy food.

14:03  
Jim: It's really great. Again, I think you're doing SciComm - science communication -  leveraging social media for scientific engagement in really creative ways. I love the following your Twitter account, and I love your ability to take something that is sort of in the zeitgeist. Right? That people do care about people are talking about already, but put that little bit of a spin on it that build an understanding of the field of plant pathology, the field of mycology, the scientific process, really, really fantastic work that you're doing in that space. What advice do you have for scientists out there or soon to be scientists out there who want to get into science communication?

14:44  
Matt: I think it's great to be out there. And I think, you know, there'll be a number of senior faculty that might push their students away from it and say, "Oh, that's a waste of time." I say that's nonsense. I've gotten more coverage from my research from Twitter, you know, five years on Twitter than I have my whole life as a researcher. And all my media requests have been, "I saw this on Twitter," "I saw this photo on Twitter." So I think in terms of telling the world, what my lab is doing, and the good work my students are doing, and also engaging the general audience and the general public and inside calm, Twitter is a great vehicle. For that, I will say that it can be challenging to get outside the echo chamber. As a scientist on Twitter, I follow a lot of scientists and a lot of scientists follow me. And it takes a lot of followers to kind of lower that number of actual scientists and get more members of the general public, but you're going to get more members of the general public engaged, if you're meeting them where they are like the Twinkies and heaps, they're not going to know what a qPCR result looks like. Even you can explain that that's fine. I'm not saying don't do that. I'm saying, but if you want to engage the general public, you're gonna have to make it enjoyable for them, not just yourself.

15:51  
Jim: Yeah, really, really great advice. And I think you're right, that sort of characterized SciComm is maybe at some level, appealing to broad masses, with great pictures with sort of, you know, trendy activities in the moment, the challenge, and the opportunity, though, is to really embed that scientific education into it. And the more the merrier. We really need more people talking about science, scientific processes. And so follow Matt on Twitter, and follow his example, because I really do think he's doing very, very well.

16:22  
Matt: And the other advice I'll give you don't mind me saying is that you can't get on social media with the intent to produce viral posts, because it's unpredictable. You can't know what posts you have. In fact, there is a little way to tell if you have a spelling error in a tweet, that's a good indication that you'll probably go viral. Because it's often the ones where you're like, "Oh, I wish I could edit but it goes viral or something." The other thing is to be your true self as much as you can. And I realize that's not easy for all people to be their true self online. But I talk about my kids, I talk about my personal life. I think these show that I'm a real human, I'm imperfect. I struggle with things. There's ups and downs, I have victories, but I also have failures. I think that's important.

17:03  
Jim: That's great advice. Now, your entire scientific career, though, is not torturing Peeps, or testing Twinkies. You're a bonafide mycologist with really broad interest in forest health. How did you get into plant pathology or mycology or forest pathology, however you see yourself professionally?

17:22  
Matt:  Well, there's a little bit of a self fulfilling prophecy. I think I grew up in a small town in Northeast Pennsylvania called Forest City. It's north of Scranton about 20 miles, and our school mascot was the Forester. And as it turns out, after I finished high school, this county I grew up in Susquehanna County was very rural. It was a farming, hunting and fishing kind of community. And I engaged in fishing and hunting with my dad and brother and I spent a lot of time in the woods as a Boy Scout. And just generally because we had so much land next to our house, that was water company land, so I was always in the woods. So I guess it wasn't a shock to many. When I went to apply for college, I applied to forestry school, and ended up going to upstate New York. For my first degree, I got an Associates of Applied Science and Forestry at Paul Smith's College. And then after that, I went to the University of Maine where I did a Bachelors of Science in Forest Ecosystem Science. And I stayed on there with my undergraduate advisor to do my Masters of Science and Forestry. And really, during that process of studying forestry, there's always a component of forest health, how to keep trees healthy, not just through silviculture, the, you know, manipulation of standard density and spacing, but also decreasing or screening for scouting for disease. So in my first forestry school in upstate New York, at Paul Smith's, I learned about white pine blister rust, and I learned about beech bark disease, and a number of these kind of iconic tree diseases that have been around for a long time and are still impacting forest health today. So when I had an opportunity to stay on at the University of Maine to pursue a master's working on Beech bark disease in northern Maine, it was really already a dream come true, because I was really interested in forest health and took a class and that at both schools, and as I was doing my Masters, I realized that I really wanted to be a professor. So as I move toward that, I eventually finished my master's and went to Penn State where I did a PhD in plant pathology working on a native vascular wilt fungus verticillium wilt on on the invasive tree of heaven. So that's kind of my path up through my PhD but really growing up in a rural area, spending a lot of time in the woods falling in love with forests and trees and then realizing that, oh, trees too get sick and trying to understand how to improve their lives.

