Transcript
Jennifer Berglund 00:04
Welcome to HMSC Connects!, where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. My name is Jennifer Berglund, part of the Exhibits Team here at the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture, and I’ll be your host. Today, I’m speaking with Breda Zimkus, the Director of Collections Operations at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. She coordinates all the activities among the museum’s 10 different zoological collections, which support the work of hundreds of scientists and their groundbreaking science annually. I’m speaking with her today about what led her down this fascinating career path, and the reasons why she believes biological collections, like the one she oversees, will always play a significant role in the way we learn about our world. Here she is. Breda Zimkus, welcome to the show.
Breda Zimkus 01:16
Thank you so much for having me.
Jennifer Berglund 01:23
You went to BU where you studied biology, and this is where we have something in common because we both went to BU and we both did the same semester abroad different years, of course. So you did a semester abroad in Ecuador, and you’ve said that this was the most formative experience in your college career, which I totally understand. Tell me about that experience. How did it shape you, and why do you think these types of experiences are valuable for college students?
Breda Zimkus 01:51
I think it’s about the size of Colorado, right? Something like that. As you know, until fairly recently, Boston University offered this amazing study abroad program in Ecuador, you would live with the host family and then travel to various ecosystems to look at mountaine, coastal, and rainforest environments and included going to the Galapagos and then spending the final month in the Amazon rainforest at an amazing, amazing place called the Tiputini Biodiversity Station — one of my favorite places on earth. So this type of experiential learning definitely opened my eyes to nature. I don’t feel like I was really connected with it before going on this semester abroad program. I found myself face to face with all those animals that you read about in your textbooks, or you saw on TV, on PBS. Many of those played an important part in Darwin’s work, formulating the theory of evolution by natural selection. So you saw the Galapagos tortoises that had the different shaped shells depending on how they fed; finches, those birds that had all the different sized beaks, depending on what types of seeds they ate. So it was just amazing. It was like taking your textbook out and just throwing it in front of you, and we’re just looking at it. And even though Ecuador is one of the smallest countries in the world, it’s one of the most ecologically diverse, so… It’s pretty small, so I’m not surprised. While I was there, I kind of got interested in amphibians. There are over 600 species in Ecuador, compared to the 10 we have in Massachusetts. 11.
Jennifer Berglund 03:40
Yeah.
Breda Zimkus 03:41
So yeah, it’s a different world.
Jennifer Berglund 03:43
Totally.
Breda Zimkus 03:44
Yeah, that semester just was life changing.
Jennifer Berglund 03:47
You’re mentioning that it has all these different ecosystems. It’s so amazing, because you have the Andes cutting through this country. Right? So you have these massive mountains. So you have the windward side of the Andes, and the leeward side and on the leeward side, it’s a dry forest. It’s like desert all along the coast, so that’s its own ecosystem. And then because you have these huge mountains, you have all these gradients of different ecosystems. So you go from rain forest, all the way up to higher elevation. High elevation, yeah, and then you have these upper elevations where it’s just a completely different ecosystem, and then, of course, you have the Galapagos, which you mentioned. And then because you have all of these gradients going down the Andes Mountains, you have all of these different ecological niches like going down to the Amazon Basin.
Breda Zimkus 04:36
Towards the basin.
Jennifer Berglund 04:38
And because of that, because you have all of these different types of ecosystems, you have the greatest biodiversity on Earth. Being there as a student and going outside and seeing just the bizarre looking insect that could be something that hasn’t been described by science before. Doing that on a daily basis — that’s a magic cool experience. Why do you think that these experiences are valuable for college students in general?
Breda Zimkus 05:06
I feel like there are fewer and fewer opportunities to have kind of hands on experience. You do lab work, but it’s always very controlled. In this semester abroad program, we had to do, during that time at the Tiputini Biodiversity Station, we had to create our own projects from start to finish. So we thought about a hypothesis, we figured out how we were going to test it, we wrote up the results, and then we presented it to the class as if you were going to a scientific conference. So it really made you see the whole process of this is how, you know, a scientist would work. And you got to walk out the door and figure out what, depending on the question, you wanted to ask: What group of animals, what plant, might you investigate, to answer that question? Starting in nature in Ecuador, and then doing work in a lab, made me want to then go back to the field, because at that point, I was looking at specimens, examining them, but I wanted to see them in real life. What’s their behavior? What habitats do they live in? So many questions about their breeding, and what do they eat, and all of these things, and some of those questions we could answer with the specimens, but it’s really different to see it with your own eyes.
