Black Excellence Oral History with Jonathan Auguste, June 18, 2021 (Ms2024-072)

Mika Pagani: I’m going to start the recording now. Do I have your consent, Jonathan?

Jonathan Auguste: Yes, you do.

Mika: Thank you. My name is Mika Pagani, and I am interviewing Jonathan Auguste via Zoom for the Black Excellence in STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] oral history project. Today is June 18, 2021, and it is currently 2:09 p.m. Can you start off by stating your full name and date of birth for the record, please?

Jonathan: Thank you. No problem at all. My name is Albert Jonathan Auguste; I go by Jonathan. My date of birth is August 30, 1984.

Mika: Okay, thank you. I’m going to ask what were your parent’s names?

Jonathan: My parent’s names were--my dad was also Albert Auguste, but he was Albert Lucien Auguste. Different middle name. My mom’s name was Deborah Anne Auguste. 00:01:00Mika: Wonderful. Thank you. So, I think going off from that, we can start the interview in a chronological order. I can begin, perhaps, asking with more questions about your parents. Would you like to tell me where they grew up?

Jonathan: Yeah, sure. So, where my parents grew up. All right, that one’s pretty far back. So, first, I’m from the Caribbean. I’m from the island of Trinidad and Tobago, so were my parents. My parents grew up in different environments. My dad grew up in a very, very rural setting in the town called Sangre Grande. So that was more forested areas, and it was very, very rural. My mom grew up in more of the urbanized areas of Trinidad. Both are from very large families, so we have that in common in my entire family line, my family tree--they have very large families. She 00:02:00grew up in a more urbanized area of Trinidad. Mika: Okay. Thank you. May I also ask what your parents did for work, if you’re comfortable saying?

Jonathan: Yes. My dad was a fireman. He started off as a firefighter at the fire services in Trinidad. Eventually, he transitioned from fighting fires to working in, what we call, a project section,which was more of a construction group within the fire services department. So he was classified as a fireman for his entire life, but he eventually did primarily construction efforts with the fire services department. My mom has been pretty much an accountant, eventually transitioning to become an internal auditor with the government in Trinidad, so she’s very good at numbers, and she’s done that for the majority of her career. My dad’s retired 00:03:00now. My mom is retiring next year. Mika: Wonderful! Congrats to both of them! So, may I ask where you were born then? Jonathan: All right. So, I was born--as I mentioned before--I was born and raised, for a large portion of my life, in the Caribbean island of Trinidad. I was born in a hospital very distant from where we live, but it was a hospital in Saint Joseph, Trinidad. It was a private hospital; that was where I was actually born. I was raised in a small city called Arima, which was sort of an intermediate between urban and rural. It was on the eastern side of Trinidad. Mika: Okay. Wonderful. Do you have early memories of this place? Can you perhaps paint a picture for me of what it looked like? 00:04:00Jonathan: Hmm. That’s a good question. So, as is probably common in the Caribbean, we grew up in one home, but it’s really almost like the entire family takes care of the child. So I had three different environments that I was raised in--ecological environments, anyway. My actual home was what would generally be classified as like a housing development in the U.S., so they were all houses with similar structures. Quite close together, but we did have some yard space. But it was generally a community of people within the housing development. One really interesting thing there--there were a bunch of kids my age, so I did grow up with a large group of kids my age that we did sports with together as well. However, I probably spent most of my school 00:05:00time there, but on vacations like holidays, when we get our summer breaks and stuff, I spent all my time by my family members. These are more interesting things we would do; we would go to family members in Sangre Grande, and that’s in the rural areas. So we spent a lot of time hiking in the forests and fishing and just playing around in the environments there. And then the other area that I spent majority of my time at, which probably also really molded how I am as a person today, was within Arima, but at my grandparents’ house where it was, again, like a housing development. But this was a really, really big, cohesive group of people. So they did like events, and everyone knew everyone in this area. So, growing up, we would have lots of freedom; we used to be out as kids at 2:00 a.m., and everybody knew where everybody 00:06:00was. It was a very, very safe; very, very controlled; very, very nice environment to grow up in.

