A love of horses and a lifetime of curiosity | equine scientist

Katrin Hinrichs
I came here and in two weeks I realized that was exactly where I belonged. It was amazing. People talked about ideas. They talked about what was known, what wasn't known. And I found that I had just a natural bent for research. 

Dave Weich
Bailey said, You should interview my mom.

This was before we had a name for the podcast, maybe even before we realized that the series of interviews we were discussing would wind up being a podcast. 

I’ve been working with Bailey for five years. Her sister has watched my pets a few times when I’ve gone out of town. But I’d only met their mom once, briefly, when she was here visiting from Pennsylvania.

So a part of me thought, Really? Out of all the people in the world, we should interview you mom? Yep. As usual, Bailey was right.

Long story short: Meet Katrin Hinrichs, Chair of the Department of Clinical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania’s New Bolton Center, and a 2022 inductee to the Equine Research Hall of Fame.

Katrin Hinrichs
I don't know what it is. People are just born really fascinated with something. And for me, it was animals. I had guinea pigs and snakes and spiders and tried to keep a crab alive once I'd brought back from the beach. I had tropical fish, we had rabbits and cats and dogs, and I begged for a horse every year until finally I got one.

Dave Weich
Did you grow up somewhere rural? Did you have a lot of space?

Katrin Hinrichs
No, I grew up in Orange County. Orange County, California. Fullerton.

Dave Weich
Siblings? Was this all you, driving the animal brigade?

Katrin Hinrichs
I have a brother and a sister older than me. My sister, I don't remember having any—she's the oldest—I don't remember her having any interest in animals. But my brother, really, the guinea pigs were his and mine. They were in a cage outside his window.

[1:01]
Dave Weich 
And that, I guess at a young age, this was a pursuit. Before it became a job, it was a...

Katrin Hinrichs
Yeah, no, it was a fascination, I could, you know, my delight was just doing anything with animals, watching them going out… I remember when I was in college and they wanted us to draw the mouth parts of a butterfly. And the people in my classes said, How do we know what a mouth part of a butterfly looks like? But I know what a mouth part of a butterfly looked like because I would, you know, try to get them on my fingers and I would see them.

You know, I just loved them, everything about them. And I studied them, I had books on everything from dinosaurs…I had all the horse books. I had the Encyclopedia of Horses. I knew all the horse breeds. I used to type, when we had a typewriter for a while, I used to type names of horses. I still have a thing that I typed when I was, I don't know, eight years old: Names of Horses. It was all fascinating to me.

Dave Weich
Describe to me what your job is. What do you do now?

[2:08]
Katrin Hinrichs
What do I do now? It's very sad. I'm so sorry, but I sit in front of this computer. Basically, this is what I do all day. Because right now, I'm the chair of a department of veterinary medicine. So instead of actually doing veterinary medicine myself, I now help to keep a department of 60 people, faculty members that do veterinary medicine, running.

Dave Weich
What was the impetus to make that shift and how long ago did you do it from the lab to that role?

Katrin Hinrichs
I did it about, I did it six years ago. I went to veterinary school in California, and then I practiced in California. And then I was unfulfilled in practice, so a colleague of mine was here at the University of Pennsylvania and said, “You would like it here. Apply for this residency.” A residency is a specialty training you do after you've already graduated from veterinary school. So it was a residency in reproduction, and I was pretty interested in reproduction. So I applied for the residency and I got it, and I came here. So I was here for six years, from 1982 to 1988. Then I went to Tufts University and then to Texas A&M University. 

But at Texas A&M University, this job opened here. My husband had retired a couple years before. He's from Pennsylvania. I met him here in Kennett Square. He grew up a mile from where I'm working right now. So he had friends back here. [4:00] We always used to come back here. I had friends still here at New Bolton Center. He had friends in the area. And we kind of had this idea that when we retired, we might move back out here. Well, he was retired and I wasn't ready to retire. And this position came up as the chair of New Bolton Center where I had done my training. And it was, I mean, it was ideal. It was something that was a progression of my career here to try to help others do what I did when I came here. You know, I was in practice, feeling unfulfilled, came here, and found out that this is exactly the place for me. And so I applied for the job and then got it. We moved out here in March 2020.

