Lessons from Matthew Reyna, PhD

Ulemu Luhanga: 00:03

Hello listeners, welcome to Educational Landscapes, Lessons from Leaders. On today's episode, we are going to learn from Matthew Reyna. Welcome to the show Matt.

Matthew Reyna: 00:14

Thank you Ulemu. I'm happy to be here.

Ulemu Luhanga: 00:16

Wonderful. To get us going, what is or are your education leadership titles?

Matthew Reyna: 00:26

This is a little bit of a mouthful. I'm the vice chair for education and training in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Emory. I'm also a co-director of graduate studies for the Computer Science and Informatics graduate program, which includes the Department of Biomedical Informatics, the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, and the Department of Computer Science so those two roles are my fundamental educational leadership roles.

Ulemu Luhanga: 00:51

Okay, wonderful. You weren't kidding about the mouthful. What do you do in those roles?

Matthew Reyna: 01:00

Broadly speaking, I support the education and training missions of our department and our graduate programs. In particular, I try to support students, postdocs, staff, faculty, administrators, all the various people that might interact with the education and training of a department or graduate program and I try to support interactions and relationships between the different groups. As part of these roles I have the pleasure of working with my department chair, Gary Clifford, other department chairs, our main director of graduate studies, Dorian Arnold and many others. It's a very collaborative role. What I mean by sort of supporting the education and training missions, as an example, we're a university, so we have courses, students take courses, faculty teach courses, teaching assistants help to teach courses but also learn how to teach through the courses. Staff and administrators support and administer courses. So they're all different groups that interact in different ways in the context of a course and they have different incentives and perspectives and rights and responsibilities.

Matthew Reyna: 01:58

So for example, students typically want to learn and earn the highest grades possible in a course. Whereas faculty want students to learn but they may want them to learn slightly different things than maybe the students want to learn and often for good reason and they want to sign the most accurate grades possible, not necessarily the highest one. So this is something that anybody who's taken a course or taught a course appreciates. But I think it's helpful to recognize the different incentives, the different responsibilities, the different ways that people interact to support them. For example, also people spend time on a course but they don't necessarily want to spend too much time. So there are some aligned incentives and some that are somehow a little bit different. And I also recognize that many of these relationships, for example, between teacher and student are highly asymmetric. So students typically don't have the same power and perspective and of course that many faculty have. So I try to support people with these differences in mind knowing that they need different things. Courses are one example, research is another and a PhD program that's really the more prominent example. So those are many, many ways that different parties interact within a program.

Matthew Reyna: 03:21

So that's a like a high level example. Practically speaking, it's a lot of emails, a lot of meetings. I chaired our PhD programs, admissions committee this year, which has many people interact in many different ways. I helped to expand our curriculum to meet our growing faculty and our growing students. And I submitted I think a dozen courses to the graduate school last year, which I'm sure they appreciated reviewing. I spent a lot of time preparing policies that explicitly describe and prescribe expectations. I'll talk about policies. I think it hopefully a few times because I think that policies are really the unsung heroes of a lot of administrative efforts and that's because I think the absence of explicit policy or expectations can be kind of dangerous because of all these competing incentives and asymmetric relationships. So it's important to have explicit expectations for everyone, especially for groups that are underrepresented, underserved in higher education because I think they're the ones that are most affected without explicit expectations that help everyone. And on that note, I also work in DEI and outreach for our department and graduate program. So that's a long and meandering answer to what do I do.

Ulemu Luhanga: 04:41

I really appreciate that because as you talk about the number of people you've got to collaborate with and that you've highlighted the importance of policy because I agree with that. There's such an important element about transparency and typically transparency is seen through how policies are explicitly laid out and applied. So I appreciate that perspective.

Matthew Reyna: 05:05

Yeah, let's just talk about policy for the rest of the time. I think that's a great... There's some expression in nature of horrors of vacuum. And so I think when you're not explicit, you have whatever's written down, which might not be anything or it might be under described and you have what's done in practice or whatever is done in the moment. And I think when there are asymmetric relationships that the people who suffer most from that are, for example students. So I think it's policy sounds really uninspiring, but just a fundamental question is what do I need to do to be successful? What's important for me? I think these are very relevant questions and I think it's good to just say what those things are.