Mika: That sounds so beautiful--such like a collective of safety. I love that. So, you mentioned a lot of kids being in your community. Did you have siblings? Do you have siblings?

Jonathan: Yes. So, I do have one younger brother. He has pursued a career in more tactical--so he works in the security services in Trinidad. I think, right now, he’s probably transferring. He is moving around. He drives one of those armored cars and stuff like that, so that’s what he’s doing currently. He’s five years younger than I am. Yeah.

Mika: Wonderful. Thank you. So, it sounds like growing up in your household, correct me if 00:07:00I’m wrong, you had both the urbanized and rural kind of meshed together and that your brother took like the practical kind of… Jonathan: Yep, that is definitely how it worked out.

Mika: So, would you like to tell me more of how that came to be? Were there early memories in your education that led you to your pursuit in science? Was it education, or was it really your family? Was it the island that you grew up on?

Jonathan: Yeah, I’ll tell you a lot about that actually. So, I grew up as a pretty competitive person. I used to actively compete in a bunch of different sporting activities. So what I did as a kid growing up is, I would pick up one sport, and as soon as I started medaling in a sport, I’ll just move on to a different sport. So I did swimming for a while, cricket, basketball; I did martial arts. I just bounced back and forth, but I was a pretty competitive 00:08:00person. My family was extra, like my direct--my parents and my brother--were extremely kind, very loving, and very, very supportive people, and they were also very competitive. So, there were a lot of game nights in my house, which we used to call it the night of war; we used to call it war. That was really funny. But yeah, so we grew up like pretty competitively in the things that we did. I think that competitive nature sort of helped me throughout my career because I never shied away from a challenge. So I think that sort of definitely helped me throughout my academic career. I pretty much studied all the way up until I finished my Ph.D. in Trinidad. I moved to the U.S. after my Ph.D., when I took up a postdoctoral position here. But I’ll probably start 00:09:00by talking primarily about my undergraduate days. I can’t remember too much about my pre-undergraduate times. But what I do remember about my undergraduate is that, for some reason, maybe it’s because it’s my competitive nature, I decided to pick up what was called--or was generally accepted as the most challenging of all the majors--which was biochemistry. So I did a major in biochemistry and a minor in biotechnology at the University of the West Indies [UWI]. Coming from a primarily athletic background, I wasn’t as much interested in academics as I probably should have been. And it actually took one professor at UWI that eventually recognized me and challenged me. His name was Dr. Brian Cockburn. He was the first one to actually challenge me and push me and support me. And 00:10:00like, when he started doing that, that’s when I actually started excelling because I took it upon myself to read more and study more. In my final year of my undergraduate degree, I started doing really well academically, and that’s when everybody sort of noticed me. But, before then it was like really bad grades my last two years there. Because of that guy actually, because of Dr. Brian Cockburn--he actually recommended that I reach out to my Ph.D. supervisor, Dr. Christine Carrington, when I finished my undergraduate degree. Back then, I didn’t even know what a Ph.D. was. We didn’t have research opportunities the way that it is common here in the U.S. But I was interested; I mean, it was something he recommended, so I thought it would be good for me. So I looked it up, and I met with Dr. Christine Carrington. Turned out to be the best decision I ever made in my life, 00:11:00for my career specifically. She took a really big chance on me because I didn’t start getting really good grades during my undergraduate degree. I graduated with like a 3.0 GPA, so that was pretty bad getting into graduate school, especially in Trinidad. So, she took a big chance on me, and it turned out really well. We were very, very compatible. We complemented each other really, really well. She was very supportive; she was very challenging as well. And we did really well together. And I did a Ph.D. that lasted maybe four and a half years. And I published eight peer-reviewed manuscripts which, for the Caribbean, was on a really, really high end. And then eventually, we actually received awards after finishing, where I received an award for the most outstanding science dissertation 00:12:00within the University of the West Indies. So that was a pretty nice reward after all the work that we had put together. So she definitely helped mold me. She’s the mentor that I sort of strive to reflect as a mentor now for my graduate students. After my Ph.D., I had several offers of post-doctoral positions. But I guess the most notable one was a fellowship to go to the Centers for Disease Control for a few years, which I declined. I decided to go to Dr. Scott Weaver’s lab at the University of Texas Medical Branch [UTMB] in Galveston, Texas. I was fortunate enough to interact with him while I was doing my Ph.D., and I visited his lab for two summers in total, and he really liked me, and he offered me a job 00:13:00as soon as I was finished with my Ph.D.. And I was like, yes; let’s go! I knew the environment; I knew the people. It was a really good environment. So I moved to UTMB at Galveston, Texas, in December 2011. There, I eventually gained two mentors: Dr. Scott Weaver, who was my primary mentor, and Dr. Robert Tesh. And these two guys are some of the most famous or internationally renowned arbovirologists in the world. So they’re very, very important guys, and for some reason, they always made the time for me and the time to always talk to me and encourage me. They pretty much supported every idea I had. All the bad ideas, good ideas--they were very, very supportive in their nature. And they definitely molded the way in which I pursued science, 00:14:00the perspective I had on science, and how I approached science in a more, in this case, transdisciplinary way because they had very different studies--they studied arboviruses in very different ways. So, these two guys made a lot of time for me, and I could never be more thankful for Dr. Weaver and Dr. Tesh for the mentorship that they had as I was growing up during my postdoc. Drawing close to the end of my postdoc, I was pretty productive. I had about thirty publications during my postdoc, and then we decided to try our luck writing grants. So I wrote my very own grant for the first time. I did other grants for my principal investigator, but this was my very first one that was for which I was the sole author. Of course, they reviewed stuff. But I was fortunate, and I was 00:15:00successful. And then I received a career development grant called the K22 grant from the National Institutes of Health. So that grant actually facilitates the movement from a postdoc position to an assistant professor position. I was very happy. I was just gonna stay at UTMB and continue my research there. But Dr. Weaver and Dr. Tesh and several other researchers at UTMB--I mean, department heads, P&T [promotion and tenure committee] chairs, they were like, you should apply for jobs, test the waters, but you should just go try. I was like, oh, fine; I’ll do it, but I’ll probably just stay here at UTMB. Eventually, I applied for a few jobs. They were right. I did get quite a few offers. By that time in my life, I knew what kinda worked for me professionally and academically, 00:16:00so I decided to accept a job at Virginia Tech in the department of entomology. They sort of reflected the collegiality that I really, really love. I just love people who are really friendly and nice and always encouraging and supporting. And I decided to go with that environment, and I’ve been here for about four years now, and it’s been very productive. We’ve done really well getting grants, and we have a pretty large group of students that we have here at [Virginia] Tech now.

