05/27/2022
Pamela Moody is our second feature for WiSE’s Real Humans of CSHL. Pam has been the leader of the Flow Cytometry Shared Resource since 2002, Manager from 2002-2019, Principal Core Manager from 2019-2022, and now the Director. In her current role she oversees the daily operations of the facility, and trains staff and CSHL scientists on the Dual Fortessa cell analyzer, and the FACSAria and SONY cell sorters. She also consults on protocol development, technical development, and data analysis. She is also the recipient of our 2022 Biennial WiSE Mentorship Awards in the Faculty/Admin category.
1. Why did you choose to come to CSHL?
“At the time when I was looking for a new job, I had a couple of offers and they were entirely different. The reason I chose Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory was because I felt, unlike some of the other places that were interested in me, that it wouldn't become just a routine job, where you check in every day and then you check out. I knew that I would be working with a variety of people from PhDs to graduate students, people from all around the world. Meeting new people, doing different projects, depending upon what that person wanted to do in that lab. So every day would be different because I wouldn’t know who was walking through my door and what they needed from me.”
2. Have you always had the same position?
“I’ve always had the same position. What has changed in the 20 years I have been here, is the facility. When I first came here, they had a small room by the equipment closet in the basement of James, where they had a sorter and an analyzer around the corner by the fly room. And at the time I was like ‘I don’t know if I can see myself working in a place this small and in the dark.’ Institutions always seem to want to stick flow cytometers in the basement. At the time they had gotten a large shared equipment grant for new instrumentation and they wanted to grow the facility. Bill Tansel, who was the facility head at the time, said Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory is known for so many things but flow cytometry is not something people often refer to like, ‘Oh the flow cytometry facility at Cold Spring Harbor.’ He said, ‘Do you think you could grow up the facility? Bring back more people to the facility, make it a technology people around here become familiar with and want to use.’ I said yes. So that’s really what’s changed. Since I’ve been here we have moved 3 times and the facility has grown with each move. We were in James, and then we came to the old Hershey. When they tore the old Hershey building down, we moved up to Axinn and we were there for a couple years and then we moved back to the new Hershey building. I hope this is the last move. And if they move again I hope it's after I retire. Moving is a lot of work, especially since the facility used to be one room, now it's multiple rooms, and the instrumentation and square footage of the facility are much bigger. It takes a lot of coordination between the instruments’ manufacturers because they have to be decontaminated, and shut down in a certain way to prepare for relocation. I have to get everything else ready to move, so that’s really what’s changed.”
3. Did you always want to be involved with science?
“That’s an easy one, yes. Since I was a little girl I’ve always had a curious nature. I was an only child who constantly harassed her mother, asking her questions about nature, animals, and how does this work and how does that happen? And I guess my mom got so tired of me asking all these questions and why, that she began taking me to the library every week and she would plop me down in the science section for the children and I would look at and take books home. And then eventually I got to an age where she bought me a set of Encyclopedia Britannica’s, which were like the big thing. Libraries had them and schools had them, but not everyone owned them. So she said, ‘Okay, any questions you have just look them up in these books.’ They went A through Z and I found myself looking at it. I’ve always had a love for animals. Initially I thought I would be a veterinarian. When I went to school I was pre-vet and I thought that was what I was going to wind up being. But then the more science classes you take- then I was like- ‘oh I’m going to be a marine biologist’ and then from there- ‘oh genetic engineering’ became big, I want to be a geneticist. So my life in science has taken a variety of paths that I’ve meandered along the way. And I’ve just been open to trying new things and learning new techniques, and that’s how I wound up here.”
4. Are there any memorable moments you’ve had while working at CSHL?
“Not an easy question, because it depends on which way you want me to answer it. Memorable, scientifically, would be, there are a lot of those because flow cytometry is usually a part of somebody’s research that they do here at the lab. We don’t see where we fit in until the paper is published and we get a copy of the manuscript. Scientifically, early on, I did a lot of work on a project for a graduate student called Nick Naven, he was out of Mike Wigler’s lab, and I worked with Linda Rogers on this. His project was published and it had to do with tumor mapping and single cell sequencing and that paper has been cited hundreds of times. Actually I went to an international flow cytometry meeting and that paper was cited in that meeting. So I was like, ‘Hey I did a lot of the work that took place in this paper.’ So scientifically that’s my most memorable.
For me personally, there have been quite a number of memorable moments here at the lab and they have to do with the people I’ve met, again. It all comes back to the people. […] Another graduate student named Allen Yu, he was out of David Spector’s lab. And again while we were working in the facility, we started talking and I found out that he had a love for fishing and for photography, which are other things that I like to do. And so next thing I know, on stressful days, he’s like, ‘Hey Pam, we’re all fishing down at the harbor. Why don’t you come down and fish with us?’ So I started leaving the lab and I’d go de-stress down at the harbor. I worked here for over 12 years and looked at the harbor every day and always wondered, ‘Gee, I wonder if they catch anything in there.’ *laughs* And it took a grad student to tell me, ‘Yeah come on down, we’re having fun.’ And then you know walks around the lab and shooting pictures, and he had a photography club, so that’s what I said early on about meeting people at the lab. Those people now have, they’ve left tons of memorable moments because it's not just the science that I did with them, but they affected me on a personal level as well.”
