What keeps me motivated despite the constant strife and challenges that we face in sciences is the pursuit of discovery. And an understanding how something works to provide a very deep and rich understanding of how that process happens.

I'm Susan Kaech. I'm the Director of the NOMIS Center for Immunobiology and Microbiopathogenesis at the Salk Institute.

I grew up in Washington State. Olympia, Washington, actually the capital of the state. I went to school in Seattle, and so I grew up in the western part of Washington, the rainy side of Washington. My family was a very general, typical family. I had a sister. My mother, unfortunately, died of breast cancer when I was 17. So that was quite a big shake to your youth and makes you think a lot about different aspects of how you live your life when you lose someone to cancer at that age.

The most important thing that my parents and my family instilled in me was the idea that hard work is what it takes and that you can pretty much do whatever you want. I didn't know really about social boundaries and gender boundaries and glass ceilings that existed when I was growing up.

Our family lived in a place where you could pretty much do whatever you set your mind to as long as you worked really hard to get there. I always had a knack for science. My dad was actually a biology teacher, so I kind of had interesting exposure to science through the lens of a school teacher. My favorite classes were physics and chemistry, and I liked doing math homework.

My first job was at Kentucky Fried Chicken, and I didn't have a car. As soon as I turned 15 and a half my parents said, you need to have a job, that's when you can start to work. So I had a job at 15 and a half and I would drive this little orange scooter to Kentucky Fried Chicken, and that's where I worked for the summer. In college I didn't really have much exposure to what you could do as a scientist.

To me, being a scientist wasn't really a profession I knew about. So I initially started off actually majoring in engineering. It was somewhat of a coincidence that I was able to take a biology course as an elective, actually, my freshman year in college, and that was where I was first exposed to genetics and cell biology.

My advisor, Charles Laird, who came up to me, he actually said, what grad schools are you applying to? And I was like, oh, I guess, yeah, I hadn't really, you know, thought about grad school as an option. I thought the traditional route was to go into industry, and he's like, oh, no, no, you should go to grad school. So that's when I started thinking about different graduate schools I wanted to go to. And I was very fortunate that I was able to attend Stanford University in their Developmental Biology program, which is where I got my PhD.

In reflecting about where my lab was going at the time, as being an immunologist and studying your immune system, I was really starting to stretch our research into different areas and intersections that crossed into different areas of science.

And the Salk Institute knocked on my door and asked if I would take a look at this position to be the Director of the NOMIS Center. And I knew that a more diverse scientific environment would be beneficial to our research.

Their research is focused on understanding how our immune system functions to protect us from infection and other diseases such as cancer.

On one hand, the immune system can be beneficial, but how on the other, it can contribute to disease and pathology.

That's one of the biggest areas that my lab has had an impact in the field is elucidating the framework genetically and biochemically for how long term memory T cells form after an infection or after a vaccine. And really getting to a level of detail that we understand the molecules that are involved in guiding this process to help us generate now better therapies for cancer and vaccines for infectious disease.

It's an exciting process that you can't really explain with words, and I want other people to share in that.