Staff Spotlight: Emily Wilson
Learning by Doing
“When I was starting out in this field, the most important thing was being humble and asking questions,” said Emily Wilson, lab manager for Jeffrey Olgin, MD, who is chief of the UCSF Division of Cardiology and Ernest Gallo-Kanu Chatterjee Distinguished Professor in Clinical Cardiology. “Nowadays you can Google things, but I’ve always watched what other people are doing – that’s how learning works for me. I get in there and figure it out.”
Born in Pennsylvania, Ms. Wilson grew up in Indiana and developed a lifelong love of animals. She earned her bachelor’s degree in wildlife science from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., and landed her first job as a biological technician in the DeSoto National Wildlife Refuge in Iowa. She lived in a single-wide trailer in the middle of the refuge, helped rangers and scientists conduct water quality testing, drove a tractor with huge mowers on the side, and spent her weekends tracking deer with PhD candidates. “It was a lot of fun,” she said.
She moved back to Indiana to join her fiancé, and got a job as a laboratory technician at Indiana University’s Krannert Institute of Cardiology. There she met Dr. Olgin, who at that time was an early-career faculty member and cardiac electrophysiologist conducting research on cardiac arrhythmias, or abnormal heart rhythms. It was her first lab job, and one of Dr. Olgin’s postdoctoral fellows, Sander Verhuele, PhD, was particularly helpful in training her.
After a few years, Dr. Olgin was recruited to UCSF as chief of cardiac electrophysiology, and invited Ms. Wilson to relocate to the Bay Area to help set up his new lab. “I had never been to California, so my husband and I flew out for a visit,” she said. Although her parents and her husband’s entire extended family lived in Indiana, Ms. Wilson and her husband decided they were up for an adventure. “I told Jeff that I would come out for six months to two years,” she recalled.
More than 20 years later, she is still the manager of the Olgin Lab. “A big reason I have stayed is that I’m given the freedom and resources to roll with the punches as needs change,” said Ms. Wilson. “Jeff doesn’t limit you or put you in a box. He’s allowed me to grow with the position – what I’m doing now isn’t the same as what I was doing when I first started. He listens to different ideas and is not a micromanager. And he’s quick to say thanks.”
There are surprisingly few lab managers at UCSF, since staffing that position is an expense many labs cannot afford. Instead, these duties are often taken on by a postdoctoral fellow, or another rising star who spends a few years in the lab prior to medical school or a PhD program. “Those people are great and very good at their jobs, but they’re going to leave,” said Ms. Wilson. Over 22 years at UCSF, she has accumulated deep institutional knowledge. She knows the back story of the division’s research protocols and has maintained records in notebooks dating back to 2000. She also helped establish systems that all division researchers now have access to, allowing them to easily answer questions such as how many patients are enrolled in a particular study.
As lab manager, Ms. Wilson wears many hats, including managing lab members’ schedules, tracking inventory, ordering supplies, overseeing logistics, and setting up new systems. She also helps with many experiments, constantly learning new techniques. “I’m a jack of all trades, master of none,” she said. “I always want to try new things. Some things are very hard to learn, like learning how to do echocardiograms on mice. I thought, ‘I’m never going to get this,’ but suddenly, one day it clicked. It’s important to not give up. When someone else does it, it looks so easy, but usually that’s because they’ve been doing it for a really long time.”
Building the Division’s Biobank
In addition to managing the Olgin Lab, Ms. Wilson also oversees the Division of Cardiology’s biobank, which includes tissue and blood samples from study participants. It began around 2013 with the advent of the Health eHeart Study, which harnesses the power of smartphones and mobile health apps to gather big data from thousands of participants worldwide. Researchers leverage this information to learn more about the causes of heart disease and develop better ways to predict, prevent and treat it. Though the study is conducted mostly remotely, some participants are also invited to contribute blood samples.
“We reached out to biobanks at UCSF and other universities as we built this from the bottom up,” said Ms. Wilson. “Once we started collecting samples, people started asking us for advice. We realized that others in the division were working on similar efforts. Jeff is very big on collaboration and getting the division to work together. If one faculty member has a great idea for a study and is collecting resources from a particular patient cohort, that can totally benefit another faculty member. But if it’s done in isolation, no one knows [those resources exist].”
The Division of Cardiology biobank grew to support every faculty member in the division who is collecting biosamples, along with deidentified clinical information. “Not every researcher can afford to have a staff of five or six people, so it makes sense to have it all within the Division of Cardiology, where we have a common purpose,” said Ms. Wilson. “There has been a lot of growth and collaboration.”
To assist with the Health eHeart Study and the newer Biomarkers of Early Atrial Transformation in Atrial Fibrillation (BEAT-AFib) Study, Ms. Wilson became a certified phlebotomy technician. “We don’t always have access to a medical assistant, so I wanted to be able to draw blood from clinical participants,” she said. “Now when I go to the clinic, I tell participants, ‘I’m literally taking your samples right up to the research lab.’ When we identify promising biomarkers or proteins from our animal model studies, we can use our biobank to explore those hypotheses in human biosamples. All this research is connected – it’s all related.”
In addition to blood samples, the biobank also includes tissue from human hearts, including donations of both diseased hearts that are removed when a patient receives a heart transplant, as well as a few donor hearts which were declined for transplantation but can still be used for research purposes.
Troubleshooting Problems
Even with her decades of experience, Ms. Wilson remains humble. “I’ve picked up things along the way, but I’m no PhD,” she said. “I’m not afraid to say, ‘I don’t know the answer, but let’s find someone who does.’”