Ulemu Luhanga: 05:52

Absolutely. So thinking about the recognition of the importance of policy, your DEI work, the collaboration work, what skills do you use in your roles?

Matthew Reyna: 06:06

So good question. It helps to be patient. I think that's maybe a good response to any question about skills. When you're working with different people that have these different needs and priorities and so on, you can't expect for everything to happen on the timescale you want it to happen. I also think it helps to be impatient. There's too much to do and too much that needs to be done just to wait for things to happen on the pace that they would naturally happen. So I think it's helpful to exercise patience and impatience as needed as part of broader interpersonal skills. So both are helpful. Organizational skills and time management, I think for a lot of leadership roles you're juggling 100 things on a good day and more on a normal day and you have to be comfortable with that and also efficient.

Matthew Reyna: 07:07

So I use my calendar heavily for example. I think before I started this position I used it, but now it governs what I do in a very realistic way. And I use computer programming for example as part of my research. Maybe we can talk about that a little bit, but it's also helpful for educational leadership. So for example, during our admissions process, I frequently need to match applicants with faculty based on which applicants are interested in which research and which faculty have a need for students. And for a variety of reasons, this is something that's difficult to do. If we have hundreds and hundreds of applicants, but not all the faculty are available to review or there's maybe some faculty members very popular that year and others are new and this and that, matching is difficult. So I write code that learns from the applications to identify the similarity between faculty and between faculty and applicants to help make these matches.

Matthew Reyna: 08:16

And the results are generally better than what I could do if I were doing it manually, especially given the time demand. But it helps that once you've written this code, you can reuse it every year with minor changes and it takes maybe minutes instead of hours. So speaking to efficiency, having tools that help you with efficiency are important, especially people make mistakes. Of course people who implement computer code, cause computer code to make mistakes, but if you can embed the preferences that you're looking for, it's not just helpful for things like research but also for administration. So it definitely helps when I want to do things more effectively so that I can pay attention to other things that I need to pay attention to.

Ulemu Luhanga: 09:03

That is so cool. As somebody who during undergrad did computer programming, the patience you have to write code, I appreciate.

Matthew Reyna: 09:15

It's a creative exercise but I do it for my research so I'm doing it anyway and it's a fortunate skill that I'm able to reuse.

Ulemu Luhanga: 09:26

Absolutely. And I love that use in your research and then use for efficiency for the education side. So I would love to expand on that and learn a bit more about what was your journey that led to these current roles?

Matthew Reyna: 09:42

Sure. So that is a good transition because I did like math and computers and I knew that I always wanted to do something with them, but I didn't really know what that was for some time as when we're young we have these, I like this, but will someone pay me to do something with this? And I know that you as you said, had a similar beginning with a somewhat different path. But I think it's interesting that those slightly different paths, led us back here to talk about educational leadership. So I majored in math and languages as an undergraduate at Case Western Reserve University, which is in Cleveland, Ohio. And after that I started graduate school and math at Georgia Tech and it wasn't the best fit for me because I was interested, I realized in computational mathematics, but math is a very large umbrella and there are many things underneath it.

Matthew Reyna: 10:35

So I started graduate school and applied math then at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which is in Troy, New York. And I studied what I would call computational mathematics for the sake of the podcast. And maybe it's helpful to give a very, very brief talk about what that is. So it's something of an open secret that most equations are impossible or at least very difficult to solve. I think anybody who's taken a math class wouldn't necessarily disagree with it, but you can actually, if you go further in math, you can actually prove that things are impossible, which is a really fun thing. And however we still want to solve them, we still want to do the impossible. So maybe they describe some kind of bio process that we want to study like something in physics or biology or medicine and maybe we need a solution to understand that process in a better way, whatever it is.

Matthew Reyna: 11:29

So often we'll settle for an approximation instead of the exact solution to the equation, but we want the approximation to be good. So you're willing to settle for something that isn't perfect but you want it to be at least close enough to perfect that it's useful. So for my PhD, I created and implemented and analyzed these highly accurate numerical methods to solve kinds of differential equations which describe how processes evolve over time, for example. And I was also a teaching assistant and I taught a course for teaching assistants. So this leads or at least is related to my path to educational leadership. And while I was studying for my PhD, I became friends with a few biologists and they needed to, part of their research measure the area underneath certain kinds of curves.

Matthew Reyna: 12:17

They're called chromatograms for people who know, but they essentially describe data that they observe from an experiment. And if you've taken a calculus course you know that finding the area underneath a curve is a very mathematical thing to do. And so here's what they did. They started by printing out the curves on paper and then cutting them out and weighing them on a scale and it works but it takes a lot of time to do and it's as you would imagine, not very efficient or accurate or consistent or environmentally friendly, for example. So they didn't want to do that anymore. So they started to try to fit curves to normal distribution. See these are the bell curves that you see a lot of the time, but this was faster, but the curves weren't these normal Gaussian bell curve sort of thing.

Matthew Reyna: 13:10

So it was actually very inaccurate, it was worse than cutting them out in the first place. Then they took screenshots of the curves and they imported them into Photoshop and they traced them and they counted the number of pixels and that was what they did and it was a lot better, but it's still very manual process. So at this point they asked if I could help because they had thousands of these curves to analyze and it would take months to do a full-time work. So I watched what they did and I implemented computer code that modeled what they did but improved in a few ways and it was very, very fast and accurate and consistent and saved a lot of paper at that. So this is a story of how I got here, but I don't want it to be a story of biologist are bad at math or clinicians are bad at math because that's not the takeaway for me at all.

Matthew Reyna: 13:58

They had a problem, they knew what a good solution looked like and they knew what a bad solution looked like, which is even more important. And they knew what they could do and what they couldn't do and how to frame the problem in a way that other people could help. So they really did most of the work and they approached me to help with just those last parts. And so I think it's really a positive story that helped me realize that biologists and clinicians and others had all these interesting mathematical and computational problems that I could help solve. And so it took me on the path to where I am now. So after I finished my PhD, I started a postdoc in computational biology in the department of Computer science at Brown and then the department of Computer Science at Princeton. And then I moved to a department of Biomedical Informatics and the Department of Pharmacology and Chemical Biology here in Emory. And then after a year or two shortly after the start of the pandemic, I switched from more of a postdoc role to more of a faculty position and assumed my leadership role. So it's the long story to how I came to where I am.

Ulemu Luhanga: 15:13

I love that origin story, especially highlighting the importance of bringing together experts from different areas to come up with solutions. That's why we study our specific areas.

Matthew Reyna: 15:29

Exactly. It's not a story about how some people are better at computers than others. It's the law of comparative advantages. It's leveraging different strengths and interest to do more than we could do by ourselves.

Ulemu Luhanga: 15:42

Absolutely, thank you. So when you think about that journey and your current roles, what do you wish you knew before stepping into the two leadership roles?

Matthew Reyna: 15:58

So that's a good question and in some sense, maybe I'll reframe it a little bit in what do I wish that somebody had told me or what would I tell somebody else? Because I think in some sense those questions are similar but there are things that you know that's still helpful to hear from others and things that maybe someone else knows that's helpful to reinforce. So what would be helpful to know or helpful to tell somebody? Time commitment. So some of these educational leadership roles will consume as much time as you're willing to give them and that I think speaks to the importance of the work. But from a practical realistic perspective, if you invest as much time as the role demands and really needs, then you're not able to do everything that you need to do for other things that are important for yourself or your family.

Matthew Reyna: 16:57

And so it's a difficult balance to maintain. So I think recognizing that not just time commitment but just how much work is worth doing is important to state. I'd also recognize the emotional ranges of the position. So you share in some ways some of the greatest accomplishments that people have in their professional lives. You are on committees, you get to say congratulations doctor to people and it's really a rewarding thing. You get to help people learn to learn, you get to do all this really rewarding stuff and there are some real highs but there are also some real lows. Students have tragedies both within and outside of the educational programs. They have disappointments including ones that you unfortunately have to help to enable. Sometimes not everybody who starts a graduate program finishes it and sometimes you have to facilitate their departure from the program for example.

Matthew Reyna: 18:01

So that is both very rewarding and very difficult things. I'd also mention that a supportive and interested supervisor is paramount. So I wouldn't be doing this if my department chair wasn't as invested in education and training as I am. I might still have the role but I wouldn't invest as much time and effort and interest into it as I am. So having someone who's willing to make a space for you and say, I understand that you're here and you have a job and there are certain things you need to do as part of your job to be successful, but this is an important part of the job and we want to make space for it and reward you for investing in it, I think is important. So those three things, I don't know that I would say that I didn't know them before stepping in the role or at least I certainly didn't recognize them to the degree who I do now. But it's, I think things that are worth mentioning, time commitment, the emotional range of the position, and then support.

Ulemu Luhanga: 19:09

Thank you. I really appreciate that, especially the last two because they are very interlinked, that emotional component and support and the system support for the ability to do that. So as you think about all those skills that you need to use, all these things you have to do, what continuing professional development do you do to keep up to date with the needs of your roles?

Matthew Reyna: 19:40

So you're laughing a little bit while asking it because I think you realize it's an impossible task. There's a lot more that I would like to do and a lot more I should do, but it's hard to, how do you support people who need support and then acquire, how do you do everything you need to do? So I participate in institutional and external training. So for example, the training grant office at Emory held an annual training grant day earlier this month and I participated in that and that's almost a full day endeavor and very much appreciated. But it's a full day, it's a lot of effort. Yesterday for example, the biology department at Emory hosted a speaker who discussed increasing DEI in graduate education and I attended that and they talked about in particular diversity supplements connected to post back education and how these things can intersect in a very interesting and positive way. And so that's great to hear how other institutions are doing that and what we can do more in Emory. So I wish I had more protected time for professional development, but you carve out things you can, so reading things online, there's a lot of stuff that you can do but you find opportunities where you can.

Ulemu Luhanga: 21:07

Absolutely. That time management piece sneaks in everywhere.

Matthew Reyna: 21:12

Yeah, it's never ending.

Ulemu Luhanga: 21:14

Indeed. So I know you talked about advice that you'd give somebody if they were stepping into the role. Do you have any additional advice you would give someone interested in doing the same type of leadership roles that you have?

Matthew Reyna: 21:32

Yeah, so I think, I would say be mindful of the larger picture but also not, so a lot of the answers come back to balance. So being mindful of a larger picture, how do I enact policies that support a larger program and are sustainable while recognizing that policies interact with students in a very individual way? And so you might institute this policy but someone's experience with that policy is very much going to depend on their situation and for them it's not so much a policy, it's their life, their graduate career, it's their training. And so, the, being mindful of the larger picture of practicalities of a balance that you need to have between these things are helpful. It's always appropriate to go back to time management also. So one of the things that you... There was this program I also did last summer, it's the faculty success program.

Matthew Reyna: 22:47

So Emory is kind enough to sponsor faculty to participate in this and so I participated and there was a lot about time management about how to structure time, to be aware of how you're spending your time and to be so that you can protect it and be able to do all the things you need to do. And so they talked about using calendars very explicitly in scheduling things you need to do because there are things that'll creep at to your calendar that you're not necessarily aware of. Even things like your commute. Sometimes people don't realize how long their commute takes or how long lunch takes or things like that, but it's easy to get to the end of the day and say, "Where did the time go?" And not know and when you have an educational leadership role, it can go to a lot of different things, to a lot of emails, to a lot of things that are very important. But in that creative activities you can lose track of what they are. So balancing all things, use your calendar, and schedule time for things that are important for you to stay in your educational leadership role. So if you're devoting time to educational leadership and you're not able to, for example, focus on research in a way that's consistent with your staying in your role, that's a problem. So use your calendar widely and consistently.

Ulemu Luhanga: 24:26

Thank you. I definitely appreciate that because I think I was somebody who didn't use my calendar as well as I now do in order to block off time.

Matthew Reyna: 24:38

It's not sustainable. You will get to the end of the day, the end of the month, the end of the year and you'll, what happened? It's not that we need to be overly dependent on our calendars, but it's helpful to know what we're doing with our time.

Ulemu Luhanga: 25:00

Absolutely. So building on this idea of someone interested in doing similar types of work, how do you view succession planning?

Matthew Reyna: 25:13

So I view it as important and I guess I'll return to policy because I think it's important and we're laughing about it earlier, but I think it's really necessary part to take institutional knowledge and preferences and just this is how things are done and put them down on paper on a document, something where it's accessible not only to people who are here now or people who are going to be here tomorrow or next month or next year or so, for a couple reasons. One, so they don't have to reinvent it to make it easier to acquire again for this vacuum of expectations so that they don't have to so it helps with equity for example when you say, well, we did things in this way last month. And so it's helpful to do the same thing next month so that people don't have stochasticity in their lives.

Matthew Reyna: 26:21

I inherited this role from one of the faculty in our department, Ashish Sharma, who had this role for many years and I was going to take it over and then he got sick, which was really awful. And then the pandemic happened and then a lot of things happened. So it was really, I would have loved to have learned from him and have learned from others. And my department chair was great but there were a lot of things happening in 2020 and a lot of things happening now still today. So I think having things written down and explicit and here's what we do, it doesn't mean that you have to do those things forever. You can always change policy. Policy should change, it's needed. But to make things explicit and clearly communicated is not just helpful for today. It's helpful for things to come.

Ulemu Luhanga: 27:24

Thank you. So important. So as you're reflecting on what you've done to date, what contributed to your biggest successes?

Matthew Reyna: 27:37

I think when I hear questions like this sometimes I hear people say passion and I think passion is great and all, but I think passion is, that's not my answer. I think it's good to be passionate and important to be passionate, do things that you care about and all of that. But I wouldn't attribute my successes to passion because I think that's in some sense unfair where it suggests that if only you care enough about something, you'll be successful. And I think that's an unrealistic way to describe success. Sometimes success means good fortune, sometimes it means dumb luck, sometimes it means changing your definition of success so that you can meet your criteria for success. So I think that's a very honest answer is that I've been very fortunate where I'm going along and doing things and then something fortuitous happens and I go in a new direction and I end up in maybe a different place or a different role than I expected and it's great. And then you find a way to say, "You know what? Actually, this is what I wanted to do." And there's your success. So I think good fortune is responsible for a lot of it. Work is another part and that's somehow different from passion where working hard and doing things is in some sense different from passion but it helps. So trying I think goes a long way to success as well.

Ulemu Luhanga: 29:34

Thank you, I appreciate that, highlighting the hard work piece and also the being open to wherever life takes you because people always talk about, you set up a plan and then you veer off the plan and it's like, maybe you were supposed to veer, so wherever you go.

Matthew Reyna: 29:54

Or even not saying, oh this was supposed to happen anyway, but just being open to this is happening now, how maybe it's even better than what you would've expected or imagined. And then just evaluating where you are and where you want to go and just saying, I'm on this path right now and to appreciate that.

Ulemu Luhanga: 30:25

Absolutely. Live in the moment. Love that. What are or were your biggest growth opportunities so far?

Matthew Reyna: 30:38

Maybe I'll go back to skills and say I would like to be more patient sometimes and also more impatient sometimes. So I like that pairing because I think they sound like opposites, but I think they're very complementary and helpful. I'm working on efficiency. I always, there's so much I want to do, so much that's worth doing and finding ways to get that done. I think relying on other people is helpful in finding ways for people who are also interested in something to contribute and help make things that are important a success. So a lot of the skills that I talked about earlier are also my growth opportunities because I recognize they're important and I think I'm good at some of them, but obviously not perfect and of course I'd like to be better at all of them. So those are growth opportunities including being more and less patient.

Ulemu Luhanga: 31:59

So can you expand on that a little bit? Being more patient and impatient? Kind of some examples.