Mika: Wonderful; thank you so much! That was so insightful! Oh, my goodness; I loved every bit. Okay, so I kind of wanna backtrack and flesh out a couple of the details with you on this incredible journey that you’ve been on. So, one of the first things that kind of stood out to me was, you were saying that you, at least during your undergraduate, you kind of started out as perhaps--not to put words in your mouth--but perhaps less motivated 00:17:00of a student? Then you suddenly are getting eight publications, getting high grades. Do you wanna give me more insight to that transition? I feel like there might be a story there.

Jonathan: Yeah that’s right. So, that’s true. So, one of my major characteristics, I would probably say, that led to the productivity throughout my graduate degree and my postdoctoral research and everything--in addition to just being slightly competitive and knowing that I was never gonna probably be the brightest person in the room. Sometimes I would talk with people like my mentor Dr. Tesh, for example, and he would give me examples of papers that he knew were published in the fifties and then the forties and then the thirties. So it’s like, yeah, no way I will ever remember these details. So I worked hard. That was my defining characteristic; I knew how to work hard from my sporting activities that I did, 00:18:00and I just used that same approach to all of my research that I’ve ever done. You know, people usually say, be the first one there; be the last one to leave. That was something that we did; we put in a lot of time, a lot of effort. When I was doing my Ph.D., I did a long-distance relationship for almost the entire time of my Ph.D., so almost three and a half years. And that helps because I was either working in the lab or working in the field. And then when I was at home, I was working on my computer while I was speaking with my now-wife. So I was pretty productive. I worked really hard throughout my Ph.D. and postdoc, which turned out to be really successful in the end.