Jennifer Berglund 06:37
So after you get back from Ecuador, you sort of change course a little bit, and you end up working in a lab working with frogs. But you also started becoming interested in anatomy, sort of like harkening back to those early days with your mom and her anatomy textbooks. Tell me about your adventures in anatomy.
Breda Zimkus 06:59
My adventures.
Jennifer Berglund 06:59
Yeah.
Breda Zimkus 07:00
Well, I will say I was definitely not a skilled field biologist to start. So I took this mammalogy course with Dr. Tom Kuntz, who is affectionately or was affectionately called Batman, because he was a world renowned expert on bats. But as part of this class, you had prepare a specimen, and the class went on a field trip to New Hampshire to set traps and collect specimens to then prepare. Unfortunately, I didn’t catch anything on the field trip. So I went to Tom Kuntz, and I said, you know, “What am I supposed to do?” And he said, “I don’t know, you’ll have to go get some roadkill, or catch something some other day.” And I said, “Oh, my gosh, I’m gonna fail this class.” So you know, I was living in Boston, I didn’t have a car so I wasn’t about to get roadkill, and I was convinced I was just going to fail the course. And then one night, the ceiling in our apartment caved in, and lo and behold, a mouse fell into our bathtub. So my boyfriend at the time and now husband was horrified when I said, “We have to catch this mouse, bring it to the biology lab so I can stuff it.” But that’s what we did. We, you know, caught the mouse, carried it in a plastic bag to Tom Kuntz who helped us gently put it to sleep so then I could prepare it for for the class. So I didn’t fail.
Jennifer Berglund 08:30
And thus began your adventures in taxidermy.
Breda Zimkus 08:37
I had returned from Ecuador, and was trying to find an independent study. I think we had to do a senior thesis or something, so I approached Chris Schneider, who is also a herpetologist and asked to do research in his lab. And what I ended up doing was sequencing the DNA of a species of toad that’s distributed across the Andes Mountains to try and figure out if there was one or multiple species. Then Chris actually had a grant at the time and was going back to Ecuador. So this National Science Foundation grant involved collecting amphibians, reptiles, birds, and small mammals to study some of the evolutionary processes associated with generating species diversity in the tropical rainforest. So I ended up going back to Ecuador and seeing even more amazing places and collecting with Chris so my interest in herpetology was just kind of incrementally growing with all these experiences and obviously being in the field again was amazing. I’m not surprised that after college I was looking for a position trying to do something in herpetology, and you know, there are not many jobs doing that. So I was definitely very lucky to get the position that The American Museum of Natural History, which is this world class institution.
Jennifer Berglund 10:10
Tell me about that job. What were you doing there?
Breda Zimkus 10:12
I moved to New York City without a job, and was going on interviews trying to get a position. I had applied for a number but hadn’t heard yet and then September 11 happened. And a couple days later, I was like, “Okay, I guess this is not going to work out. I really don’t want to stay here now.” I had my backpack on my back ready to take a train and go home, and I got a phone call from the American Museum of Natural History saying, “Would you like a position?” And I was like, “Oh.” Clearly not anticipating the phone call. They basically said, “We have an orientation program on Monday, and if you don’t make that one, there isn’t another one for a month.” So it’s kind of now or never, so I said, “Okay,” you know. So I went home for the weekend, hugged my family, and basically got back on a train and and started my new job the following Monday. I think I was probably one of the last people to be hired for quite a few years. Because of 911, the number of tourists was reduced, and so they didn’t, they weren’t making as much money so they basically had a moratorium on hiring. So I thought it was the right time. It was in the department of herpetology, so the amphibians and reptile. I was a Scientific Assistant. I worked half of my time in the collections, mostly moving and rehousing skeletons, and then the other half, I was assisting one of the curators Chris Raxworthy, with his work on the Molecular Systematics of geckos from Madagascar. Again, Molecular Systematics is using things like DNA sequence data to create family trees, so you can kind of understand the relationships among species and then see patterns of evolution.