Dave Weich
Perfect.

Katrin Hinrichs 
Yeah, it was a great time to move, I'll tell you. So I was here for two weeks before they closed the whole university [5:00] down because of the pandemic. And we're a satellite campus, so we had to maneuver the whole campus through the pandemic.

Dave Weich
Okay, so how would you describe yourself? You know, just as an introduction, if someone's listening to this, you are now in that role. But more generally, you have honorary degrees, you have done a lot of work. If I were to meet you at a cocktail party, and I said, “What have you been doing with your life?” how would you describe it?

Katrin Hinrichs
That's an interesting question because it depends upon how truly interested the person you're talking to is. A lot of people, you start talking about what you've done and they just kind of glaze over. They wanted something fast, right? Or if you think it's somebody who might actually be interested, you can say, “I do research in horse assisted reproduction.” And then they might start asking questions. So it all depends upon what's going on at that cocktail party at that moment in time.

[6:08]
Dave Weich
Why horses? Do horses not reproduce enough to meet the demand for horses? What drives that work?

Katrin Hinrichs
Well, the great thing about horses, not only are they amazing animals, but they're worth money. Real money, hundreds of thousands of dollars for a really well-bred horse. Up to, people can pay a million dollars for a racehorse, but we don't have anything to do with racehorses because they won't allow any type of artificial insemination, even all the way to assisted reproduction.

But in other kinds of horses, they're worth a lot of money. And the mares are just as expensive as the stallions. Mares cost a lot of money. And if you breed a mare naturally, you have a chance at one foal per year. They might be 10, 12, 15 years old before they get to the Olympics. Then you've got an Olympic champion, and that mare is already on the downswing of her reproductive life. So you might be able to get a foal per year from her until she's 21 or something. Six, seven foals for all that. 

Or you could do assisted reproduction—and there's many different kinds of assisted reproduction, but basically what you're going to do is instead of having that mare get pregnant, the mare produces embryos which you transfer into a recipient mare that some people might call it a surrogate mare, but a recipient mare—and that mare carries the foal to term. And then you go back to the champion and get another embryo and transfer it into another recipient mare. [8:00] And that way you can get five or even 10 foals per year. It's not a lot, but it's 500% or 1000% better, right? That really is one of the main drivers. 

Another one is if you've got a really valuable stallion, you have really put a lot of money into this horse. You freeze semen from the stallion, but then he gets old and he's no longer fertile or then he dies. All you've got left is this, you know, collection of straws of frozen semen. Well, if you use that to inseminate mares just to get them pregnant, it's not going to last you very long. But if you use it for assisted reproduction, we can take one straw of semen and take the tiniest sliver of it off and have enough sperm to do in vitro fertilization with. 

Dave Weich
When you say assisted reproduction, why is that different than artificial insemination?

[9:01]
Katrin Hinrichs
Well, if you want, artificial insemination is a kind of assisted reproduction, too. But typically we use it in our field anyway to say it's something you do when you have an embryo in your hands. In general, that's what you would call assisted reproduction. 

So if we inseminate the mare and then flush an embryo out of her, that's assisted reproduction. We're going to transfer that embryo to a different mare and then we can breed the champion mare again. Or we can get unfertilized eggs from that mare, take them into our laboratory and actually fertilize them in the laboratory like they do for humans. This is what they do with humans. They get the unfertilized oocytes from the woman, take it to the laboratory, get the semen from the man and do fertilization in the laboratory.

So that's another method of assisted reproduction. We do that. That's what we do mostly in horses because instead of just getting one embryo at a time, which you would do if you inseminated the mare and flushed the embryo out, you can get 10 or 20 unfertilized oocytes from that mare at a given time. It gives you the possibility of five or seven embryos because you have inefficiencies all along the way.

