The embryo and our peers as the best mentors: How the Research Preparation and Resilience Program sets up students for success in developmental biology
5/7/2025
Many of us, now passionate about our careers in developmental biology, know the struggle of securing our first lab position. Without this first opportunity, many doors remain closed and we fall out of the pipeline before ever getting in it. “How will I get experience when I am expected to already have experience?"
Marta Truchado-Garcia has stepped up to help students who have fallen victim to this inherent circularity of the job market. A postdoctoral fellow with Richard Harland at the University of California, Berkeley, Truchado-Garcia established the “Research Preparation and Resilience Program (RPRP): The embryo as the best mentor.” Last year, the RPRP won the Society for Developmental Biology’s Education Grant for its unwavering commitment to training and helping future scientist start their careers in developmental biology.
To understand what inspired Truchado-Garcia to envision the RPRP, just take a look at her trajectory in research. She completed her undergraduate degree at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in Spain, where unlike the U.S., students are matched to senior thesis labs based on the track they choose. For Truchado-Garcia, this turned out to be terrible; she wasn’t allowed to do much in the lab or even discuss her ideas with her supervisor. Thankfully, she found an outstanding mentor for her graduate studies. Truchado-Garcia earned her doctorate with Cristina Grande, and she still recalls the words of her mentor, “You are learning, don’t forget that you are learning and absorb.”
Truchado-Garcia remembered running experiments and Grande reminding her that for each of the experimental results it was the first time in history someone was seeing this. “No one else knows. Only we know.” To Truchado-Garcia, this excitement was intoxicating; Grande’s energy and passion were volcanic. This was her foundation—the words that helped her see science from the eyes of a child.
Now Truchado-Garcia helps RPRP students nourish this same child-like wonder by providing them access to a variety of models: planaria, flies, frogs, flatworms, snails, leeches, sea urchin, chickens. Whatever she can put her hands on, the students will too.
“Richard Behringer sent me bat embryos! I like to show them the biodiversity,” she said. In seeing – and handling – all these different models, Truchado-Garcia’s students apply their scientific background and make inferences about organisms that are new to them. She loves to see students start to connect the dots between theory and practice. “This course is not a normal course. It’s not just the technique, it's a change in the mindset,” she said.
An outstanding example of the program’s success is their upcoming publication now available as a preprint. In collaboration with the Developmental Studies Hybridoma Bank, students from the Fall 2024 cohort have been working testing the cross-reactivity of antibodies raised against electric eel in Xenopus samples. These students characterized several antibodies in the nervous system of Xenopus at different developmental stages. The manuscript is full of images, clean, beautiful antibody stains. “People with no experience did this. The stains, the figures, the drawings, and the sections are all done by them,” Truchado-Garcia said.
|
|
|
Drosophila ovarioles extracted and stained by RPRP 2024 students. Green, Actin; blue, nuclei. (Credit: Marta Truchado-Garcia) |
What’s the secret for the program’s success? “I couldn’t do it without my students,” Truchado-Garcia said. Every week, the teaching assistant is a former student of hers. The program took off in the Fall of 2021 and runs every semester at UC, Berkeley. When the course is over, Truchado-Garcia adds each of the students from the new cohort to a Slack channel. Over 100 students and alumni now use it to share advice and opportunities—a network of budding scientists and peer mentors. It is evident that the community she has created is one centered around the idea of giving back and supporting one another.
Part of the SDB Education Grant goes towards covering these TA’s pay. The Molecular and Cell Biology Department at Berkeley covers part of their stipend as well. The Department fuels the program’s success in other ways, as well. John Gerhart, a faculty member at Berkeley, offered Truchado-Garcia lab space for the program. Other faculty at Berkeley, many of whom are long-standing SDB members have also supported of her efforts—Richard Harland, Mark Jenkinson, Rebecca Heald, Fred Wilt, and David Weisblat to name a few.
To Truchado-Garcia, the most rewarding aspect is seeing her students find a path into their own interest within research. The first generation of RPRP started in Fall 2021, and graduated last year. These students came back to the lab to tell Truchado-Garcia what their plans for the future were. She said it has been gratifying to see her students finding their place and being granted opportunities at the labs they spoke highly of. She often gets asked for letters of recommendation from students who might have previously given up. In writing these, she has found that the students have “rearranged their mind and think it’s possible” for them to work their way into the research they aspire to conduct.
Truchado-Garcia’s experiences during her career shaped her approach to mentorship. Her commitment to training students is a clear result from the dedicated mentors she found along her path. Like them, she understands that investing in trainees, especially those with little to no experience, can prove life-changing for those enthusiastic about pursuing research opportunities in STEM.
Last Updated 05/07/2025