Jennifer Berglund 12:09
That’s sort of like the modern version of determining the relationships between species.
Breda Zimkus 12:16
So taxonomy is the scientific study of relationships and naming and describing new species, and traditionally, it’s done with morphology. So you look at an animal or a plant, and you describe it. You can code, you know, does it have spines, does it have a certain colored throat, and then use those that data to make relationships and build this tree, but then we started using things like DNA. So those were additional pieces of data that we could use to build these trees of relationships.
Jennifer Berglund 12:52
There’s also coevolution, and have things that develop the same features over the course of their evolutionary history.
Breda Zimkus 13:00
They live in the same habitats, but in different parts of the continent, or…
Jennifer Berglund 13:05
Yeah.
Breda Zimkus 13:06
…whatever it may be.
Jennifer Berglund 13:07
Exactly, and so you know, if you’re just looking at morphology, just the shapes of things, you might connect to species that have coevolved the same features, but are in fact, very, are not very closely related at all, right?
Breda Zimkus 13:22
So we would call those cryptic species.
Jennifer Berglund 13:28
Being in these collections, working in the museum setting, how did you ultimately go from there to Harvard and back to school?
Breda Zimkus 13:37
So I loved that job. I was learning an immense amount about curation of natural history collections. And obviously, I was learning a lot about doing molecular work, but I was helping with someone else’s research, so I wasn’t able to ask my own questions. There was no field component to that work so it was completely in the lab. So I was definitely attracted to the idea of of asking my own questions, and conducting my own work, so after a few years, I decided I was gonna go to grad school, so I applied and got into the Organismic and Evolutionary Biology program at Harvard, which was really the ideal place for me because the program was associated with the Museum of Comparative Zoology. So Jim Hagen is the Faculty Curator of herpetology, so I was one of his students within the MCZ, so I could use the collections as well as, you know, obviously, take courses, teach, and do field work. The MCZ and other natural history collections across the globe have lots and lots of specimens. I was able to take them and get loans of others to do the morphology, but getting sequence data from older specimens was very difficult, especially at that time, so I needed to get newly collected specimens so I could take tissue samples and then sequence the DNA.
Jennifer Berglund 15:16
So the tissue samples from old specimens degrades chapter being in collections for awhile.
Breda Zimkus 15:22
Yeah, so they degrade over time. So the older a specimen is, the more difficult it is to get genetic data out of it. Things like formalin, which is a preservative we use to fix the animals in when we prepare the specimens do bad things to DNA. Now we have next generation sequencing technology that kind of override that way of preservatives, but at the time, we were using something called Sanger sequencing, so we really couldn’t get much of any DNA out of preserved specimens. So we really did need to have tissue samples that were recently collected and not put in formalin. So as part of my PhD work, I studied this group of small brown frogs, called puddle frogs. Actually, being a herpetologist, studying these types of frogs was fairly easy. You know, they live in leaf litter or on the ground. So really, you just hiked around, you might have a little net, sometimes you had a larger net if you were near water bodies, like ponds or rivers, but most of the time you just hiked around the leaf litter. You walk slowly. When you step, you watch the leaf litter to see if anything moved. Sometimes it was a cricket, sometimes it was a frog. And then you would just, most of the time, I just catch them with my hands, then we would photograph them while they were alive because once they are preserved, they lose their color. So we want to know what they look like in life, and then you would euthanize the animal and take a tissue sample. We would generally put a small incision in the kind of the axillary or armpit area and take a little piece of liver. I was in pretty remote areas, so I didn’t have liquid nitrogen, so we would just put it in a little bit of ethanol and a tube, and then we would prepare the specimen first and foremost, and then transfer it to ethanol. So we would take the specimen and position it nicely so all the fingers are separated, and we can see all those characteristics that we want to examine later. And then yeah, we would travel around to the various habitats where we thought the species would exist. Basically, I was trying to fill in the gaps of my collection. So I had a number of colleagues who had given me tissue samples, but there were certain species where I didn’t have tissue samples for them, so I did fieldwork in Malawi, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and then later in Gabon, collecting frog species. And I would not only collect Phrynobatrachus, which are these puddle frogs, but often I would just do a general survey on the amphibians in that area, which was useful for the governments of those countries because they could use that information for conservation. Sometimes I was the first person to go into an area. So I was in the Batéké Plateau National Park, which is in southeastern Gabon on the border with the Republic of Congo, and I was the first person to ever do a herpetological survey there.