Dave Weich
You were interested in animals. At some point, reproduction became your focus. So how did that happen and why was reproduction…was it more of a technical challenge?

Katrin Hinrichs
Well, as you said, first I was just interested in animals. When I was in grade school, I was going to be a veterinarian. I was going to cure rabies. That was my goal in grade school. And then I got a little more focused. When I was in eighth grade, I wrote away to UC Davis for their vet school catalog so I could take the right high school courses, so I could get the right undergraduate courses, so I could get into vet school. I was focused. 

Got into vet school. Obviously, was going to focus on the horse. At that point at UC Davis, you could, in your senior year, do just horses. So I was the only woman on the equine track at UC Davis in my year. Graduated from veterinary school. And I was very young. I graduated when I was 23. 

I didn't know how to get a job. I didn't know anything. I never actually worked for a veterinarian. I got in because of my grades, My grades and my horse experience. By then I'd had horses essentially since I was nine. And I had really good grades, and that got me in, but I didn't have any experience in actual veterinary practice. 

So I applied to a couple positions, two in fact. One never wrote me back. And the other one, I met them at the veterinary convention, the convention of equine practitioners, and they said, “We were looking for someone different” before they ever even talked to me. So then a guy came to the school, this is right before we graduated, and said he was looking for somebody to work in his practice, knew somebody I'd worked with before vet school who recommended me to them—probably on the basis of me not having a job at the time. I went to work for him in Northern California in a mixed animal practice. We didn't have a laboratory. It was 1978. If we wanted lab work done, we had to send it to San Francisco, so by the time we got any results back, the animal was either better or dead. It was meaningless. 

I practiced there for a year and I realized, I'm not using even 10 % of what I learned in vet school. And then I tried a couple other things because I'd wanted to be a veterinarian basically all my life, and here I was a veterinarian and it wasn't fulfilling to me. And I hated being on call. I was in a two-person practice. So I was on call half the time. I'd be home having dinner and then the phone would ring and all of a sudden, you know, I got a problem on my hands. And so I looked around, I did a year of dairy practice, I did a year of relief work, where I really wasn't hired by any one practice but just came in and spayed animals, spayed dogs and cats. I was just trying to figure out why I was unhappy. 

And that's when I got the letter from my, it was a person who had been an intern my last year at Davis and invited me to apply for the residency in reproduction. And so I applied, and they accepted me. And I came here and in two weeks I realized that was exactly where I belonged. It was amazing. [14:30] 

People talked about ideas, they talked about what was known, what wasn't known, and how we could approach this differently. And what did this mean? And we saw clinical cases in reproduction. We had journal clubs in reproduction. People were doing research in reproduction. And I found that I had just a natural bent for research. 

You ask a good question. And my mentor at the time was so supportive. I asked questions, everybody had the answers. And I had an idea, somebody had already done it. And I still remember writing in my journal at home the day I   an idea and somebody hadn't already done it. 

And so I just said, I want to look at this thing I saw. In fact, what I said to Bob was, “I'm looking at these endometrial biopsies, and I looked at them through the winter and, you know, the epithelium shrinks down low. And then now it's spring and the epithelium is tall again.” I said “What makes it do that?” And he said, “Right.” 

Which meant that you asked a question that nobody knows. So I decided to design a little study to treat mares with different hormones, take biopsies and see what the different hormones did to the biopsy. And I did it. I treated them. I took the biopsies. I got them on slides. I started looking at them and realized, Oops, forgot one thing. You have to be able to analyze results. So I didn't know how to say… I could see visually this was different from that, but I didn't know how to… So I still actually have those slides somewhere because I never was able to analyze them. So I never wrote the paper. I can tell you what I found though, but I can't prove it. 

Dave Weich
It set you off in a direction though. 


Katrin Hinrichs
It certainly did. And because my next question was, I saw that with just one hormone, the endometrium looks completely normal in a mare with no ovaries. So we had some mares with no ovaries for a different study. And those are the mares I used to treat with hormones. And I said, well, if her uterus looks entirely normal on this one hormone, progesterone, could I take this ovariectomized mare, put her on progesterone, and then transfer an embryo into her and she could stay pregnant? Without any ovaries? 