Matthew Reyna: 32:13

There's a lot of things that you want to accomplish in this role that I want to accomplish. I want policies or practices that are related to graduate education. We have a lot of different components to graduate education. You have courses, you have research, you have teaching and I want to improve all of those things. So being patient might mean I can't tackle them all at once. So I did a lot of work on courses a year or so ago. And then more recently I did work on our policies for satisfactory progress, which glass half empty are things that if you don't do then you might go on probation or are dismissed from the program, glass half full, here's a recipe for success. And if you are able to follow them or recognize that these things are important, then you have a lot better chance of being successful in the graduate program.

Matthew Reyna: 33:22

And so an example of patience would be saying, I can't do all of these things at once. There's a lot of people who are involved who have maybe different opinions and very valuable opinions about how these things can and should work. How can I involve them in the process or make sure that they are involved but also make progress? So saying I can't do too many things at once, accepting that sometimes things will fall off of the queue sometimes because something else happens or the graduate admission starts up and then that's very consuming for a couple of months and saying, okay, we have to return to this other thing a little bit later. But being impatient is then saying this is important. I know that other people have other priorities, I know that I have other priorities, but you have to sometimes even make calendar events every few days to respond to someone say, "Do you have any updates on this?"

Matthew Reyna: 34:25

Sometimes they're very important for students. So something that might be not so important for us as an administrators or as faculty or as whatever might be very important for a student. Maybe they want to go on an internship or they need to form a committee and schedule their proposal defense or something like that. And for us it's like, oh these things just, we don't worry about them as much because we know that they work out. But for the student just saying, "Oh don't worry about it, it will work out." Can be very unsatisfying. And so being impatient sometimes means scheduling impatience and saying, I'm going to follow up with this. I know that this person who has all these other things going on in their lives, it's not a priority for them, but it's a priority for somebody else or it's having a real impact on someone else who has less power in this interaction. And so I need to manufacture some impatience to help them with what they need.

Ulemu Luhanga: 35:32

Thank you. So powerful. Thank you. So what do you love most about your work and what you do?

Matthew Reyna: 35:43

I think it's very important. It feels very important. Maybe this is touching a little bit on passion, which I said a couple answers earlier was I didn't want to overemphasize passion as a factor in success, but I have some passion for sure. I have passion for what I'm doing. I think it's important to learn how to learn, for example. Education has this wide umbrella and it goes beyond going to a classroom and sitting for 15 minutes or an hour and 15 minutes and absorbing things in quizzes of tests. So this transformation of students from more passive learners to more active learners where they assume responsibility for learning how to do research, for learning how to do things, to be independent and then being able to train others I think is very, very rewarding. And to be able to participate in that and help facilitate it is very helpful. And I know this happens throughout the educational process, I'm sure through early childhood education, through primary, secondary and higher education. But I think I particularly enjoy this timeframe of it where you really are helping trainees to transition from trainees into trainers and I think that's very rewarding.

Ulemu Luhanga: 37:28

Absolutely. I definitely resonate with that as an educational developer. It's like I get to see them in the next phase when they're faculty and staff and it's like, "Don't you want to develop even more?" And it is exciting to be-

Matthew Reyna: 37:44

It is. Sometimes you get to work with them even after, so I've been on PhD committees of students who are now faculty and you get to collaborate with them and their progression from trainee to trainers is really remarkable. And you get to see them interact with their own students and apply some of the same lessons. Sometimes they will as educators, there are tools that we have in our toolkit, things that we use. I often talk about telling a story and how when you're doing research, a big part of research is communicating the story of that research to others. And it's like, if you chop down a tree in the forest and no one hears it, did it really happen? If you did research and you didn't tell anybody about it, did it really happen? And how communicating research, especially scientific research, which is not just equations and plots and things like that and computer code, communicating that is very important. So seeing faculty being able to take lessons that maybe you shared with them and then share with their own trainees is very rewarding.

Ulemu Luhanga: 39:02

Wonderful. I feel like we kind of went into a bit of this next question, talking about passions around education. Is there anything we haven't touched into in that area?