Mika: Wonderful. Oh, my goodness. I can only hope that would be me. So, I think another 00:19:00small pocket of a story that I’d like to also flesh out is that move to Texas. You went from being from Trinidad your entire life, right? And then moving all the way to the U.S. Did that affect you?

Jonathan: You’re right actually, because that was a first--that was a big transition for me for sure. Moving from Trinidad to Galveston. It, however, wasn’t as big a transition as I thought it would have been. There was definitely a culture shock. I had to learn things and adapt to the environment around me really quickly. But the community that was there…I actually joined a very, very big group--a very big lab. And they were really nice folks at all times. So it was really easy because I’m a very social person; I 00:20:00fit in the group really quickly, and that made that transition much easier. At that time actually, when I did move, I got married the following year in the following May, so my wife moved out there as well, and that just made everything incredibly easier. There were a few hurdles and a few things that I encountered as we moved to the U.S. I guess the biggest culture shock there was to some extent that in the Caribbean, we’re all mixed. We all pretty much look the same. Even if we don’t look the same, you don’t recognize it too much. We all just wanna be what we call a very big mixed pot, we call it a callaloo. Being in the U.S. for the first time, that’s the first time I noticed that there are actually small, segregated groups, so that’s the first time I encountered those kinds of things that I dealt with. 00:21:00Mika: Okay. Thank you. Thank you. At least for context for the audience, would you like to say the year that you moved? I think that may be helpful.

Jonathan: I moved in 2011 to Galveston, Texas.

Mika: Okay, so this is the 2010s. Thank you. Now, I don’t want to focus on the pain and hardship, of course, that coming to the U.S. gave you, but would you like to speak more to that experience of how it felt, specifically, to find those odd, segregated groups coming from a place where you had never experienced that before?

Jonathan: Yeah, so, that’s a good question. I would say that, in essence, I’m not the type of person that will let something affect me for a long period of time or affect me very much in that regard. 00:22:00So those sort of instances where something like that may have happened, I could’ve brushed that off pretty quickly. What I did take away from it is that when somebody does say, it’s like a minority group or underrepresented minority, I do recognize that there are limited opportunities for some groups. And that is something that I’ve personally committed myself after seeing that, sort of encouraging and always helping those groups. In that sense, it’s like, all right, okay, I saw that there is a small issue, or there is an issue--it’s not a small issue--and something that I should help with. And that’s kind of like what I’ve taken as my career and my trajectory from my service that I do, to try to like help these groups.

Mika: Wonderful. It takes a really resilient spirit to do that, so I just want to acknowledge that to you. Would you like to give more insight 00:23:00to the ways that you are giving back? I know that you just briefly mentioned that; would you like to speak more in depth towards that?

Jonathan: Sure, sure. There are a few different things that not only myself do, because my lab also does lead, so a lot of my graduate students also do lead a bunch of these efforts as well. We started out very small after just coming to Virginia Tech; we started off with little things like science fairs, and encouraging students, high school students, to pursue graduate degrees. Eventually, I became more involved with some of the groups here on campus. I got involved with some of the Latin dance groups, and we got involved with some of the, what we call, the Initiative for Maximizing Student Development Program and George Washington Carver Program--interacted with those students. I do a lot of work with 00:24:00Mrs. Molly Wilson, where we do a lot of recruitment events. I’m one of the representatives from my department, when I talk about what our department does, and encourage students to come to Virginia Tech. And these activities are primarily targeted for minorities, underrepresented groups, or just general students. So that’s how we encourage students to pursue graduate degrees, telling them what’s available to them here and how we can support them as underrepresented groups. On campus, we’re pretty much a sounding board for anybody that wants us to listen. Because I come through academia, in general, I have a good perspective, so I can also help direct graduate students as to what they need to be doing before they complete their master’s or the 00:25:00 Ph.D.

Mika: Wonderful. Well, thank you for all of that labor and work that you’re doing on top of being an assistant professor because I would just like to state for the record, now that we’re having this recorded, that in my academic career--and I’m including my undergraduate--so my undergraduate plus my doctoral experience now, you, Dr. Auguste, have been one of two Black professors I’ve had. So just seeing you as a researcher, being the incredible professor that you’ve been, that was already enough for me as a researcher, so I just wanna say that. So thank you. That was work in itself. But for you giving that spiel of all the other work that you’ve been doing, I cannot imagine. So with that, I would like to ask more of what is it like being an assistant professor at Virginia Tech; is there more of an experience 00:26:00there? And we’ve gone through this chronological of how you’ve come to be, so what is it like now that you’re here?

Jonathan: That’s a good question. So, I did select Virginia Tech; I did want to come here because of the people, and I’d probably say that was a very, very good choice. Since I’ve been here about four years now, we’ve been very productive here. I’ve had a very strong group. Dr. Tim Kring, who’s my department head, and [Xe Jing Ming], what you would call my two mentors here at Virginia Tech. They’ve really done a fantastic job of just helping, providing direction that I need because it is a very big task when you move from a postdoc to an assistant professor position. And coming to Virginia Tech, I was the first arbovirologist out of a cluster of hires of about four other 00:27:00arbovirologists. So being the first one here, I was responsible for getting a bunch of the labs up and running, so I’m now the director of the Biosafety Level 3 labs and the Arthropod Containment Level 3 labs at the Fralin Hall. I had to get those functional, which were non-functional for about two years before my arrival. And then we had to get animal facilities and everything set up for more work to take place. It took some time getting everything set up, but eventually when it was, the lab was able to hit the ground running at that point, and they’ve been very productive. I have a relatively large size group. My lab, currently, is probably the smallest it’s been; it’s about six people. I have one lab manager, and I have five graduate students. We have a very, very diverse group. We have 00:28:00Haitian Americans, Dominican Americans or Hispanic Americans; we have two Caucasians, and then I had a Korean American, so that’s been a pretty exciting time. We do really interesting events like Bring Your Native Dish Day when we have meetings. So, it’s been a pretty, pretty nice group here at Virginia Tech. What I would say is Virginia Tech has--outside of my department, it has a very, very collegial atmosphere. So I work with a lot of different people; in fact, I work with more people outside of my department than I do inside my department. I work with a large number of faculty from the veterinary school, given the fact that I do virology research. And there’s been a really amazing group in biochemistry as well that we’ve worked with for quite some time. So, in general, it’s been a really amazing time here. 00:29:00Absolutely no complaints.

Mika: Wonderful. Thank you. So, you’ve said what you are; would you like to speak more on what you do, the specifics of arbovirology?

Jonathan: I didn’t talk about that at all yet. So, my research encompasses a very diverse portfolio. Definitely. I started with my Ph.D. doing arbovirus surveillance. This is what appealed to me back then because I was able to do a lot of fieldwork. And as an outdoors person and an active person, that was very, very exciting for me. I started off doing surveillance in the forest and the savannahs of Trinidad, looking to trap mosquitoes, and, occasionally, I would trap like rodents and stuff to see what virus or antibodies to viruses they had. In addition to my surveillance work, we did a lot of 00:30:00computational studies. Coming from a resource-limited setting, one way to offset the disparities in what’s available to us was to do a lot of computational studies, so my research involved the fieldwork as well as phylogenetics and computational studies. We were able to bridge that gap, with respect to not having some of the facilities that I could have here in the U.S. or in other places in the world. Then I did a lot of phylogenetic studies, looking at how viruses moved, where they stayed between epidemics, sort of just trying to trace the movement of viruses over time. I did a lot of evolutionary studies and viral spread studies during my Ph.D. With that background, I then moved to UTMB for the postdoc, and that’s where I wanted to focus on everything that I couldn’t do during my Ph.D. So there, 00:31:00I did a lot of molecular biology, a lot of molecular virology. I worked a lot with animals, cell culture-based systems, and diversified my research as much as I could. I was very fortunate that my mentor had a lot of funding available, so that I could explore very, very different areas of research. At UTMB, I started off doing viral discovery, so I started looking for new viruses that existed in mosquitoes or other arthropods or invertebrate animals, and we were pretty successful in that. With the advent of next-generation sequencing, a lot of people started discovering new viruses, and it just blew up. And we were pretty productive, isolated a lot of new viruses, especially from Trinidad. 00:32:00After moving from viral discovery, I started working with animals, which eventually led to some of the vaccine development work that I do. After discovering new viruses, starting to work with animals, starting to better understand that field, I started moving towards vaccine development. What I eventually did was start employing some of those novel viruses that I discovered, and by trying to understand how these viruses behave naturally, I figured out--well, my group figured out--that there is a lot of applications you could potentially have for these viruses. What we started doing actually is we started using these novel viruses, and I don’t want to be too technical, but we started making chimeras of these novel viruses to use as vaccines. And now we’ve made several vaccines 00:33:00with insect-specific alpha viruses and insect-specific flaviviruses. And, now, we’ve had several vaccines that are in development now for a lot of different important arboviral pathogens. So at Virginia Tech, I’ve extended that research, and that has been a focus on my lab, and we are NIH-funded for that work. We’re also trying to understand how some of these viruses that only infect insects and can’t infect any vertebrates, it can’t infect a human or animal--how they actually prevent mosquitoes from getting infected with subsequent viruses. So for example, I can infect a mosquito with one of my insect-only viruses, let’s just call it Virus A. And then the bad viruses, the pathogenic viruses like Dengue and Zika, Chikungunya. Once Virus A infects these mosquitoes, it reduces the transmission of 00:34:00Dengue, Zika, and Chikungunya viruses in those mosquitoes. So we’re now trying to understand the mechanism that underlies that, so that we can either use these viruses as a biological control agent or figure out how they work and make mosquitoes that will, then, be refractory to infection with these bad pathogenic viruses. We’ve also been studying viruses that we believe might be on the cusp of emergence in humans and animals, so viruses that have been around for a while or recently emerged that we believe have become a very big problem. We’ve been studying these viruses to understand how they do what they do; why are they pathogenic? Then, we’re also making vaccines for those viruses, and one of those viruses is quite a common virus called Cache Valley virus; that’s what we’ve been focusing on recently. 00:35:00Mika: Thank you. Oh, my goodness, I feel like I got to sit in on the most palatable lecture on the virology subdiscipline of entomology. I really appreciate it. So, not to take away too much from the specifics of what your lab does, but I understand, given this historical time period we’re in and we’re living through right now, as a virologist were you--I believe you were given the opportunity to work with coronavirus groups? Am I correct?

Jonathan: That is correct. So, when SARS-CoV-2 hit--we knew it would be a very big problem, when it first emerged. There was a massive push to do research on this virus as fast as possible. A lot of us knew it would become a very big problem. So several people here at Virginia Tech, including myself, started working with the virus. 00:36:00And we were fortunate enough that my Biosafety Level 3 lab--actually the one that I’m the director of--was able to accommodate that research. So we took on a lot of different projects, looking at the pathogenesis of the virus, and now we are primarily developing vaccines, or therapeutics, against the virus. And we’ve taken on about three projects. One project aims to develop nanobodies. So, camels produce a very specific type of antibody that is different from humans. It’s a small single-chain antibody that has very good therapeutic efficacy, so we’ve been trying to develop nanobodies to treat SARS-CoV-2, so somebody can take that if they do get infected, and it reduces the disease, but you can take it beforehand, and it will serve somewhat like a vaccine beforehand. 00:37:00And then we’ve worked on actual vaccines; we have two vaccine projects. We’ve also done pathogenesis studies and different animal models, just to try to understand like how the virus does what it does, why does it produce certain phenotypes or produce certain disease symptoms? What I recognized that happened during the coronavirus outbreak, that was somewhat new, was the large global effort and the combined effort by researchers. So, for example, usually, researchers would keep information hidden until they get it published, and that was somewhat different with SARS-CoV-2. People put everything online as soon as things became available. That was pretty interesting because that helped propel how fast we could have 00:38:00got things done for that particular virus, and that is something that I think if we were to do in a general sense for most outbreaks, I think we can progress really quickly to help remedy those outbreaks or those pathogens.