And I did it. It was the first embryo transfer I ever did. A colleague of mine here had started doing embryo transfer clinically. And so she had all the technique down, Pat Sertich, she had all the equipment and all the technique down. So I tried it on our teaching herd, and the first transfer I did into a mare with no ovaries, treated with progesterone, got pregnant, and that hooked me right there.

My mentor, Bob Kinney, said, really? Pregnant? He said, “Hmm. It's a good thing I didn't tell you that it was impossible because that's what I thought it was.” 

I got three out of four mares pregnant, and wrote it up and everybody thought it was the best thing. I thought it was the best thing. Nobody knew that. Nobody knew. Nobody knew you could do that. And I showed you could. It was great.

Dave Weich 
And how old were you at that time?

Katrin Hinrichs 
28. 28, 29.

Dave Weich
So, yeah, I mean, that seems like a remarkable discovery. And particularly for someone, you were right at the beginning of your career. Was that normal at the time? Is this a field where, you know, in sports, people are reaching their peak at 28. That's as good as you're ever going to be in many sports. Is that typical in your field, that someone at that age would be having these breakthroughs? And if so, is it really just kind of a result of not knowing any better and being like, I want to know!

Katrin Hinrichs [18:49]
Well, when somebody says, “What is the most important personality trait in someone that you think is going to succeed in your lab?” To me, it's curiosity. I have so many people that come to the lab and say, “I want to do research.” What does that even mean? That doesn't mean anything. What you need to do is say, “I want to come to the lab because I saw this thing and I want to figure out what's going on there.”
 
That’s who's going to succeed. Because you'll find some way to answer some question. You just have to ask questions. And if you're asking questions all  the time and somebody starts showing you how you can answer them, you just want to do that. 

It's like crossword puzzles. What do I do in my spare time? Crossword puzzles. Because I just love to solve questions.

Dave Weich 
So you feel like that's just you. That's your DNA, that's not your job. That is just your personality and your nature.

Katrin Hinrichs 
Well, and that's the thing, when you say “How does your job intersect with your life?” what could be better than doing what you want to do all the time? I just feel very, very fortunate that I found what I like to do, because I was in practice for four years. I know what it's like to be doing something you're trained to do but it is just not doing it for you.

Dave Weich
I hear that from people in all fields. I mean, I think if there's been a refrain so far in these conversations, it might be that “when I was trained for this field, I really did not understand what the actual day to day existence in the field was going to be like.” A lawyer told me, a planner. There is the academic study of the field and then there's the actual pursuit of it.

Katrin Hinrichs 
Yeah.
 
Dave Weich
Are the conversations that you have with students—and doesn't have to be today, it could be in the recent past—how are they different or maybe how are they the same in terms of their understanding and their expectations of the work from when you were in that position?

Katrin Hinrichs 

Well it feeds back on what I just said. 

I think I’ve been so fortunate because almost all day long I’m doing things that I think are fascinating and fun. Even now as an administrator. You could say, “You’re not doing that anymore,” but I am. I’m still on the side helping people with their research here and there and running small research projects in my lab through my lab research assistant. But most of the time I’m not. But I’m still solving problems. Running this department is like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. [21:48] Trying to get the money and the pieces and the demands of the students and the clients and the hospital and the research all to sit together in the best way possible to continue being New Bolton Center.

What is different about the students now? I think that the mantra of you have to protect yourself, you've got to have a work-life balance, put a barrier up so people don't ask you to do too much—I think it's framing it in a way that they can't look at work as something that's good. It frames work as bad. It frames what you're doing as something unpleasant that separates you from your life. Whereas I think you're going to be so much happier if you can find that thing that you would do even if they didn't pay you, right? So, I think framing it that way makes people less happy.