19:34  
Jim: What is your lab working on right now in the forest health space?

19:38  
Matt: Yeah, well, I have a couple of grad students and undergrads working on a couple specific projects. We're still working on verticillium wilt as a bio control of tree of heaven, something I've been working on since my PhD and I've had a couple students on I have a student currently working on pests and pathogens of sugar bushes. So we're looking at diseases that impact sugar maple and red maple health and maple syrup production stands. So that's been really exciting because maples are susceptible to verticillium wilt, but I haven't worked specifically in like sugar maple stands. So that's been really exciting to see some of the fungi that we're getting out of that. I work on chestnut blight, which a lot of your listeners will know is one of the most iconic plant pathogens of all time. And we use a virus to debilitate the fungus that allows the tree to respond and basically overcome the infection. So continuing to work on that. I have another student who's working on ambrosia beetles that vector pathogenic fungi. And I have a student coming on the NSF GRFP, this fall is continued work on neonectria and nectria ACA is beech bark disease pathogens and closely related allies. So a couple of different forest health projects that are ongoing, but only a subset of all the projects in the lab, because I've gotten interested in environmental micro outside of forest health as well.

20:56  
Jim: Sounds like you really are busy. That's a very broad portfolio. When you think about your own career, or you think more broadly about forest health and the time that you've been in this space, what changes have you seen?

21:09  
Matt: Well, I think if you ask someone that was 10 years older than me, they would say the biggest change they saw over their career was everything went molecular, right, or a lot of the work went to be bench work, and looking at the Phylogenetics and things like that. And I think we could say for our generation that everything is genome-based, right? We're sequencing the genomes of all our pathogens. We're trying to understand plant pathogens at the genome level. And we're doing comparative genomics. And although I'm more applied, I leverage the power of genomes to mine out, you know, mating type genes and to look at specific secondary metabolite gene clusters. So, there's useful things in genomes, even if you're not a person who does comparative genomics. Even if you're just mining out single gene markers for phylogenetics, it's still useful to have those genomes that are publicly accessible. But I would say that's a big thing. I think one of the other things that forest pathologists have been struggling with is there's less and less jobs available in academia, there's forest health jobs available nationwide. But there's a lot of competition between entomologists and plant pathologist for those positions. And I think each would argue that they're better qualified for a forest health job than the other. And I would say both are qualified. But it's unfortunate that in some cases, entomologist are having to carry a lot of plant pathology and plant pathologist are having a lot of carry a lot of entomology and that presents some challenges.

22:31  
Jim: It's some really interesting trends that you're noting. I'm curious, in your perspective, as an instructor, does that translate to how you're teaching plant pathology?

22:41  
Matt: Well, so I teach plant pathology, and I teach forest pest management. And forest pest management, although we teach vectors in general plant path, forest pest management, which is my other course, which is more geared towards forestry students is happened to my ology half plant pathology, and I teach the full course. So I feel like it's a more balanced approach for them to understand contemporary threats that forests are facing, and they can go out and see defoliating caterpillar or they could see what boring beetle or they can see a leaf spot pathogen or a root rot disease, and know them to see them. So I feel like we're preparing those students a little bit better. Whereas general pathology is more focused just on the different pathogen groups, the thing that they get the forestry students don't is that we don't spend too much time in forest pest management talking about viruses and bacterial diseases, because in the tree pathology or forest pathology world, we don't deal with a lot of bacterial diseases. You know, we have leaf scorch, and a couple others, but generally, we're talking mostly about fungal pathogens, because they have the enzymatic capacity to degrade lignin. So they're the ones that are dominant in these perennial woody hosts.

23:50  
Jim: Really interesting. Seems to me that forest health is one of those areas that is extremely dynamic. I think the challenges are many. They're multifaceted. And it seems that both human practices, as well as climate change, really are influencing forest health in many, many different ways that the fact that students are being trained broadly, are you seeing an opportunity or need to train students broadly, really, really aligns with what we're seeing?

24:18  
Matt: Right. And the other thing is that I mentioned that entomologist and plant pathologist are competing for jobs, but they're also competing with ecologists as well. And of course, this is not me attacking ecology either. There's a need for ecologist as well. But at some point, when you have an ecologist taking a position that maybe a plant pathologist, the diagnostic training is less maybe in that capacity. So think the kind of ability to work with the organisms, to isolate them, to fulfill Koch's Postulates do these things or fulfill these rules. These are important aspects to plant pathology and shouldn't be swept aside.