Jennifer Berglund 18:21
Wow.
Breda Zimkus 18:22
And that information, then when I published it, was really useful for people in that country to know what they had in that National Park.
Jennifer Berglund 18:30
What was it like to go to all of those different countries?
Breda Zimkus 18:34
I mean, to imagine doing this now, in the age of cell phones, at that time, no one really had cell phones. So I would kiss my family and go for two months, and they may or may not hear from me for weeks upon weeks. We would have a team which included local collaborators, and then at least one other graduate student usually came with me. And we would just set off and depending on where we would want to go, it would be kind of planes, trains, automobiles, and then hiking in, so I feel like I did take every type of transportation where I needed to go and then generally, it’s still required either you were car camping, or you had to hike in, camp for a while, and go to the various areas that you wanted to look for frogs.
Jennifer Berglund 19:24
What did you learn from that work?
Breda Zimkus 19:26
I learned a lot about myself that I pretty much could do anything. But yeah, I mean, I was contributing to the body of knowledge on this particular group looking at the taxonomy. Basically, we had a much better understanding of the relationships of the group because we had this molecular data. So we had this tree of relationships, and then, like I said before, I described a bunch of new species and that work is still ongoing. There are lots more to describe. The fact that I actually have described species of vertebrates is also amazing. And there are fewer vertebrates to be described than invertebrates, so there’s just so much so much work to be done. I was interested in learning how they diversified across Sub-Saharan Africa. There is about 100 species of them at this point. So I used specimens from the Museum of Comparative Zoology, and I also got loans of specimens from other natural history museums so I could look at their morphologies, their external characteristics, and I would measure them. I’d take X-rays, look at their skeletal anatomy. I also did a technique called clearing and staining. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen these specimens, but you actually take the skin off the animal and use chemicals to clear the tissue so it’s literally transparent. And then you stain the bone and the cartilage red and blue. So you come out with these beautiful, beautiful specimens, so it’s basically you’re looking through their muscle to see their bones in situ. So, they’re probably my most favorite specimen preparation types. And we have a pretty amazing collection of them at the MCZ.,
Jennifer Berglund 21:29
I know you’ll do in the ichthyology, the fish collection, but also in the herp collection.
Breda Zimkus 21:29
We do. In the herp department as well. I was doing that type of morphological work, and then I was also using molecular tools to build essentially a family tree of the relationships of the species in this group. And using that genetic data, I was able to identify new species. So species that were cryptic, they simply looked similar to other species that we had described already, but these ended up being genetically distinct. Either they were completely unrelated to the ones that they were looked like, or they could be sister species, and the diversification of their genes showed that, you know, they were isolated at some point, and they would likely not come back together and freed. So yeah, at this point, I think I’ve described 10 or 11 new species.
Jennifer Berglund 22:26
I have to ask, did you name any after yourself?
Breda Zimkus 22:28
I did name one after my husband, so there is a Phrynobatrachus jimzimkusi, that is unfortunately now endangered, I think, so I probably should have thought about that before naming a species that may go extinct, but yeah.
Jennifer Berglund 22:45
It’s just a rare specimen, you know, just just like your husband, a rare specimen.
Breda Zimkus 22:51
Yeah, it’s found in the highlands of Cameroon and Nigeria.
Jennifer Berglund 22:55
What does it look like?
Breda Zimkus 22:56
Small brown frogs, so not, nothing distinct. It’s found in these mountainous area and part of the reason it’s going extinct is with climate change. That habitat also with use in the area by people, so it’s essentially just losing its place where it lives.
Jennifer Berglund 23:15
Habitat loss and…
Breda Zimkus 23:16
Temperature.
Jennifer Berglund 23:17
…climate change.
