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August 24, 2020
About this episode:
Dr. Graciela Pineyro is a professor of pharmacology at the department of pharmacology and physiology of the University of Montreal. She has done extensive work on the molecular pharmacology of opioid receptors and is currently focusing on the pharmacology of cannabinoids in the context of pain. We chatted about how the current pandemic has affected her personally and professionally.
Dr. Graciela Pineyro on the web:
Podcast transcript:
Dr. Yamina Berchiche 0:00
Hi Graciela, how are you?
Dr. Graciela Pineyro 0:02
Fine, thanks.
Dr. Yamina Berchiche 0:04
Thank you for being back. So I wanted to reach back out and learn a little bit more about how the COVID situation has impacted you as a scientist and your team.
Dr. Graciela Pineyro 0:17
So well, it has had an impact on me personally because I am here in Canada and my husband is back in Uruguay. I was supposed to go back by the end of March but this did not happen and he probably will not be able to come here this summer. So we will hope for Christmas. That is on the personal side. On the scientific side, I like everyone else you know, I was caught a little bit by surprise maybe because of myself. I did not realize what was happening was. And so one day we were doing experiments and the next we had to close that we have to go back now and start from scratch. And that is one thing in and everyone has been going through that. I also think that this gave us a little time of recul or perspective. So I would like to take it in that positive sense. Priorities and what is it that I want to be sort of finishing first, second, and so on in my lab. So prioritizing is a good thing that happened with COVID.
It also gave me the possibility of learning new things, you know, finishing papers. So not everything is bad, and maybe we should be able to take this with us in the future. You know, you have to take time aside in order to think to learn and do better projects. So, yeah, there are good and bad things. So, now we are going back, we are deconfining next week very slowly. 20% of the research center will be deconfining that is at Sainte-Justine Hospital in Montreal. And we will see what happens. We are all prepared to take this civically with responsibility and also with a grain of salt knowing that we might not be able to, that we might have to be going back and forth for a while before everything goes back to normal. So that type of planning has to take place and that is a new thing. We're sort of thinking in advancing our projects in sort of blocks, closing some questions very tightly. So if we are sent back home at least we have something to work on, analysis, and all that so that's the way we are thinking.
Dr. Yamina Berchiche 3:02
Definitely and how were you communicating with your team? Were you finding it easy to talk to people during the confinement? Did you talk to them more?
Dr. Graciela Pineyro 3:11
What I found it like we communicate by Zoom. We have lab meetings by Zoom, we have personal meetings by Zoom. But one thing that I found is that Zoom democratizes the word you know, like people that usually do not speak so much in the lab meetings, were speaking a little bit more through Zoom. I don't know whether it is because they are at home and you know, they feel less threatened by the you know, the anxiety of speaking in person but I thought it opened much more the interaction this so that we are going to keep for a while anyway for lab meetings. So we are still keeping that and it was very positive for us. Yeah.
Dr. Yamina Berchiche 4:05
That is great. So I wish you all the best. A good deconfinement and hopefully it will be one time deconfinement and we can go back to normal. Thank you so much.
Dr. Graciela Pineyro 4:16
Okay, bye-bye bye thank you for having me bye-bye.
* This transcript has been minimally edited to facilitate reading.
