Interview with Prof. Joan Greve

Joan Greve: a “come back” to the Ivory Tower

By Graciela Matrajt

While today most PhDs and post-docs are trying to break into the industry field, Joan Greve, a bioengineer who has dedicated the last fifteen years of her life to doing research in drug discovery, is making her come back to the Ivory Tower. Her reasons are tangled with her multiple and diverse experiences, from both her professional and private life.

Joan's first steps in science started during her undergraduate years at the University of Washington (UW), Seattle where she studied Engineering. Joan’s main interest was to apply engineering tools to improve people’s health. After discovering the unofficial undergraduate bioengineering program at UW, she joined a lab to do research in leg amputation and to investigate a variety of prosthetics. Joan spent nearly three years in this lab and really enjoyed doing research; although highly self-motivated, she also received excellent mentorship regarding what she needed to be successful in her projects, including how to communicate her research advancements through three publications. She set the bar quite high for a student who was barely breaking into the science world.  Her passion and dedication to her research absorbed her so much that she neglected her grades. As a result, and despite her clearly advanced research experience, she failed to be accepted into Medical and Graduate schools.

Those were busy years for a young person who was also an athlete in college. So, after graduation, Joan was burnt out and decided to take a break for a couple of years to travel, experience different jobs, and explore the world. But science always attracts bright minds, and after two years Joan felt the need to return to the lab. By then she was married and had followed her husband to Northern California where he was attending grad school. She then looked for jobs in the California area and saw an advertisement in the newspaper for a job related to imaging at a company called Genentech. Lucky for her, the head of the imaging lab already had a sense of what a bioengineer could provide. She started her new career in Genentech as a Research Associate in the Department of Biomedical Imaging in 1999 where she remained, in various positions, for 12 years.

Joan really enjoyed working at Genentech; she learned new analytical techniques, performed small animal surgeries, imaging analyses, learned about new equipment, and once again received superb mentorship. She particularly enjoyed collaborating with people from multiple disciplines and being able to present her work at a variety of conferences. And as she blossomed in her scientific career, she realized that she could be leading her own team of scientists and could have more decision power to direct her own research. This, along with the desire to increase her knowledge and become an expert in her field, motivated her to go back to school to pursue a PhD. 

Joan primarily applied to graduate programs in bioengineering. The one exception, however, was Stanford University, which had not yet started its department. Still, Joan was convinced that Stanford University was the best place for her; so she decided to find a solution. And she did. She first contacted a few professors who were working on topics that were a good fit for Joan’s interests. She made some presentations of the research she did in Genentech, and initiated a series of conversations to convince them to take a chance on her and to allow her to do her research thesis within their group. Finally, Joan obtained financial support from one of these professors and engaged in thesis research work using Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) and small animal models at Stanford University. She is forever grateful for the investment her thesis advisor made in her.

Those were very productive years and Joan enjoyed being a student again, but she still had the firm idea to return to industry.  So, after graduating, she rejoined Genentech where she became the Scientist of the NMR facility within the biomedical imaging group. Persistence and conviction drove Joan to her ultimate goal: she became an expert in her field and obtained a position with leadership responsibilities in a world-recognized research firm.

But after a few years, Joan's ambitions started to grow again. She felt she was ready to move to an even more managerial role, where she could help facilitate a larger research program. In addition, Genentech had just been bought by another firm, Roche, and for someone who had been there for over a decade, it appeared the culture of the company was changing too.  Finally, Joan's private life was calling for more stability; her husband had moved to Seattle several years before and the couple had been living apart all that time. Joan felt that it was a good time for her to return to the Northwest and, when she found a position aligned with her new ambitions, she moved back to Seattle. She became a Scientific Program Manager at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. 

Once more, Joan had obtained all that she wanted. Well, almost. As she moved back to Seattle and her new career started to flourish again, with new scientific goals, new instrumentation approaches, new colleagues, and new successes, her private life declined and, ultimately, ended in divorce. 

Although the Allen Institute exposed Joan to many new opportunities, it was not the right fit for her, and once she was single she had more flexibility to think of what might come next. So, one more time, Joan felt the need to follow her ambitions and start a new adventure: she decided to try and come back to academia. Indeed, her priorities had changed; she wanted to mentor researchers and teach them in a lab setting. Furthermore, she had underestimated her desire to answer basic scientific questions left unanswered in various parts of her previous work. She didn't want to solely pursue applied research focused on drug development. Rather, she wanted to continue her efforts to do good, high-quality basic science while teaching other people what she has learned throughout all these years of experience in industry.

Transmitting knowledge to the generations that follow is the major purpose of higher education institutions. What could be a better fit for Joan's new priorities than returning to the Ivory Tower? It was not easy for Joan to translate her atypical path when applying to tenure-track faculty positions.  But, after much discussion, the right fit was found: Joan is elated to have obtained a tenure track position as an assistant professor at the University of Michigan starting next January. She will be part of the Medical school and College of Engineering and will teach Biomedical Engineering. In addition, she is establishing a lab where she will teach state-of-the-art imaging laboratory techniques. Her ultimate goal is to guide students into research using preclinical Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) in animal models.

Next winter, when Joan teaches her first course, a handful of students will have the good fortune of receiving instruction from a brave, intelligent, and ambitious woman who has more than fifteen years of experience in industry. Professors with such a profile are rare and much needed to reconcile industry with the Ivory Tower.

Welcome back to academia, Joan!