Mika: Wonderful. How amazing that is to have your hand in the scientific inner workings of a historical time period. I just want to give space and acknowledge that. Also I’d like to not lower the tone of this interview, but I just wanted to give space and see if you have thoughts on this--that given the disproportional impacts that COVID-19 has on the Black community, specifically, and within this nation, considering how closely you, as a researcher, work with it 00:39:00and with the identity that you carry, does this intersection of the two--does that affect you at all? Would you like to speak on that?

Jonathan: Yeah, that’s a difficult question. Because it is true that it is a very large, disproportionately affected population, including in the way of treatments and the number of people reporting cases. There’s a large number of factors that results in that proportion of people becoming infected. I probably couldn’t state all the different reasons, but that is something that definitely has been worrying. Somebody said something once to me that, we’re Black first in this country. So that comes with its own 00:40:00situations or scenarios you need to think about. It’s very difficult because sometimes reaching a lot of the communities you need to reach in those environments to clearly explain what they can do to reduce transmission among themselves--it’s just nearly impossible. Yeah, I don’t know if I can fully answer that question. It’s been difficult seeing us impacted that way and not being able to help that situation.

Mika: No, you answered that beautifully. I completely agree. And it didn’t have to be that in depth. It was more of just your feelings on that ’cause I can only imagine as a graduate student how I feel, but as someone that works with it, that must be incredibly difficult. So, thank you. Maybe to change the shift in tone 00:41:00and not to focus on just trials and tribulations and the pain of being a researcher and a Black researcher at a predominately white institution, but perhaps you’d like to share a moment of excellence in your career, and don’t be humble. This is truly something that you--

Jonathan: I don’t know. Mika: If you’d like to shed light on something that maybe brings you joy in your work.

Jonathan: Okay. So, yeah, there are a couple of things I can probably--two things that probably come to mind. So, to me, recent things that come to mind would be…I really appreciate it when I spend time with graduate students. When I spend time with a graduate student, and I can see a transformation in a graduate student from the person they came in as to the person that they leave. And 00:42:00I’ve, just recently, had undergraduates in my lab for very long periods of time, and I’ve had a very big group of graduate students. And, to me, one of the most fulfilling things that I’ve had is the happiness that I see when I know my graduate students are doing really well, or when my undergraduate publishes and leaves and decides to do a Ph.D. and in a different--oh, she’s at the University of Georgia right now. So, I’m usually the most excited about my--it’s not even an output, but I’m usually the most excited about seeing my students do well. That is definitely one thing that really encourages me. The other thing that I was very, very excited about was, after getting after putting in all the work, all the effort and working hard long hours, we usually get--in science, we 00:43:00are usually rewarded by either publications or grants. And my group worked really hard on one project for a long time, for about a year. And then we were funded by the NIH for about two million dollars to develop a vaccine for Zika virus, and that’s one of the viruses that was very important to me because that’s one of the viruses that has severely impacted South America, including Trinidad. So, I was very excited about the possibility of pushing my vaccine and moving my vaccine forward. The fulfillment from achieving that and the possibility of that happening was very exciting for me. Mika: Wonderful. Congrats! That is exciting; just wanna take a moment to let that sink. The amazement of that ‘cause you deserve it, and on top of that, is there something that you can 00:44:00attribute to that as far as a resource? If someone was asking for advice to getting to the path that you got on, is there something you could point to?

Jonathan: Something I would point to--so, as you listen to--I guess--my biography, you can see that pretty much all of my success is derived from my mentors. You can work hard, but if you don’t have the right network or the right mentors or the right facilities in your community, things can become challenging. So what I will usually tell people--I mean, you surround yourself with the people that make you better. Always people that push you up and never down. If you do that, continue to do that. Try to find those people. I always tell, especially undergraduates because they’re the ones usually terrified of professors, or even my graduate students, we are here 00:45:00as your resource. I am here to help you achieve what you want to achieve. So, for a graduate student, if they don’t wanna go into academia, that’s completely acceptable to me. I’ll help them achieve what they want, right? So we are a resource; faculty is a resource that everybody should take advantage of. Don’t be afraid to reach out to people, talk with people. Just those conversations can be very beneficial to you in the long run. It might be able to open doors for you. So, I would probably say, build that community; find those mentors that can help you throughout your entire career.