24:54  
Jim: I agree with that perspective. For sure. It'll be interesting to see how these various fields adapt In the future, how we influence each other to there's a lot to be done out there, I think and there's a lot of opportunity for different perspectives and doing this. I want to ask what might be an unfair question here - might be akin to which of your children is your favorite - that you work on lots of different pathogens, a lot of different plant diseases. Do you have favorites?

25:21  
Matt: You know, I think a lot of time pathologists who ask what their favorite pathogen is, a good percent of them will probably say it's the first one they worked on in a meaningful way. And for me, the neonectria fungi, neonectria ditissma, neonectria faginata, those are the two fungi, two causal agents involved in beech bark disease. And I worked on in Maine, I had a PhD student Cameron Stoddard, who now works for the Forest Service, he worked on them here. I have a new student coming on, Hanna, who's going to be doing that work, thanks to NSF GRFP. So I'm continuing to work on those. And as I work on them here in West Virginia, which is a real hotbed for biodiversity of these fungi, we're finding more and more new species. So I really have an eye for these things so much that my kids now have an eye for it. So if we go somewhere, they point out perithecia on the bark of trees and say, "Hey, is this one is, this one important?" Like it's are like six and seven. And they're identifying perithecia, maybe I've trained them too well. But that's the other thing that if I could just go off on a tangent here for a second, one of the most meaningful things to me as a scientist is been able to go out to the woods here in West Virginia with my kids, and make some of these first discoveries, like when we found this new species of coronectria on red spruce in the high mountains of West Virginia. It was, you know, December of 2018. And I was with my three boys in the woods. And when I found the tree covered with these perithecia, I'm like, this is something new and my oldest got excited. He goes, "Are we going to be famous?" I said, No, no, that's not really how it works. But I said, these are the breadcrumbs, I keep scientists going. And he was really excited. He smiled the whole day. And it was real special to be able to share that moment with them. Because when I look at the paper now that we've published on this work, and fungal ecology, in between the pages, I see glimpses of my kids smiling, and just having enjoyed that experience with me, are they co authors, they're not there. You know, they didn't do enough to justify co authorship at their current age, but they are all acknowledged in the acknowledgments.

27:18  
Jim: That's wonderful. You're touching a bit on your personal life. And this is one aspect of my interactions with you that I've always really appreciated. You talked in the social media context about being authentic, being yourself, putting yourself out there. And you've done that in really meaningful ways in your professional life. As I mentioned, at the top of the episode, you've been a longtime advocate for JEDI -  for justice, equity, diversity and inclusion in our profession. You are one of the first APS members to reach out to our governing council after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis Police, asking our leaders to make a statement about that I want to thank you publicly for your advocacy in that particular instance. I also want to thank our APS leadership for not just putting out a well-intended but toothless statement, but for really articulating the values of the American Phytopathological Society. And tying that to metrics that I think really continue to influence real change in our society, we've got a ways to go. But advocates like you really do make a difference. I want to thank you for your work in this space. Additionally, you've been an advocate for mental health issues in academia, certainly in plant pathology, but I think that the impacts really extend beyond our particular discipline. In 2021, you published an article in Nature in the career column section of the Nature magazine called "Finding Mental Health Clarity Under Pandemic Pressures." And in that article, you talked about your own experiences, challenges with depression in explicit terms. You detail the impact of graduate studies on your anxiety. You talked about being hospitalized as an undergrad student. And you also articulate how the pandemic and the complexities of home life and your quest for tenure and promotion impacted you. It was, to me a really powerful article, one that certainly spoke to your authentic experiences and put you out there as a human being. Why did you choose to write this article?

29:31  
Matt: I think this comes back to being so active on social media. And if I could quickly just jump back to the APS and statement. I think I was seeing in real time, a lot of other professional societies putting out statements and realizing that I hadn't heard anything from APS leadership, not that they weren't thinking about it. But it inspired me to reach out and say, "Look, I've seen AAAS and MSA and some of these other professional societies that I know of, or I'm involved with and you know, I want to make sure that APS is also representing their membership and advocating for their members." So you said that leadership did an excellent job. And I'm proud to be a part of APS. And I'm proud of that response. Coming back to the mental health thing. I too, have witnessed people telling their stories on social media. And so often, as with all justice, equity, diversity and inclusion, so much weight falls on the shoulders of early career scientists, and it's just so unfair that they have to invest so much of their time in this and US-tenured faculty are just kind of continuing to do business as usual. But the pandemic taught me that it can no longer be business as usual. Because the strain and my own coping mechanisms for dealing with my untreated, undiagnosed ADHD and anxiety was just too much. And for those listening, that have young kids, and have made it through this pandemic, it was really stressful. And I think just the anxiety of keeping business as usual at work, and homeschooling kids for a short while and doing all that was just, it was overwhelming. And I knew that once I got tenure too, that gave me a little bit of security, that maybe early career scientists didn't feel. And I felt it important to be like, look, not only can you make it to tenure with these things, but there's tenured faculty that understand your story that share your story, and can tell you that there's ways to navigate with those complicated mental disorders and mental health issues. So I felt it was really important to talk about that. I also am beginning to realize that it's not just about publications for so long. As a scientist, I'm like, gotta get more publications, gotta get more publications. And if you look at what I posted on social media, I'm writing more editorials. And this careers piece, I'm writing more for newsletters for professional societies, because I feel like it's not just about publications. And I know that hiring committees, a lot of them look at those metrics, but I can tell you, I serve on hiring committees, and I bring up these other things, because they matter to me. And I'm in a position of power now. And I let other people know that they're important, and that this is a changing landscape. And if we really care about being inclusive, then we need to look at other metrics, representation matters. That's really the biggest motivation behind me coming out with my story about struggles with mental health is that I can't tell you the number of DMs I got.

