Geeking Out With...Camille Sullivan
September 2, 2025
Abigail Arnold | Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Geeking Out With…is a feature in which we talk to graduate students about their passions. You can check out past installments here.
Camille Sullivan is a fifth-year PhD student in Molecular and Cell Biology. She is a member of the Rosbash lab, where her research focuses on how the protein kinase Doubletime regulates the circadian clock and the twenty-four-hour cycle in drosophila (fruit flies). She is also the co-founder of the Brandeis University Mentoring Program for the Sciences (BUMP), which pairs students in the sciences with alums in their fields of interest. She joined Geeking Out With… to talk about her enthusiasm for mentorship, why she believes it is so important, and what makes a strong mentor-mentee relationship.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
What inspired you to start BUMP?
BUMP started because of my co-founder, Anjali Pandey. She said we should do something to help the community and make it easier for current students to connect with Brandeis alums. We’re constantly hearing from our advisors that we should get in touch with people, but there’s no centralized system for setting these connections up. We had the idea of creating a network for this because we have lots of great alums, many still in the Boston area, who want to give back and many students who want to network and do informational interviews. The idea is to supplement the Brandeis academic curriculum with another mentor with whom you can talk more generally about scientific interests and your potential career paths.
Why do you think mentorship is so important?
I’ve been very fortunate to have a ton of fantastic mentors in my life. Having a mentor is so invaluable because they’re someone who can help catch your blind spots. As the name implies, you can’t see your own blind spots, so you need someone else to point them out. I think most people think of mentors in the traditional academic sense, and I am so thankful to be surrounded by many mentors in the Brandeis community who are continuously helping me grow technically and intellectually. But you can have mentors in all areas – a life mentor could be someone who’s not in science but who knows you as a person and is someone trustworthy who can help you figure out how to reach your potential. I am a firm believer that you can never have too many mentors!
I have been a mentor for a few people as well, mainly undergraduates who are in my lab. Being a mentor is really good training for yourself too. It gives you a sense of how hard it is. Mentors are juggling a lot, and they are people too, with their own blind spots. As a graduate student, you’re typically expected to mentor at some point – undergraduates or new graduate students – so BUMP gives alums the ability to continue with that, and that’s good from a CV and training perspective. I feel that mentorship is such an instrumental part of someone’s career and a good mentor can really catapult your progress towards your goals. I also feel a sense of responsibility to pay it forward like others have done (and still do) with me.
What do you think makes for a strong relationship between mentor and mentee? How has your perspective on this changed as you’ve had more experience with mentoring relationships from both sides?
Mentors will give you as much as you give them, so when you come to meetings really prepared – here is the problem I am struggling with, here’s where I’m stuck, here’s what I’ve tried – you get really productive feedback and guidance. If you come to your mentor with a really broad issue and haven’t done the work to narrow the scope of your problem, your mentor will give more open-ended, general feedback that may not be as useful. I think it’s on mentees to make a genuine effort to come to meetings with something specific to talk about.
One thing I’ve learned is that it’s very easy to make assumptions about what you think you’re communicating and what the other person is understanding. I’ve been refining this from a mentor-mentee perspective but also from a scientific communication perspective. I love to restate what someone says to me, because the number of times they say, “Yes, but I actually meant…” is mindblowing to me. So often we sit and nod because we think we have the same understanding. When I mentor undergrads, I ask them to say things back to me as well because that makes it easier for me to identify where I may have not explained something clearly enough or where there is still a knowledge gap.
Another thing that has become clear to me over the years is that you need to be in touch with what work you need to do as an individual, since no one can do that work for you. This changes at different stages. For example, in my second year, my work was generating data, and now, in my fifth year, I’m really trying to figure out my scientific story alongside generating data. I feel like I have a bunch of random tidbits of data, and I’m not sure how they fit together. It’s up to me to come up with a story and propose it to my advisor and see what he thinks. But I need to do the hard work of preparing a story to the best of my ability so that he has something to work with.
You were a finalist in the Three Minute Thesis competition this year. How do your thoughts on communication apply to contexts in which you’re presenting your work?
A critical component of scientific communication is understanding your audience. You need to identify the audience you have and craft your presentation, whether it’s oral or written, to reflect where your audience is and meet them there. For Three Minute Thesis, I met with Marika McCann of the Professional Development team and got great feedback on the presentation (which I highly recommend for anyone considering doing 3MT this year). You can’t identify issues by just practicing alone – you need an outside person. Getting a variety of feedback is best, but you don’t want too much of it. Of course you’ll have contradictory feedback, but at some point you need to own the product. That circles back to the idea that having different mentors is great because you can get different ideas and approaches, but then it’s on you to synthesize and figure out what the best one for you is and not just blindly mash them all together.
What people at Brandeis have helped you on your journey of starting BUMP and understanding mentorship?
Michael Rosbash has been instrumental because he’s been an insightful and supportive mentor who has taught me countless things and continues to help me refine my scientific acumen and communication. Kate Abruzzi, another faculty member in the lab, and Shlesha Richhariya and Hannes Ludewig (both postdocs in the lab), have been such patient, generous, and supportive mentors who lead by example. I am so grateful to them and strive to emulate them every day. For BUMP specifically, shout-out to Anjali who’s a fabulous person to work with and brings a lot of professionalism and energy to every interaction! Marika McCann and Becky Prigge have also been instrumental in passing on their knowledge of potential issues and pitfalls that come with organizing events and programs like BUMP. They have been relentlessly supportive and it has been a pleasure working with them.
When you’re not working in the lab or on BUMP, what do you like to do?
I really enjoy hanging out with friends. I love to be outside and am a pretty active person. I’m from the Pacific Northwest, so any chance I have to be home and on the water is great. I’m a big fall fan and am very excited for fall foods, outfits, and activities but most importantly for this heat to go away so I can get back to wearing sweaters and sweats.
What advice do you have for other students exploring their passions?
I think it’s really important to be deliberate but not overthink things. You learn so much by doing things and honestly, within three to four hours of doing something, it’s pretty obvious if you have momentum or not. Be thoughtful about why you want to do something and what it brings you in terms of energy or experience and what you have to sacrifice to do it. As a graduate student, I feel my plate is always full, so you usually need to take something off your plate to add something new. You shouldn’t let a full plate stop you, but you should be thoughtful about what you are putting on it. Sometimes you need to go for it and understand that not everything works out but the experience and lessons that come from trying are worth it. Following your passions can bring you a new level of energy. BUMP has connected me with so many people I never would have connected with before and given me a creative outlet that’s helped my bench work. You don’t know how successful something might become until you try it.
One of the things I love about Brandeis is that it feels like you get to choose your own adventure. We’re given a rough template and certain requirements to meet, but after that it’s very open-ended. It could be easy to feel daunted by that, but it’s such an incredible opportunity to put your energy towards what you want. At the end of the day you’re responsible for your day-to-day activities, which is one of the coolest things about grad school. You get to control how you fill your plate, and I would really encourage people to take advantage of that.