Dave Weich
There's so many factors involved. I mean, I agree with you, and I always try to remind myself that a lot of people don't necessarily have the options or, honestly, the clear passions—that’s a huge part of it. That's honestly the biggest hurdle, actually knowing what you would be excited to pursue and where that intersects with the idea of someone actually compensating you to do it.

Katrin Hinrichs
Yeah.

Well, I would never have imagined this as a career for myself. You know, my father was a PhD. He was an electrical engineer, and I always thought, oh my goodness, PhD is some high mighty thing I would never possibly be able to achieve or even put myself for.

But there it was and the possibility existed, and by George, you know, I got accepted for enrollment to a PhD and completed my PhD and did a very good job. You know, but that was not anything I would have thought about before I came here to do my residency. 

But the research was part of the residency. It never would have occurred to me that this is the solution. And that's what I tell people: If you're not happy doing what you're doing, just try something else, something that might sound good, and just keep doing it until you find what is good. And I can say that because I finally did find it, but I did try mixed animal practice, dairy practice, relief-work practice, and I remember applying for jobs after the relief work wasn't working out for me either and thinking, I don't even want this job. Why am I applying for it? But I had to make a living. 

Dave Weich
What do you think about assisted reproduction or cloning or any of these subjects now that maybe when you think back to the beginning of your career, you just didn't have the experience to process and understand or even form an opinion about?

Katrin Hinrichs [31:52]
Well, it depends upon if you're talking about assisted reproduction in humans or assisted reproduction in animals because like many veterinarians, I have a very, very firm line between human stuff and veterinary stuff. Even human medical things and veterinary medical things.

In my mind, even as an animal owner, I understand these are animals. They're not people. Now, one of the things that has evolved more and more in our society is people actually do understand that some people treat animals as if they were their children. They'll go broke supporting end of life treatment for their animals. That has never been me. 

But given that, when I think about human reproduction, it's very difficult for me to think about assisted reproduction. I think, how does somebody feel, know, that as an embryo, they were stored in liquid nitrogen?

I can't even wrap my head around that. But again, everyone [27:25] who's conceived naturally, how do you feel that once you were an oocyte wandering down your mother's fallopian tubes? You know, those are things we just can't conceive of. Little joke, little inside joke there.   

You know, we buy and sell animals. Animals are listed for sale. They go to auction. We slaughter them for meat. We keep them in pens so they can make eggs for us. Animals are a commodity. In some way, even people's pets. They pay thousands of dollars for these pets. They buy them. People breed them on purpose. They select what male to breed to what female. We don't do that in humans. That's unethical in and of itself, right?

So there is really different ethical guidelines, to me, as a scientist and a reproduction person, between humans and animals. 

In horses, there are ethical issues around what we do because to obtain the unfertilized eggs from a mare, you have to go through the same procedure that they do in women. Well, women agree to do this and undergo it voluntarily.

It does involve getting stuck with needles, right? So when we do that with mares, we give them drugs and they're so heavily sedated, hopefully they don't feel a thing. But I could see doing it on an infertile mare to try to get embryos. But right now the conversation is, Should a completely normal young fertile mare being bred to a completely fertile stallion undergo this procedure? Don't know. I don't know the answer to that. I know people are doing it because it's efficient and they get many more foals from really valuable mares that way, and it's very safe. But you know, it's something we're debating. So there's different ethical issues in each way. 

Cloning? I don't have a problem with cloning in animals. Absolutely, totally opposed to any possibility of cloning in people. But in animals, as I said, we buy them, we sell them. Cloning is not genetically engineering anything. It's simply taking the genes that were in this cell and putting them over there where you can make an embryo from them. And you're not altering the genes in any way.

It's like saying, you know, I have a seed from a corn plant. If I left it alone—maybe corn's not a good example because corn doesn't seed itself naturally. Oats. Here's an oat. If I left it alone, the oat seed would fall down into the ground below the oat plant, right? But I'm going to take this oat seed and I'm going to plant it in that ground over there and I'm going to fertilize it and water it so it grows. Is that unnatural? Yes. The oat seed wasn't going to go over there, and it wasn't going to get fertilized, and it wasn't going to get watered. Did I create an oat plant? No, no. I just allowed the seed to grow. Yeah, so to me that's what cloning is.