Breda Zimkus 23:18
Yeah, essentially, a frog can only go so high up a mountain, and then…
Jennifer Berglund 23:21
Right.
Breda Zimkus 23:22
…you know, it’s too hot for it. I continued after my graduate work and started working on a different group of frogs called rocket frogs. They were larger in size. Apparently, they always win the jumping contest that they have. They’re more colorful, I would say than puddle frogs, but it’s more because they literally rocket off when they jump. I was doing postdoc work. I started teaching and then I also took on this job designing and building the cryogenic collection. But yeah, I started teaching anatomy at Harvard Med school. I had taken human anatomy as a grad student, one of the professors on my thesis committee, Farish Jenkins, was a very famous paleontologist. He was basically the Indiana Jones of paleontology. He was an amazing character…
Jennifer Berglund 24:18
Yeah.
Breda Zimkus 24:19
…is a good word. He just had this personality that was larger than life, he would recite “Moby Dick” in class, and put on a peg leg when he was trying to demonstrate how different animals walk. So he taught this anatomy course at the medical school for many years. When I was in grad school, he had already stopped teaching it, but he still encouraged all of his students who worked on vertebrates to take it even if they weren’t studying mammals. I think it was because he knew that colleges and universities always needed people to teach anatomy, so he was setting them up for the future. So a cohort of five grad students went and took that course that semester. So three afternoons a week, we would take the bus over across the river to the med school and take the class which included cadaver dissection, and that also was probably one of the most exhausting, but definitely rewarding experiences of my life. And then after graduate school, Dr. Lee Gehrke, who led that course, asked me if I wanted to be an instructor, so I jumped at the chance. I think that Lee wanted someone that had an evolutionary perspective, as part of the team. Obviously, Farish had that role for many years, but then when Farish stopped teaching the class, there was a little bit of a hole. So I started teaching, so every fall between 2013 and 2019, I went over to the med school in the afternoons on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and I gave lectures and then spent time in the cadaver lab. My heart was always with natural history collections. But I didn’t know how I could make it into a career if I wasn’t a faculty curator, but this opportunity came up. The MCZ wanted to create their own cryogenic collection, which basically is for all the genetic resources, all those tissue samples and DNA are stored in liquid nitrogen cryo vats at ultra cold temperatures so, generally, they’re at minus 170 Celsius.
Jennifer Berglund 26:30
Let’s give credit where credit’s due. Yes, the MCZ wanted to do it, but you kind of pitched the idea.
Breda Zimkus 26:35
They had advertised a position, I think, while I was in grad school, and for some reason, they didn’t fill it. So I sought out people and said, “Hey, are you still interested in doing this? If so, would you like to hire me?” So yeah, I became first a Project Manager during the kind of research phase, which was more difficult than I anticipated, because I just thought, “Oh, I’ll just see what other museums are doing.” But there weren’t many cryogenic collections out there associated with natural history museums, so I did survey those ones that I could. I visited their collections. I learned as much as I could. But yeah, there was there was some unknown many unknowns…
Jennifer Berglund 27:22
Yeah.
Breda Zimkus 27:22
…as well. We ended up building this collection, taking all the samples from all of the freezers all over the museum and consolidating them into a centralized repository so we could better curate the samples there at colder temperatures. And unlike mechanical freezers, which can fail pretty easily, power goes out, suddenly your freezers not working. Liquid nitrogen holds temperature just as it is. And then we also kind of barcode and sample, and we’re tracking them, so we knew exactly where they were, and it was easier to find them and then be able to provide them to both researchers at the MCZ and researchers across the globe who ask us for tissue samples. So essentially, you’re working with a bunch of huge thermoses. They’re, the samples themselves, aren’t immersed in liquid nitrogen, but there is, you know, six or seven inches of liquid nitrogen at the bottom of these big huge thermoses, and they just keep the whole thing cold. But you when you do open them, smoke comes out, so you know. Yes, I mean, I don’t even notice it anymore but if I do take people, visitors, in to see this, they’re always amazed. It reminds me that it’s not kind of an everyday sight.
Jennifer Berglund 28:30
Very dramatic. No, it’s definitely not. So this is like a really big, important job. And now, you know, you’re talking about like when you started working on this, not many museums had cryo collections. There were just a few. Now it’s kind of like more of a standard thing. And as you were putting this together, you actually sort of published on what best practices were for cryo collections, and they’ve kind of gradually become more common in natural history collections. Am I correct in saying that?
Breda Zimkus 29:19
Yeah. So, I surveyed what was out there and did research. Went to other organizations that were kind of outside of the natural history community to see what they were doing. So biobanks dealing with human tissue samples have been doing this for a lot longer than we have. So there are some unique aspects of natural history collections, like for most bio repositories, they just have the sample, they don’t have the whole animal somewhere else. So we have to be able to track both of those and know the data is the same. So I ended up publishing some best practices that could be used by others when building their own collections, but those are kind of always evolving. And now we have the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections has a wiki, and people can go online and see those best practices. And they’ll continue to evolve and change as technology and our understanding continues to evolve and change.
Jennifer Berglund 30:19
What can you learn from cryo collections that you can’t through specimens? I mean, how do they augment a collection of physical specimens?
Breda Zimkus 30:26
Like I said before, now we have some next generation sequencing technologies that allow us to get data from some of those specimens on shelves. But it doesn’t always allow us to get things like RNA or high quality DNA that we might need for getting genomes together. So having these cryo collections allows us to get so much more data from a specific species or specimen. And like we said before, specimens degrade over time so as they’re on the shelf, you can get less and less data from them over time. So eventually, there does come a point where you won’t be able to get anything from this specimen because the DNA has been degraded by sunlight and a lot of other things. So yeah, having these tissue samples just exponentially grows the amount of information that we can get from an individual specimen. We’ve taken all these samples that you know, were not discoverable. Now, people can find them online. They’re cared for, we track them easily, and yeah, we’re actually now going in to sample all the holotype specimens in the MCZ. So holotypes are the actual specimens used to describe the species, so we’re actually subsampling those and putting samples in the cryo collections. So even if those specimens themselves degrade over time, many of them are decades, even 100 years old at this point, we hopefully can continue to get DNA and other molecules from the tissues.
Jennifer Berglund 32:11
It’s also really interesting, researchers, I think, particularly in oceanography, but in other sciences as well are doing something called eDNA research where they’re going in and, eDNA meaning environmental DNA, where in oceanography, you go in and you grab a water sample in a particular area of interest and then you filter that water sample through this filter paper, and filter paper collects all of the little particles of DNA that are floating around in the sample, so, you know, anything from like tentacles to scales to poop.
Breda Zimkus 32:45
It’s a great method for non invasive sampling, and to be used in monitoring species in a certain area.
Jennifer Berglund 32:54
It’s also fascinating too, because it’s kind of like forensic science, right? It’s like DNA fingerprints of anything that could have been in the area at a certain time.
Breda Zimkus 33:03
A visible record of what’s there.
Jennifer Berglund 33:05
It’s like this kind of fascinating new method of detecting species in an area, and the only reason it works is because you have all of this sequence data from collections like cryo collections.
Breda Zimkus 33:19
Yeah, you need comparative data to be able to, you know, so there’s this taxonomic sequence database, called GenBank, run by the NCBI, and basically, you can barcode samples and use that sequence data and you do something called BLAST it. So you basically put in your sequence data into this online portal, and it tells you what its closest matches, so you can easily take a sample. You don’t even know what could be there, and you can figure out, you know, what species might have been there.
Jennifer Berglund 33:57
It’s just so interesting to peer into the future of that kind of research and the possibilities.
Breda Zimkus 34:02
It’s definitely the next frontier.
Jennifer Berglund 34:08
You’re the new Director of Collections Operations for the MCZ, which is so exciting. So exciting to have you at the helm there.
Breda Zimkus 34:16
I’m excited to take this role, yeah.
Jennifer Berglund 34:18
So tell me a little bit about what that role is, and what do you hope to accomplish in that role, and how do you plan to usher the MCZ collections into the future?
