Asking Questions and Finding Answers

Nancy Staub’s career has been a long series of asking and answering questions. And for the last four decades, believe it or not, a lot of those questions have revolved around salamanders.

Staub, a biology professor who studies the evolution of sexual dimorphism and monomorphism in salamanders, has worked at Gonzaga since 1991. In that time, she’s worked alongside hundreds of students, guiding them through research and providing them with a space to ask questions and find answers.

Staub is able to effectively serve students because she knows what it’s like to start in uncertainty and find your path through education. Having started as a math major at Brown University, Staub soon found that wasn’t quite the right fit. She transferred to Earlham College and graduated with a degree in biology but still spent many years trying to determine what exactly interested her most.

It wasn’t until graduate school at University of California at Berkeley that she ended up in an evolutionary biology lab with a very specific focus.

“The professor was a renowned evolutionary biologist who worked on salamanders,” recalls Staub, and if you couldn’t tell by now, that was the lab that started it all. The research engrained itself in Staub, dictating her own questions and investigations for the next several decades. Why?

It’s why researchers tend to stay in their field for so long, she says, “because the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know, and the more there is to figure out.”

By the time Staub accepted a job at Gonzaga, she was trying to figure out the right type of research projects to do with undergraduate students. Once again, the answer was salamanders.

Since then, the research has evolved to focus on salamander glands. According to Staub, because they are amphibians, they are covered in glands that keep their skin moist. Without these glands, they’d shrivel up like raisins. But they’re also used for communication.

“We don’t know a lot about how they communicate,” Staub says. “But we do know their typical means of communication is via chemical signals called pheromones.”

Basically, she explains, these pheromones (hormones secreted outside the body), are a form of communication humans aren’t very attuned to. Salamanders actually have a special part of their brain just to process pheromones and it’s attached to the nasal cavity.

Thanks to Gonzaga’s well-equipped lab, Staub and her students are able to look closely at the glands of a salamander by taking very thin sections of skin (after embedding the skin in wax) and studying the skin under a microscope.

The salamanders are pretty cool. But for Staub, what’s even cooler is getting to work with students as they discover the power of science and research.

Ethan MacVicar (’26), a biology major with a music minor, can attest to this. He says his time in Staub’s lab has been his first “real” experience with research, but he now considers it something he wants to pursue past graduation. “It’s been a really welcoming environment, a judgement-free zone,” he says. “We are always encouraged to ask even the most basic questions and she’s more than happy to answer the question, guide us or help us find the answer on our own.”

If you think it might be hard for Staub to remember each of her students, think again. “This is really going to date me,” she laughs and says, “One of the students I have in my lab now, I actually had his dad as a research student back in the day.”

“They’re both hard workers and good thinkers,” she continues, common qualities not only in her research students, but in all Gonzaga students.

Staub knows science as a discipline and, more specifically research, can be intimidating to students. The feeling of not knowing that’s often synonymous with science can make students feel “stupid,” and at the same time, the sheer volume of information out there can make them feel overwhelmed with knowledge.

Staub says it’s not something to fear, but a tool to use. “Science is really a way of thinking and asking questions,” she continues. “When someone says they don’t believe in science, I really have to scratch my head, because would they say they don’t believe in a hammer? That’s really the equivalent. Science is a tool, a hammer is a tool, whether you believe it or not. You use it for the purpose it was designed for, and you use science when you want to figure out how things work.”

She encourages her students to lean into the feelings of not knowing, even assigning a reading entitled, “The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research” by Martin A. Schwartz. “The truth is,” she says, “there is always more to know, and that means you are on the cutting edge of knowledge. You’re figuring out the next piece, contributing to the puzzle of what is known and filling in the pieces that aren’t known. And that is really exciting.”

Staub has been passing this nugget of wisdom on, teaching students to embrace “stupidity” and ask questions, for the past three decades. She recently played a part in Gonzaga’s latest commercial, showcasing the University's brand “Lead the Way.” Believe it or not, it wasn’t Staub’s first experience in front of the camera. She delivered a memorable performance in one of Gonzaga’s first commercials in 1999. If you look closely at the two videos, you’ll notice she’s wearing the same sweater in the latest video as she was nearly 30 years ago. Just a fun nod to Staub’s tenure and the decades she’s spent shaping Zags who go on to lead the way in the world.

“Our students are very intentional about changing the world and using their knowledge to make it a better place. And they all do it in a slightly different way,” she says.

She points to the COVID-19 vaccine as a recent example of research making a difference in real time – “Messenger RNA vaccines are great example of how all this basic research has been done already and when the time came, we used it to make a very quick and effective vaccine.”

So, she’ll continue to encourage her students to ask questions and look for answers.

“You never know,” she says,” when your research will help solve the next big problem.”