Dave Weich 
Do you have pets?

Katrin Hinrichs
Right now I only have a horse. I had dogs my entire life, but our last dog died a couple years before we moved from Texas. And this job here is so all encompassing that I don't have time for a dog. And my husband's not a dog person.

Dave Weich
Bailey—your daughter, one of them—believes that you are more absorbed in your work now since you took this job then you then she can ever remember you being. So my first question is Do you actually think that statement is true? And if so, why?

Katrin Hinrichs
Yes, it's probably true. And I can tell you exactly why, because when I was at Texas A&M, I was in my laboratory. And I had certain demands on me from my department chair and my department about my research productivity. 

But my inner, my inner motor to do that was always higher than what the external demands were. So I had no problem meeting external demands. It was just what I did. Now there, my other main duty—I didn't do clinical work there; my other main duty was teaching. I love to teach. I love to teach. 

It's funny, why does someone love to teach? I always think I'm making this so clear. This thing that it took me 20 years to find out, and these guys are going to understand it right away. You know what? They don't actually understand it right away, but that's how you delude yourself. You try so hard. But I did have an expectation for teaching. I was assigned these 25 hours of lecture and I did that.

But I was always able to easily produce more than what my department chair required of me. So it was easygoing because that's what I wanted to do. Here, it's all external demands. I have to, right now, I'm in the middle of our annual reviews. I have 60 faculty members. I need to go through their updated CV, their personal assessment, their teaching evaluations, their clinical performance evaluations, the mentoring committee report. Understand everything they've done in the last year, and then meet with each one for an hour to discuss where they are, what they need to do, what they're doing well. That's just one minor part of my job.

I have people all the time, you know, getting sick or retiring or wanting to leave or going on sabbatical or ⁓ other things. They want to have a fellow. They want to hire a fellow. They want to open a lectureship. They want to petition this donor to support ⁓ a trainee in this area. They're all so passionate. You know, where I work now is one of the top centers for equine veterinary medicine in the world. This is where I was able to find my career. It's life-changing for people because we're in an environment of people that are just as passionate as I am, but they're passionate not about reproduction, but about ultrasonography or about orthopedic surgery or about ophthalmology and you just got to get out of their way. And so everybody wants to do more, be more, do the best, be the best. And what I'm trying to do is help them do that. But all of these things come in: I have a report due to the dean, I've got a deans and chairs meeting I've got to absorb the agenda for, I have to drive into Philadelphia for this. I'm meeting a candidate for a chair position there.

These are external things. And I'm trying to do the best job I can. And then I still want to do my science. So, if I didn't run my lab or try to be a functional member of my section of reproductive studies—so I go to journal club and I try to support the residents; I have a resident doing a research project with me. If I didn't do those things, probably wouldn't be, it would be a full, full-time job.

Trying to do things that still I want to do on top of what is demanded of me makes it all encompassing. [36:13]

Dave Weich
Do you imagine doing this until you literally can't do it anymore? What's the horizon there?

Katrin Hinrichs
I'm getting sort of a glimmer of what might happen. You know, this is something that Bailey's been pushing on for a while.

When you ask me, know, do you enjoy this job? You know, I enjoy it when things are going well and don't enjoy it so much when things aren't going so well. But when I think about it, I feel like I'm finally using all of my faculties, you know, because I'm still able to do the science. 

We've got this really, really exciting piece of research that I've been working on since 2013, and tomorrow is the first day that we are going to do a trial on something that might close it down and finish it up if this works. This is kind of pie in the sky, but you don't know unless you try. 

So I'm still able to do that. So I'm still getting enough science in, but the rest of it, you know, I have to think on so many levels, so many levels from, know, can we spare $100 to buy a sink for the resident’s, you know, bathroom to, should we bring another faculty member in for hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and where's the money gonna come from? How much money should we put for this renovation of space?

