Podcast: Marge Maallo on Her Career in Science & Moving to Boston

When Marge Maallo was in elementary school, her dad would bring home college-level physics books for her to read on the weekends. That kicked off her passion for science that has taken her all over the world — from her home in the Philippines to Australia to Pittsburgh and most recently to Boston.

In this episode of the BOSFilipinos Podcast, Marge shares her experience as a scientist and discusses her research on pain at Boston Children's Hospital. She also talks about maintaining a connection with her Filipino friends and family around the world.

Listen to the full conversation below, or subscribe to our show on Apple Podcast, Google Play, Stitcher, and Spotify.

Transcript 

[MUSIC]

Kaitlin Milliken: Hello, and welcome to the BOSFilipinos Podcast. I'm your host, Kaitlin Milliken, and this show is obviously made by BOSFilipinos. 

In each episode of our podcast, we highlight a different aspect of Filipino life in the Greater Boston area. So today we’ll be profiling a new member of that community: Marge Maallo. Alright. Marge is a neuroscientist currently researching pain at Boston Children’s Hospital. 

Marge has been interested in science since she was a kid. She has memories of reading physics books during her childhood in the Philippines. And that passion for science kicked off her journey away from home. She pursued her PhD in Australia, took a research job in Pittsburgh, and ended up in Boston for her new gig this July. 

During our conversation, Marge talked about her experiences as a scientist, and what she’s learned in her research on pain so far. We also discussed moving to the Bay State during a global pandemic and how she stays connected to her family and friends in the Philippines. 

Thank you so much Marge for taking the time to join us today. 

Marge Maallo: Happy to be here. 

Kaitlin Milliken: We know that you are a scientist. You're doing research. Can you talk a little bit about your experience in science and what type of work you do?

Marge Maallo: It's not a very linear experience — the experience I have had. I was formally trained as a physicist. So I did my bachelor's and my master's in physics, back home, University of the Philippines. My research focus then was optics, holography, that kind of stuff. So very different to what I'm doing now. And then I actually also did a few years of PhD in physics back home. But even before I started my graduate school — so masters — I knew I always wanted to do something that's more translational, if you will, more than they do the way people are dealing with their everyday life. And ever since then, I've been trying to find something, something more than doing experiments in a darkroom. 

And then for the PhD program that I did in Australia. There, I worked with individuals who have congenital brain malformations, so they're born with these brain malformations, and it was such a different experience. So being trained as a physicist, I wasn't trained how to actually deal with human participants in a study. So there was that that was different. But it's also very rewarding. And I think that sent me on a path that I am now I know that I want to pursue clinical research in my future lab, if you will.

Kaitlin Milliken: Great. I'd love to go back a little farther. You sort of mentioned that you studied physics. What kicked off your interest in going down the science, physics path, as opposed to all the other types of things you could have studied or gone into. 

Marge Maallo: I don't know why physics though. But ever since my elementary days. My dad, they had this library where he works. And he would bring me home physics books. I don't know what he was thinking, why physics books, but imagine being an elementary school student and on the weekends in your free time reading a college physics book. So I think that was it. And then in high school, I went to Manila Science High School. I had this teacher in my first year, I think, and she was teaching physics. And it felt like I could just understand everything she was teaching. Then it was easy, but then I got to college. And whoa, this is not the physics I signed up for. But yeah, that started it for me. I think just my parents encouraging me to do what I love doing. I was very lucky that they didn't ask, “Physics? Why would you study physics? What kind of career do you get out of that?” So that that was a lucky break.

Kaitlin Milliken: You mentioned you were born in the Philippines, you studied in the Philippines. And before we started recording, you mentioned that you've kind of followed the research and that's taken you so many places. Can you have a little bit more about that?

Marge Maallo: Right, so I was born in Makati, born and raised in Makati. Well, it's not the capital, but it's in the area-ish of metro Manila. I lived with my parents until I moved out to move overseas. So as you know, Filipinos back home, they tend to stay with their family until it's time to start their own families. So moving to Australia was very difficult in a way that I did not expect. So it's my first time being away from family and it's overseas. So I was very homesick in the first few months. But then I made friends, things got better, and then you just get used to it. And then in the fall, in the next year, my, he was still my boyfriend then, and he followed me in Australia. He studied. He did his own thing. And then we moved here to the US, first to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where I did two years of postdoctoral research at Carnegie Mellon. And then just this July, I moved here to start another postdoc position for more clinical training. So my position at CMU was more on the research side and now I'm venturing more into the clinical world being based at the hospital and working with patients. 

Kaitlin Milliken: I know it's a really strange time to move somewhere and also a strange time to integrate into like, the working environment, the ecosystem here. But Boston is known for having this very large STEM community. And how has your experience been with that thus far?

Marge Maallo: It's funny enough. So I know a few academics based in Boston, we communicate by email, but I haven't actually met all these people I work with. So it's all been via Zoom, and phone calls. That's it. Twitter, Twitter's very helpful in that regard. Like science Twitter is very engaging and very fun at times. 

But from what I've experienced so far living here in Boston and working with people based here in Boston, it's very different to Pittsburgh and to Australia. Pittsburgh and Australia both were very… We lived a slower pace, I would say, in those two other places. Here in Boston, you can feel that it's more fast paced, more hustle, but it's fun so far, it's been fun so far. People in the lab, especially you have been very supportive. So there's that.

Kaitlin Milliken: Yeah, I'd love to go a little deeper into the work that you do. You're doing neuroimaging, which I only understand as being brain pictures from the word itself. [LAUGHS] But what does that mean for someone who's not in science who might be listening?

Marge Maallo: So there are different what we call modalities. I specifically work with MRI, that's magnetic resonance imaging. Some people when they go to a hospital, they can get an MRI, for example, because it's not invasive. And you don't have the problem with radiation like you do with X-ray. So you can get images of all body parts, abdomen, heart, brain, of course. So that's what I'm doing, neuroimaging. 

And within MRI itself, there are different techniques. So some images, you can just get 3D pictures of the brain, those are anatomical images. And then for some modalities, you get a video of the brain, if you will. So 3D images in time, and then you can sort of watch the activity in the brain as a person is doing some tasks while they're inside the scanner. And there's also another mortality, which is sort of what I'm special analyzing in or at least trying to specialize in. It's called diffusion weighted imaging. And it lets you take pictures that after processing it will let you see the connections between the different parts of the brain. So that's what I'm doing right now. 

Kaitlin Milliken: So I guess just to help me understand a little bit more, is it something where you pick that project specifically and applied to work on it? Or was it something where, because neuroimaging was what you were most interested in, or was it more than doing something in that clinical sphere?

Marge Maallo: Being from physics, neuroimaging sort of made sense for me in making this job because it's a lot of signal processing. And I received a lot of training and in signal processing back in the day when I was still studying physics. And so when I did my PhD, I worked like I told you earlier with individuals who had congenital malformation of the brain, and in my first postdoc, I worked with children who had surgeries for the management of their epilepsy. So the common thing about those two projects, I worked with very rare populations of individuals. And their brain is not typical in a way that it's not what you would expect to see in a random person. So I knew I was missing that kind of training, just being able to see if you will, a typical brain, and I knew that I needed more training in that regard. And I saw the job opening here at BCH, where it's still clinical in a way because I work now with individuals who suffer from chronic pain, but the way that their brains would appear in the MRI images would be normal would be typical, if you will. So that's what brought me here, I guess. That's what I followed. I knew what I was lacking in the training of analysis of these neuro images. And this was a great opportunity.

Kaitlin Milliken: When it comes to pain and all the things and the research that you're reading, what's really most interesting to you about that? 

Marge Maallo: So the challenge with studying pain is it's very subjective, like you and I would have very different pain thresholds. And that's one of the characteristics of pain… So I'm specifically studying headache. And that's how you differentiate migraine, and another type of headache which is tension type headache. If it's really bad, and if the pain is only on one side, then it's probably migraine. If it's all over, and it's not so bad, it's probably tension type headache. But you and I, like I said, would have very different pain thresholds. Maybe just a break would be very, very painful for me because I'm a wuss when it comes to pain. So that's one of the things that's challenging about this, and I find myself very drawn to this challenge. What can we see in the brains of people who suffer from migraine versus people who suffer from other types of headaches that would let us know let us tell, “Okay, so that's migraine, that's a different type” without relying on the subjective experience of the patient.

Kaitlin Milliken: I know sometimes I've been to a doctor or team things where it's like, right, your pain on a scale of like one to 10…

Marge Maallo: There's also this other tool that people use. It's called the visual Association scale, where they show you pictures from happy through really suffering excruciating pain. 

Kaitlin Milliken: So in pursuing your postdoc, what’s been surprising to you about that journey? What's like some of the standout things that you've learned along the way?

Marge Maallo: It's very important to have great mentors. I've always heard people talk about this. And that's one of the surprising things here in the US for me. In Australia, we knew that supervisors and mentors were very different people. They could be the same. If you were lucky, you could have an advisor, a PhD advisor who would also mentor you. Here in the US people tend to call everyone their mentors. Which is great, in a way because maybe that's what these people are doing for them mentoring them in addition to supervising their projects. But that's the most surprising and important lesson I've learned in all of this, that having a good mentor is sort of a make or break in someone's career and mental health.

Kaitlin Milliken: Oh, definitely. It's really hard to navigate things without any guidance.

Marge Maallo: Oh, yeah. And just feeling the support, it really empowers you.

Kaitlin Milliken: I do want to ask a little bit about sort of the aspect of keeping a connection with the Philippines, especially since you’re from there. I don't know if you still have family there. How do you foster that connection or stay connected when you're all the way over here?

Marge Maallo: Especially with the flipped timezones. Yes, so we still have family there. My parents and my brother are still back home. My husband's parents are also still back home. So thank God for Zoom and Skype and Messenger, everything. But I guess the closest connection being here to home is the food. We still always eat Filipino food. And that's one of the things that I was really excited to move to Boston about. There is a proper Filipino store here. And it's great because we didn't have that in Pittsburgh. in Pittsburgh, you would have an asian store. And it sells mostly products from China, Korea, Vietnam, and sometimes there are products from the Philippines and you just miss the Filipino food, even cheap thrills, like I don't know if you've ever had this, Cheepee, it's just cornflakes. Yeah… Food is really sort of my, my roots in the Filipino culture.

Kaitlin Milliken: That's really interesting too, because I know there is the one Filipina storing Quincy. In the before pandemic times, there would be popups at restaurants, where they would bring in chefs who would do special menus. Do you find yourself cooking much at home these days now since the going out option is less of an option than before? 

Marge Maallo: Yeah, but even before the pandemic I would cook because I do love cooking. It's one of the things that I learned early on in life. Even back home, I would always cook. I would love cooking for people. Sometimes, I would get hungry. I would cook. And then after the meal’s done, I wouldn't be hungry anymore. So it's just really the process of preparing the food that was fun. So when we moved here, it helps us save, for one. But now during the pandemic, like you said, it's really that default. So what I do is I always go, it's always Filipino food like 95% of the time. And then just to spice things up, we were just order in once a month now. So that's sort of the extent of our outside world.

Kaitlin Milliken: I love how you mentioned the process of cooking, I find that there's a lot of mindfulness in it too, because it's very much like a process where you're actively doing things and we spend so much time plugged in especially these days. 

Marge Maallo:  Definitely, yes. When I craved some Filipino food that I haven't cooked before, I would just call my mom, ask her, “Hey, how do you cook this?” And, and because of the time difference, she'd be like, “Do you know what time it is?” [LAUGHS]

Kaitlin Milliken: What are your go tos? What are your favorites? 

Marge Maallo: Oh my favorite is bulalo. That's very easy. I don't know if you've had bulalo before. It's just really beef shank. Sinigang’s my favorite too, like the sourness of the soup, especially during winter.

Kaitlin Milliken: Well the winters here, they get frosty so you're in good company.

Marge Maallo: Like right now it's still officially summer and it's sort of cool becoming colder.

Kaitlin Milliken: I know we talked about things that surprised you and your postdoc. What have been some of your favorite experiences so far in the short time you've been here, and what are you looking forward to as you get more acclimated and being in the city?

Marge Maallo: The place specifically that we're living, it’s very near the beach. So I look forward to seeing the beach frozen. I've seen pictures where the water is just, it's just ice. So I'm excited about that. Once a week, we go out to the beach side and sometimes I would bring my iPad and read papers. And it's just a nice change of pace from being indoors all the time. Of course, while keeping socially distant, physically distant. But yeah, I actually look forward to seeing the beach freeze over. [LAUGHS]

I also look forward to meeting some of the Filipino scientists. I know there are a number, not just a few, more than a few Filipino scientists in the wider Harvard Medical School community as well. 

Kaitlin Milliken: You mentioned that, because this is a new field for you, you're really pouring yourself into your work. How do you balance the you that is a scientist and the you that is Marge outside of being a scientist? 

Marge Maallo: One thing that I do is I always keep in touch with friends, Filipino friends. They're all over the world. So, like, a lot of my friends are still back home in the Philippines. And especially since the pandemic started. We have been eachother’s support group. So there's that and what I do with my friends is we schedule what is called “enuman” sessions. So inuman is the Tagalog word for drinking sessions. But it's all virtual now. So instead of spending it with an i, we spell it with an e for electronic. So that's what we're doing. We try to do that when everybody's free because everyone has commitments. And like I said earlier,  we go to the beach once a week, and when I'm not reading, just enjoying the views, enjoying the sound of the waves crashing. That's always a good time for me because I get to turn my brain off. And then at night, I mostly just watch cheap thrills TV.

Kaitlin Milliken: We love a good cartoon in this household. 

Marge Maallo: Oh, yes. 

Kaitlin Milliken: So this is my final question. It's sort of about folks who are in this field, who are Filipino, Filipino-American or people who might be, you know, in college and considering going into this field. Are there any pieces of advice that you have for those folks?

Marge Maallo: I would say find your people. So people always say, “You can’t be what you can see.” And it's true that Filipinos are still underrepresented in the sciences here in the US. That said, there's not a lot of Filipinos in the higher ranks, higher positions. But it doesn't necessarily have to be a Filipino that you can look up. They just have to be kindred spirits basically. So just to find your people and draw from them. Draw from the support, so it's a given day. And find your passion, just something that keeps you up at night in a good way. And in the morning when you think, “Oh, I have to do this,” it’s something that gets you excited.

Kaitlin Milliken: Thank you so much for taking the time out to chat.

Marge Maallo: Thank you for having me.

[MUSIC]

Kaitlin Milliken: This has been the BOSFilipinos Podcast. I'm your host, Kaitlin Milliken. Music for our show was made by Matt Garamella. Special thanks to Marge for joining us and sharing about her work. If you liked this episode of our show, you can subscribe to the BOSFilipinos Podcast on your streaming platform of choice. You can also follow us on Instagram, @bosfilipinos, to stay connected. What do you want us to cover? Let us know at bosfilipinos.com. Thanks for listening and see you soon.