32:29  
Jim: That's incredibly powerful. Thank you for sharing that story. Here, as well as in that Nature article. And we will link to that Nature article on plantopia.org. You referenced it a little bit already, but what I'm curious what feedback you received from that article,

32:44  
Matt: A lot of it was just people having a similar experience where they were misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder and realizing that they had ADHD and getting diagnosed for the first time as a, you know, 30 year old or 40 year old. The other thing was just feeling a lot of people saying, "Look, I can't talk publicly about this. But I'm glad you did. Because I can't. I'm an industry. I'm a grad student, like I'm afraid to talk about these things. And for it to be a black mark on my CV." And what I tried to articulate in that is that I too, had a red flag on my CV. And what I'm also realizing is that maybe another reason we need to talk about this is how do you address these things? How do you incorporate them into your personal statement, or your diversity statement? You know, there's a lot of lived experiences that I don't have, obviously, here we are in Pride Month, and there is a tremendous amount of hardship that members of the LGBTQ community have dealt with and continue to deal with on a daily basis. And I can appreciate those, those hardships, but I can't fully understand them, because it's not my lived experience. But what I will say is that coming out and talking publicly about my mental health has made me understand maybe a glimpse, a glimpse, just a small glimpse into that because I was hiding a part of who I was out of fear of professional retaliation. And that made me feel really bad and really awful. If you times that by 10, or times by 100. You know, that's what a lot of members of the LGBTQ community are dealing with perpetually representation matters.

34:18  
Jim: Absolutely. I think the power of you know, living authentically, when you're in that position where you can do that safely, can really mean a lot to people. So thank you for your leadership in this space. I think you're brave and your approach, and I think it is sorely sorely needed, and very, very much appreciated. So, Matt, we've covered a lot of ground here and I enjoyed every moment of this conversation. Do you have any parting words for our listeners? Anything you want to share that we haven't touched on?

34:48  
Matt: Yeah, actually, I was thinking a little bit more about mentioned that. I have a number of projects that are not plant pathology related. They're mycology related. But why that matters here is that I'm realizing that the more diverse kind of disparate topics I work on, the more I'm able to draw off these unique experiences and leverage some of those approaches for the other projects. So there's a lot of synergy and crosstalk happening. I have a National Geographic grant to look at fungus feeding millipedes. And although that's not at first glance, forest health related, they may be driving decay communities and the understory on these logs helping to change nitrogen and carbon cycling. But some of the approaches the culture based and molecular based approaches we're using in those systems can apply to, you know, plant disease complexes that involve insect vectors. So sometimes we go out on a limb and take on new projects that seem completely unrelated. And maybe they are, but you realize that you learn things from those unique projects that you can then leverage, you know, for other projects, so stuff we're doing with millipedes is relevant to canker diseases and stuff we're doing on brochure beetles is relevant to cicadas, and so on, and so on. But I think it's good to, if you can, and I know funding dictates this. Sometimes your contract stipulates this, you know, try to get involved with some different side projects that are outside your comfort zone. So you can not only meet new collaborators, but you can kind of reframe the way you look at a system or look at a crop or look at a tree species and maybe come up with some new insight or some new approach.

36:24  
JimL Getting outside of your comfort zone, I think is great advice, both in work and in life. Matt, thank you so much. Really, again, a pleasure to have you here with us today.

36:33  
Matt: Thanks for having me really had a great time.

36:37  
Jim: We just heard from Matt Kasson, Associate Professor of Mycology and Forest Pathology at West Virginia University. And you can follow Matt on Twitter at Kasson underscore W-V-U. I'm Jim Bradeen, the host of the Plantopia podcast. Thank you so much for listening, and we will talk to you again soon.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai