Faculty Profiles
Faculty in Their Own Words - Dr. Nicolas Malagon
Dr. Nicolas Malagon is Assistant Professor of Biology. He has taught at CMU since 2019.
What do you love about your work here?
Working with the students. You have small classes, so instead of having 300 students you can have here 10 or 20 and in that way you can know them better and work with them.
What are you teaching right now that you're most excited about?
Anatomy and Physiology is exciting because I can make connections between human anatomy and apply it to my research on cancer. There are a lot of connections that are very interesting.
What are you researching and writing?
I continue working on fruit flies, using fruit fly development to understand early stages of cancer and evolution. I've done several publications with my students. For example, we worked on using fruit flies to understand how tumors move. In another, we're working to understand how tissues change in area and how those changes are important for cancer. In another we published recently, we worked on evolution using fruit flies.
What are you reading for enjoyment?
Hopefully when I have more time one day, I have books about fractals that I want to read. I'm also reading a book about artificial intelligence and biology.
What do you most long for in your work?
For sure it's not fame or many publications (although everybody would love to have more publications!). It's definitely seeing happy students. Some of my students just presented their work in a conference by the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution and the Canadian Botanical Association. I think they were the only undergrad students there, most of the students were masters, PhDs, post-docs. I think this opened new doors for them to prepare them well. I'm sure that some of them will go into grad school and having this experience will help them to apply for fellowships and scholarships. Even just the experience to be there and talking to people about science, they will be less nervous. Though to be honest with you, I think I was more nervous than them during the presentation! They did such a fantastic job and they had so many people talking to them about it.
Do you have any interesting projects underway in the broader community or church?
I'm working as a judge in school science fairs. I found that, in the same way we recruit basketball players and volleyball players, we should start also recruiting science students! I'm already working with one of the super-talented students from high school and we're working on tissue mechanics and cancer. We meet once a week and we have discussions about cancer and she's collecting data. We are going to have a poster that she will present for her high school and we hope that she gets an award and maybe she will be able to present it not only in the province but in a science conference in Canada.
What saying or motto inspires you?
1 Corinthians 2:9. It's not that I just believe it, but I have seen it. In my life, when I go back and see the difficult times and everything that has happened, later when you see it with more perspective, I think that "no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love Him." I know it very well in Spanish, in English it sounds a bit weird to me—but yes, sometimes there is a saint I hear that says, before God gives you something, he makes you first fall in love with those dreams and then gives you those things. I feel that this is what happened to me. Those dreams are for example these students that do such an amazing job.
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