However, her broad knowledge helps her troubleshoot challenges. “I have a basic understanding of cell culture, so I can look at our incubators and figure out the reason why they might not be working,” said Ms. Wilson. “One of my major roles is maintaining the integrity of the research supplies. Even if I don’t fully understand all the nuances, it’s helpful to know that we’re looking at a protein and how it behaves, because I can let everyone know if a machine isn’t working, which could affect [the protein’s] integrity.”
That big-picture perspective helps her address technical challenges. “Let me tell you, -80° C freezers almost always seem to fail on long weekends!” said Ms. Wilson with a rueful laugh. “Even before UCSF started alarming their freezers on a more university-wide scale, I always installed my freezers with alarms so I would be notified if they fail. When that happens, you have to come in. You don’t want to open the freezer, since they will hold a decent temperature for most of a day if they’re not opened. Instead, you have to assess how much the temperature has changed, and figure out whether it’s due to a power issue or a freezer failure. If it’s a freezer failure, call facilities to see how quickly you can get a backup freezer. Don’t be afraid to talk to people – walk up and down the hallways and ask people, ‘Hey, do you have space in your freezer? Do you have dry ice?’”
Knowing the exact contents of each freezer is important. “When I first started, I would have treated serum, plasma, whole blood and DNA all exactly the same,” said Ms. Wilson. “Now I know that DNA is pretty hardy, but I don’t want plasma to freeze and thaw, because it can affect certain proteins. If I have limited space [in backup freezers], I would just take out the most important samples and pack those individually in dry ice. What’s really nice is that we’ve developed a tracking system for our biobank that lists the contents of each box.”
Part of the balancing act of managing the biobank is leaving a little bit of empty space in freezers to accommodate the contents of other freezers that temporarily are out of commission, while not going overboard. “By my design, all our freezers are pretty full, but we’ve never been in a position where there was no place to put anything else,” said Ms. Wilson. “It’s a fine line between having a little wiggle room, and the realities of limited finances and resources.”
Building Good Habits
She does have one cardinal rule. “You can ask any of the clinical research coordinators – I tell them, ‘Never work with unlabeled tubes,’” said Ms. Wilson. “If you aren’t in the habit of labeling the tube immediately, one day you’ll find you have two unlabeled tubes. And when you’re in doubt, you have to throw it out. This isn’t just something I read about. One day someone will ask for your help when you’re in the middle of something, and when you get back to your work you’ll have the memory of an insect and won’t be able to remember what you were doing. Don’t just label the bag – label each tube. If you’re walking with a box of samples and trip, everything will go flying. But if everything is labeled, you can pick it up and put it back where it’s supposed to go.”
She advises lab members to build good habits. “I always tell people to have a system,” said Ms. Wilson. “If you always put your whole blood here, your plasma here, and your serum there, even if you get distracted, you’ll know what’s what. If you do it the same way each time, it becomes muscle memory, which is key for everything. That’s how you become efficient.”
She finds that using consistent tools supports this process. “I use a particular kind of tube because it fits in the rack I like to use, and a certain kind of pipette because it fits in my hand well and I’m less likely to spill it,” said Ms. Wilson. “Are other brands bad? No, but that’s not what I’m used to using. You want those things to become natural so you can focus on other things.”
These lessons have been hard won. “Luckily, if I were to go to Jeff and say, ‘I messed up,’ there is no punishment or lecture,” said Ms. Wilson. “But it’s important to own your mistakes, because that will help you not repeat them. Sometimes those mistakes are your biggest lessons, which helps you to get better.”
‘Let’s Make It Happen’
In addition to managing the Olgin Lab and the division’s biobank, Ms. Wilson also helps onboard new faculty and set up their labs. “Emily Wilson is an absolute powerhouse when it comes to anything about running a laboratory at UCSF,” said Arun Padmanabhan, MD, PhD. “There’s nothing she doesn’t know about how to get things done, and she tackles every challenge with a ‘let’s make it happen’ attitude. Her deep institutional knowledge, combined with her generosity and willingness to help, make her an incredible asset to everyone who has the good fortune to work with her. It’s no surprise that amongst the physician-scientists in the Division of Cardiology, the go-to phrase when we aren’t sure what to do is: ‘Emily will know.’”
“Emily is simply fantastic,” said Dr. Olgin. “She has run my lab for over 20 years, and is so integral to it. She has also been a leader in the division, developing and overseeing the biospecimen repository for the division. In addition, she helps all of our faculty who I recruit who have basic science labs get things set up. She makes their transition so much easier and better. She has incredible institutional knowledge, and a ‘roll up your sleeves and get it done’ attitude.”
Even though she originally planned to stay at UCSF for just a few years, Ms. Wilson is very happy with her career trajectory. “There are a lot of very good, smart people here, and I enjoy everyone I work with,” she said. “I like balancing between clinical and [bench] research, and the fact that my job is not the same every day. Everyone at UCSF is more than willing to help everyone else. I’m humbled that faculty think enough of me to put me on their papers.”
She has assisted with a wide range of research, including investigations of the mechanisms of atrial fibrillation, the health effects of caffeine, and the relationship between body temperature and regenerative capability of the heart, among many other projects.
She finds joy in the small accomplishments of each day. “It’s great to talk with a study participant before I draw their blood and learn something about them, or to say to others in the lab, ‘Hey, this isn’t working – how can we build something to make it work?’” said Ms. Wilson. “Jeff has always given me autonomy, trusts me to get the work done, and is willing to help when it’s requested. UCSF is a good place to work. I feel like I’m making a difference, but I also have time to spend with my family. It’s a good balance.”
Outside of work, she enjoys hiking, playing with her dogs and cats, and training her new puppy, Hank. She and her husband, Ryan, have two daughters: Isabel, a high school junior, and Avery, a college freshman.
- Elizabeth Chur