"Take Five" with University of Chicago Assistant Professor Dakota McCoy
"Take Five" is an occasional feature in which we pose five questions to a Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) community member about their career, dreams, and passions. Here we profile Cody McCoy, assistant professor at the University of Chicago.
McCoy joined UChicago's Department of Ecology and Evolution last year and she will be spending much research time at the MBL as a Whitman Scientist, with a dedicated lab space in the Lillie Building. Her research interests are broad, encompassing the architecture of living things across scales. The McCoy Lab’s current projects include studying photosynthesis and symbiosis in threatened coral reef ecosystems, the biology of pregnancy, and how nature’s nanophotonics can inspire new solar technology.
McCoy earned a B.S. in biology from Yale University, an M.Phil. in geography and the environment from Oxford University, and a Ph.D. in organismic and evolutionary biology from Harvard University. She was also a Stanford Science Fellow with support from the NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship.
When and why did you decide to become a scientist?
So many little moments. In early memories, I'm sitting on my dad's lap in the morning, scribbling about addition and letters with colorful crayons. He designed a program called the Pittsburgh Plan to help young children love math and reading. Thanks to my mom, who is a human geneticist, I assumed that most women were scientists. Where I grew up, near Pittsburgh, our backyard was a treasure trove of nature; my four siblings and I caught salamanders, raised tadpoles, and painted with inkberries. It's probably no coincidence that all five of us are working in or near science.
Finally, in college, I knew I'd found the right career when I took a fantastic course called Collections of the [Yale] Peabody Museum taught by Leo Buss. The second day of class found me chasing after Chris Norris, then-curator of Vertebrate Paleontology, in the basement catacombs of the museum. As I desperately tried to keep up (he spoke in a British accent and walked fast), my gaze caught on object after object: rock slabs emblazoned with dinosaur footprints; a room filled with mammoth skulls; and the biggest scale I have ever seen “for weighing dinosaur fossils,” he explained. I was hooked. The rest is history!
What scientific question most interests you and inspires you to come to the lab (or field) for research?
How does symbiosis evolve? Two or more genetically distinct individuals manage to form a long-lasting association, navigating their own conflicts of interest and divergent natural histories. How can this ever be possible, let alone common? And what factors cause symbiosis to catastrophically break down (as happens in coral bleaching)?
Blue-sky: If you had unlimited resources and time to conduct any experiment or series of experiments, what would they be?
I would live among the orcas, recording every sound they make as well as the entire context, then apply rigorous analysis to figure out the meanings of their different sounds. I'd design an animatronic orca suit to wear and a voicebox to produce the sounds I'd learned, experimenting and testing how their conversations work. I'd repeat the experiment for every species of social marine whale/dolphin before moving on to parrots and beyond.
What are these clever animals thinking, feeling, and saying? Do they have seeds of language? Imagine being a dolphin—they "see" using sound and they communicate using sound (most humans see using vision and communicate using sound, two different modalities). It is theoretically possible that a dolphin could project, to a pal, the exact image of something she wanted to talk about. The best we humans can do is describe!
If you could invite three people to dinner, living or past, who would they be and why?
This is a tough one. Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis), Denny (the first-generation Neanderthal-Denisovan hybrid), and the Peking Man (Homo erectus) ... assuming I can employ a universal translator! If they must be H. sapiens, then I'd pick a few folks I've recently been reading about: Amos Tversky, Six-Monkey (Mixtec warrior queen), and Barack Obama.
Outside of work, what are your passions?
I love running and singing, not at the same time. Bookbinding is my main artistic hobby; once, during my Ph.D., I repaired an old zoology tome for my advisor, David Haig—certainly the most tangible, physical accomplishment of my Ph.D. years! I study Egyptian hieroglyphics from time to time. I guess hieroglyphics are cool to me for the same reason orcas are cool. When we read an ancient Middle Kingdom story, we immerse ourselves in the intelligent minds of a group of people largely alien to us. The Shipwrecked Sailor, Sinuhe, and the Eloquent Peasant are my favorite hieroglyphic stories, and all three show that humans are fundamentally the same, even across all this time and space.