Matthew Reyna: 39:16

I talked about policy, so I'm always happy to return to policy and just to make that very explicit, I think it's really important for equity, for having equitable learning and outcomes and all sorts of things for engaging a more inclusive educational process. Saying, "Here's what we need to do, this is a recipe for success." Is very helpful instead of saying, "Well, you know it's a class, you know what to do with a class, just things will work out." I think having, it's funny to say policy and passion in the same sentence, but I think really creating conditions that are conducive to the success of trainees, including very different trainees and ones who may, you might anticipate might struggle more because their background and preparation is different from maybe many of your other trainees. Creating conditions for them to be successful in an educational environment is very important. And so it's writing a bunch of things, just writing lists, do this and this and this and this, maybe it's not the most glamorous thing to do, but it's I think is important for good outcomes.

Ulemu Luhanga: 40:46

Absolutely. And you're right. I think for a lot of people it's like policy, passion? But it's using your passion to help guide policy is really important and it helps those you're working with.

Matthew Reyna: 41:00

I agree.

Ulemu Luhanga: 41:02

So last question, and I think we're going to tap into that balance and time management thing, recognizing you are more than your work. So what are some things you do outside of work to help maintain joy in life and practice?

Matthew Reyna: 41:20

So I have a family and a very, very active three-year-old and having someone who doesn't care about policy or, so actually my child does love Zoom meetings. Now it's at an age where they want to jump on and see what's going on and then look at the Brady Bunch Squares on the screen. And so I was going to say that they don't care about Zoom meetings, but they love them. But having someone who doesn't care about any of this is very helpful and helps to add perspective because it's great to be passionate and engaged and all those things. And it can lead to getting over invested in an email. And at some sense it's just an email, it's just a meeting. It's just things are what they are. And having someone who doesn't care about them at all and doesn't know what's going on and wants to go outside and to build things and has questions about trains and dinosaurs is very helpful. So having that is very helpful.

Matthew Reyna: 42:41

I would say that the pandemic has been difficult for many of us in very different and often unseen ways. And raising a small child during a pandemic has been very difficult. I know things are difficult for different people, but I would say having a small child in the pandemic is definitely one of the difficult things. But it's been very rewarding to have that time that the pandemic forced on us and to see this sort of an opportunity. So I would say family helps to anchor, it helps to have perspective and it helps to appreciate the things that I am doing as part of my educational leadership roles, as part of my research roles in a somewhat of a different way that wouldn't have been possible without having a young child who has very different priorities and incentives and interests than the work.

Ulemu Luhanga: 43:45

Oh, little three-year-old isn't into computational biology yet?

Matthew Reyna: 43:49

No, or at least early in the pandemic he would see us, my partner and I doing work and so he understands our jobs are typing and it makes the money come out so that he's description of what we do. And so he knows what the keyboard does, the money, I think he's seen us go to an ATM once so there's where the money comes out. And so he's somehow connected these things. But no, he's not interested in computational biology of clinical informatics. But some of the work that I do does touch on small children and health outcomes for them. And so having a small child and saying, he's happy, he's healthy and it's important for me. And with any luck, he'll grow up to be a happy and healthy adult and maybe go through an educational program. And I hope that he'll have the support that I want to offer our students so that's perspective.

Ulemu Luhanga: 44:57

That is wonderful. Thank you so much. I feel like that's a beautiful way to come to the end of our core questions. But before I let you go, any last thoughts, reflections, any lessons that you want to share with aspiring leaders?

Matthew Reyna: 45:17

Aspiring leaders, I would say it's a wonderful ride. It takes as much time as you're willing to give it, but the time that you are able to give it is very rewarding and I would invite aspiring leaders to think about education as very inclusively. There are many components to education and ways to care about education and to contribute to the education of our students, our trainees, our faculty, of everybody. So I would challenge aspiring leaders to think inclusively, to be generous with their time, to the extent that they can and to enjoy the time they're able to spend on what I think is very important work.

Ulemu Luhanga: 46:08

Thank you once again, Matt.

Matthew Reyna: 46:12

Very welcome.