Mika: Thank you.

Jonathan: And then in addition to mentors, I always say that hard work is probably something that 00:46:00you’re in control of and something that you can do specifically to help yourself succeed. So I would put in the time, put in the effort, and with the right guidance, you will surely be successful. So those are the two little tidbits I would probably say.

Mika: Got that all written down. Thank you. All of that, plus a competitive inner personality that is always--but all that aside, that’s still great. So I think maybe one of the last questions that I’ll ask you is, what’s next for you? Where do you hope to see your research going in the future?

Jonathan: That’s a good question. I think my lab is stabilizing now to the point where we’re generating data on new projects, so that I can keep applying for grants 00:47:00to keep those projects going, so my science is going to hopefully steadily increase, maybe in its diversity as well as more funding means more rigor as well. But being here for a few years and hopefully up for tenure soon, I’m now trying to envision what I can do to better support my communities. Now, I’m actually becoming more involved with different groups that I can help be a mentor and a guide to. So I’m spending more time with different groups such as the IMSD [Initiative for Maximizing Student Development] group, so just general student meetings. I’m going to those meetings anyway. And then I’m gonna to help build infrastructure at Virginia Tech that I think we might benefit from. So, one of the goals for me would be to get training grants, for example, 00:48:00so that we can include--well, my training grant that I’m working on right now would be a training grant to include more underrepresented minorities in STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] at the graduate level, but to work specifically with vector-borne zoonotic diseases. So that’s sort of what we’re working on right now. But I also want to build infrastructure, so I wanna develop new animal facilities for faculty here at Virginia Tech. So, in the future, I say I’m definitely gonna be writing really large grants to help build infrastructure and capacity here at Virginia Tech.

Mika: Those sound like what wonderful ideas. Oh, my goodness. It’s the spitting mirror image of the very grateful mentor becoming a really amazing mentor. So, I think we can end it there. I think that we’ve gone full circle. I’ll 00:49:00ask you, is there anything else you’d like to share during our interview today? Is there something I didn’t touch on that you would like to share to others as maybe a lasting statement? Take your time. Jonathan: Yeah… Mika: I can guide with maybe…was there like a mantra that you’d follow or kind of parallel to the advice that you’re giving to others, is there something you just wanna share? If not, that’s okay.

Jonathan: Yeah, I guess the one thing that comes to mind is…so as a mentor, we try to not place constraints or mistakenly impose a constraint on students by 00:50:00telling them they need to work harder than people because then they feel it might feel unfair about that. The one thing that I would tell every student that I interact with is, if you can be the best that you can potentially be--if you know you’re putting out 100 percent effort--then you’ve done all you can do. The rest might be up to fate; the rest might be up to luck. It is a competitive world out there, and all we can do is put our best foot forward. So I usually tell my students then, if you think you could be working more time--if you know you could be working more time--then put in that more time because there will be people who will be doing that, right? So if you don’t think you’re doing the best you can do, then put in the extra time or the extra effort, whatever it is that you may need to do to make sure you’re 00:51:00doing the best, so that you can give yourself the best opportunities that would be available to you. Mika: Wonderfully said. I can hear what you’re saying and going from everything that you’ve said, that competitive personality--not to box you in, but it’s definitely come out as perhaps what you’re saying is like yourself is your biggest competitor. So you should always be competing to make a better contender, maybe. That’s what I’ve been taking in, so thank you. Okay with that, I guess we can end our interview today at 3:01 p.m. Thank you so much, Dr. Auguste. Jonathan: Thank you so much, Mika. Mika: Appreciate it. Jonathan: Take care. [End of Interview] Ms2021-001;Pagani; Page 2 Ms2021-001;Pagani; Page 1