Breda Zimkus 34:30
So the Director of Collections Operations, I feel like, is a role that connects staff to the resources they need, solves problems, and makes sure that everyone in the museum is kind of moving in the direction of best practices. I basically oversee all the various different departments so mammalogy, ornithology, malacology, all of them. So each of those different disciplines, historically, was kind of doing their own thing and then we’re in different silos and collections operations kind of pulled them together and said, “Oh, let’s communicate, let’s use the centralized database, and let’s make sure that what we’re doing is the best for the collections.” So I spearhead a lot of the MCZ wide initiatives. We’re constantly making improvements to our database because of feedback from our staff. So that’s something that’s always happening. Every day is a new challenge. So last week, we were moving whale bones into an off site storage facility, which is in an old missile silo. So yeah, we were hoisting whale bones basically underground. So yeah, I’ve never done that before.
Jennifer Berglund 35:43
I know, and I get this email from from Breda because I reached out to her about doing this interview, and she’s like, “Oh, yeah, I can talk in a couple days, I’m gonna be spending the next few days moving whale bones into a bunker.” And I’m just like, “Oh, my God, only at the MCZ, like…”
Breda Zimkus 35:58
Right. It’s exciting to take on this role and bring the museum into this next phase. My vision for the future is to implement some standardized workflows. So we can basically not ad hoc do what we normally do. So when we have a specimen, right now, we’re relying on researchers to do some of the work, some of the sequencing, taking images. And what I really would like to do is have a standard workflow so when we accession something into the collection, we’re taking digital images, might include photographs, X-rays, CT scans, and then we’re going to extract DNA and complete sequencing so we can barcode those samples, too, or specimens to know exactly and confirm what it is, because often, we’re guessing what it is, and we don’t really know. So yeah, that’s my my hope and plan. We just need to figure out how we’re going to do that, so get some funding to do it, and figure out who is going to do it, because obviously, our staff have a lot on their plates already so we may have to hire additional people to do it. We’ll see.
Jennifer Berglund 37:13
Well, it’s exciting. We should also mention that you’re following in the footsteps of the previous Director of Collections Operations, Linda Ford, who, is it correct in saying, she was a mentor of yours?
Breda Zimkus 37:26
She was, yeah, She was actually my supervisor at the American Museum of Natural History. She was the one I reported to when I was moving those skeletons, and she left the museum there and came up to the MCZ while I was in grad school. And then she was the one that I approached when I was trying to figure out my next steps, and she’s the one that offered me the Project Manager position at the cryo collections. I definitely owe her a debt of gratitude.
Jennifer Berglund 37:58
I think the MCZ made a wonderful choice in you, and how cool is that that there are so many things in your life and career that have just come full circle?
Breda Zimkus 38:07
Yeah.
Jennifer Berglund 38:07
Linda and the Director of Collections Operations position just being a couple of them.
Breda Zimkus 38:14
People don’t think of natural history museums as modern centers for scientific research and education, but many, like the MCZ are are doing cutting edge research, and that’s dependent on specimens in the collections. So yeah, that’s something I’d like people to understand is that they’re not just full of taxidermy. There may be things on display that we can learn about, but there’s a lot going on behind the scenes that people don’t know about.
Jennifer Berglund 38:45
So true. I always tell people that the Natural History Museum, the public facing part of it, is really just the old cliche, the tip of the iceberg. You know, collections are so vast and so much larger than that, and just provide this wealth of information that we’re still kind of figuring out what that wealth of information is, you know.
Breda Zimkus 39:09
Yeah, and if people want to see more, they can go to mczbase.mcz.harvard.edu, and they go to the browse section. There are some featured collections so they can take a look at things like our glass invertebrates, some of which are displayed, on display at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, but we have lots of other collections that are really interesting so they can see all the data associated with those collections.
Jennifer Berglund 39:40
Breda Zimkus, thank you so much for being here. This has been fun.
Breda Zimkus 39:44
It’s been a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Jennifer Berglund 39:54
Today’s HMSC Connects! podcast was edited by Eden Piacitelli and produced by me, Jennifer Berglund, and the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture. Special thanks to the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology and to Breda Zimkus for her wisdom and expertise. And thank you so much for listening. If you like today’s podcast, please subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Podbean or wherever you get your podcasts. See in a couple of weeks.