Erin Howe, PhD

Please tell us about yourself, your scientific background, and your motivation to become a scientist.
Growing up in rural Indiana, I wanted to be MacGyver. I love solving puzzles and finding creative solutions to problems. I took apart and rebuilt everything in our house, and at 5 or 6 years old I ‘ran away’ from home to go to Africa to help MacGyver save the elephants. In truth, I made it to the treehouse in our yard, and I don’t think I even stayed all night, but I’ve always been stubborn and committed.

Naturally, I was drawn to engineering. I was first introduced to the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology through a summer program for high school students called Operation Catapult. I cannot recommend Catapult or Rose more highly; Terre Haute isn’t that far, so if your kids are interested, apply. At Rose we didn’t learn formulas and tables, we learned how to approach and think about problems; we learned problem solving, a skill that will serve anyone well in any career.

After graduating, I was enrolled in an aerospace engineering program when my dad was diagnosed with metastatic melanoma after having a stroke. Even with targeted radiation and chemotherapy, he continued developing new brain metastases and the primary tumor was never located. He survived 5 months despite the best care at the time. Seeing how little we know and how far we have to go, I lost all interest in the dynamic control of satellites and decided to pursue graduate studies in cancer biology. I was lucky that the new director of the Cancer Biology graduate program at the University of Colorado, Anschutz Medical Campus had an undergraduate degree in physics and didn’t think it was at all odd that this engineer wanted to be a cancer biologist. I was accepted, joined a wonderfully supportive lab with a fantastic PI, post-doctoral fellows, and technicians and overall I’d say my transition was fairly successful.

Have you ever had a mentor who inspired you to pursue a career in science? I'd love to hear about them and how they influenced you.
My first mentor was my mom. She was an elementary art teacher, and she always encouraged my brother and I to follow our dreams and be ourselves. She has never stopped being interested in what we’re doing and truly wanting to understand. Everything from my undergraduate research using finite element analysis to generate models for inverse cardiography, through my graduate research on microRNAs in breast cancer progression, to my independent research studying endosomal trafficking in breast cancer metastasis. Cancer research is inherently translational, and most funding agencies require a public or lay abstract explaining your research to patient advocates. I’m very good at explaining my work to a general audience directly because of my mom, it’s a skill I’ve been honing my whole life and it’s served me well in my career.

Professionally, I’ve had good mentors, bad mentors, and everywhere in between. I’ve always been internally driven, the best way to get me to do something is say that I can’t. I’ve learned from everyone I’ve worked with; they have all shaped who I am today. Honestly, I’ve probably learned more from the bad mentors because you’re forced to sit down and analyze the situation in a critical way that you likely wouldn’t do if everything were going well. But of course, I appreciate the good mentors more.

As a woman, did you face any obstacles in pursuing a career in science?
Yes, and it was after I transitioned to biomedical science, not in engineering, which is broadly thought to be more discriminatory than softer sciences. I don’t care to elaborate, but my experience made me acutely aware of the trauma that young women and members of other under-represented groups are living with. My experience cemented my commitment to diversity in STEM, and taught me a lot about who I don’t want to be, and how to be a better mentor.

We are interested in knowing what advice you would offer to young girls who aspire to pursue careers in STEM fields.
Find people that believe in you and lift you up; they very much exist. But don’t let the people that want to tear you down in. Learn from them, use them as negative examples. Just as in science we learn more from failures than successes, all of the people who aren’t supportive teach you how to succeed without them, and how to be better for the people you’ll mentor. We all struggle, we all fall down, it’s getting up again that matters.

We'd love to hear about your hobbies and future goals. Is there anything else you'd like to share with us?
I have an Australian Shepherd named after Rosalind Franklin. She’s 8, so the naming pre-dates accepting my position at RFUMS. I also have a mostly blind and completely deaf Australian Shepherd named Tris – but she was named by the rescue we adopted her from, not after the buffer. They’re loving life here in Lake County. We bought a house on about 5 acres and are working on turning the lawn into a native prairie and eradicating the invasive buckthorn to replace it with native trees.