This is December 1990. Yeah. And they're all geared up. Here's her first skis and boots. She's two and a half and she's trying them out in the living room and she's doing a pretty good job. If you want to go into the big snow, make them turn.

I am the first Black faculty member at Salk and while I am honored to be the first, I refuse to be the only.

I grew up in Denver, Colorado, and I grew up in a family that loves to be outside. So we grew up skiing, hiking, camping, biking, and actually my parents met skiing, and so I have been skiing since before I could walk, like as soon as I could stand.

My family is extremely athletic. I'm actually like the least athletic person in my family, but still, I grew up as a gymnast doing 20, 25 hours a week of gymnastics every week, and then moved into springboard diving.

I fell in love with science in the second grade. We had to do a project where you picked an environment, you would draw out of a hat, and I randomly drew the ocean. And I just fell in love with the idea of asking questions. I fell in love with the ocean. And from that moment on, I wanted to be a marine biologist. I wanted to study whales. I wanted to save the planet.

And I remember crying at night making this decision of, you know, I'm not going to pursue athletics anymore. And I'm really going to pursue academics. And I remember sitting with my dad, sitting next to me on the bed, and I was in tears. And he just said to me, you know in ten years, in 20 years, they're not going to be doing their sports anymore, right. They're going to be doing something else. You get to pick that thing earlier than them. You get to pursue the thing that you love that will last you a lifetime.

My name's Christina Towers. I'm an assistant professor at the Salk Institute and our lab studies cancer cell metabolism. I ended up going to college at the University of Miami, majoring in marine biology. And actually within like the first week of being there, I changed my major because I realized I get super seasick. But I still love science.

And talking to everybody around me, they were like, well, if you love science you should just be a physician. I was in Miami at the time, and so I volunteered at emergency clinics all over the city of Miami. Being in Miami, these were inner city clinics and just about every patient that walked into these emergency clinics were either completely uninsured or vastly underinsured. And it just broke my heart, actually. And I will never forget a patient that walked into the clinic who had a breast tumor literally growing out of the skin of her chest. And this woman was going to die of breast cancer, which is a nearly curable disease at this point. Because the first time she was being seen was in an emergency room clinic. I would cry myself to sleep every night. And so I realized, well, I love science and I want to save the world, save people, save patients, I couldn't do it in a patient facing capacity.

I remember going to my freshman year biology professor and telling him I love science, but I just don't know, I don't know what to do with it. And he was like, well, you should try research. And I was like, what is that? He took a chance on me. He put me in a lab. I had no idea what this lab worked on. I remember walking into the lab on the first day and they explained to me that they studied immunology, and specifically immunology of aging. And from that first five minutes in the lab, I fell in love with research. I fell in love again with this idea that all day long we just get to ask questions. We answer those questions, but really we just generate like ten more questions every day.

It's this endless cycle of just asking questions. And from that moment on, I never left the lab. I loved science my whole life, but I have always been one of the very few and often the only person of color in those classes. I think that experience really showed me that in order to be heard, I had to speak often, I had to speak up, and I had to speak boldly. That experience has instilled in me this boldness. And till this day, I think I pursue bold hypothesis, I pursue innovative questions because it's burned in me that I have to be to be heard.

It's hard to stand up. It's hard to raise your hand in a room full of people that maybe don't look like you, you don't feel like you belong. So now I really believe that if we can create an environment, a culture in science and academia, where we make sure everybody knows that they deserve a seat at the table, it empowers this emboldened nature. It empowers people to ask questions. That's what leads to the new techniques, the new technologies, the medicines that will save lives, is when people are innovative and aren't scared to ask the bold questions.

When it came time to start my own lab and launch my independent career, I had several job offers, but the Salk offered something that I had never seen before.

The Salk offered this opportunity to pair really phenomenal, fantastic, and innovative science with people that were doing the science that I felt I could connect with.

My lab studies cancer cell metabolism and we're really interested in how cancer cells recycle their own nutrients. The other half of my lab is trying to leverage that fundamental biology knowledge to target these processes in pancreatic cancer and lung cancer.

Alongside all of the science and trainees that I am helping to bring up, I am also trying to build and advance diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging efforts at the Salk Institute. I really believe that those efforts will make Salk a better place. It will make Salk science better. And it will pave the way for all of academia to reach more trainees and to reach more patients. I absolutely love what I do. I love that I work on questions that will impact patients. I love that I work with trainees who will change science for the better over the next generations. But ultimately, what I love the most is I just love answering questions.

I love asking questions. I love that when we find an innovative hypothesis and we design the experiment to test it, we answer the question, but really we just generate ten more novel hypotheses. And this endless cycle of pursuit of knowledge, That's what keeps me up at night, and that's why I get up every day to do this.