I can't even explain to you how many different areas of my brain I utilize in one day. So when I think about it—I've thought about it—my attitude has changed in the last couple of years because it was really hard at first. And now the last couple of years, I'm actually enjoying it more, but it's actually a really hard time now because of the budgetary crunch that all academic institutions are under now.

But I guess I'm enjoying it because I'm fully engaged. I have a great person who's my counterpart in the hospital. I think about it sometimes. This job would not be, I probably wouldn't still be doing this if it wasn't for her because she is as passionate about what she does as I am, and we are able to discuss things without having to put the governor on. You know how you are…when I talk to this person, I'm going to have to kind of… no, we're, we're able to just interact. And we are both passionate about New Bolton Center and the success of our faculty. I kind of oversee the faculty and their research, and she oversees the hospital and the hospital environment and the clinical effort the faculty put in.

Dave Weich
You have daughters. [39:44] As they make a career for themselves and make a life for themselves more broadly, what does that look like to you? Obviously they have different passions and the world is very, very different than it was when you were starting out. What are your hopes for them and or advice for them? 

Katrin Hinrichs 
Well, I did hope that they would be passionate about what they do. Bailey loved film. She wanted… she was all about making movies, movies, watching movies. She convinced her classmates to get dressed up and come to our house and made movies back when you had to… it was just a tape recorder, a video tape recorder. But that's a tough, everybody says, and there's no doubt about it, that is a tough, tough profession to be in. And going to film school basically drained that out of her. She lost her passion during the time she was in film school. 

She's so artistic. She's so much more talented than I am. And I like that the job she's in now utilizes so many aspects of what she's talented at. And it's kind of like my husband. She's very much like my husband. 

He was a elementary school teacher before he retired. And he was able, he just brought everything in. Because he's also a talented artist and he's a musician. He's a comic basically. And his kids loved him because they had music in their classroom, and art, and he made jokes, and the class had a class song with all their names in it. And, you know, to be that talented at everything…

Sometimes it's difficult because you want to focus and take this thing and go with it. So I'm in awe of my children. My children have broadened my world. I was just playing music with some friends last night and played a song by Feist that I never would have heard if it wasn't for my kids' interest in music.

I just kind of stand back and watch them. They're living life differently than I did, but they enjoy it a lot. I think they're living life the way they see it.

Dave Weich
Is there anything that we haven't talked about, given who you are, your life experience, where you're sitting now that you just think is worth sharing or considering?

Katrin Hinrichs
I would just say try new things. I mean, the only reason I'm here in this position is, basically, because Dave retired before I did. Otherwise, I would have seen the position open here and thought, But it's department chair. I want to do research and reproduction. I don't want to be a department chair. But it was New Bolton Center.

To come back here in this job after having been a resident and PhD student here is, you know, mind boggling. And it's in the most beautiful place I ever lived: Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. Where my husband grew up and has friends from the time he was in grade school. So, you know, I'm glad I did it. I'm so glad I did it, but I wouldn't have had these pieces not fallen into place. 

And it's not just that I'm an enthusiast, you know, because I didn't actually like practice. If I was just an enthusiast, I would have said, this is the place for me, but it wasn't.
 
Dave Weich 
So I didn't know that your husband was an elementary school teacher. I mean, you're a PhD working in this incredibly specialized and highly technical area of science. And he's literally teaching, you know, I don't know…

Katrin Hinrichs
Third graders, yeah. [44:27]

Dave Weich
What were the conversations at home like? How did your work lives kind of interact in your actual, just in your marriage?

Katrin Hinrichs
Well, my husband is not interested in my job, nor are my children. They're interested in my interpretation of my job. Am I happy? Am I working hard? But the things I do come out of me, obviously, but that's not a topic of conversation. 

I met my husband playing music because I'm a musician too. The fact that he's smart and educated and funny, and a wonderfully-talented musician… I could just listen, I can still listen to him sing all night. And we have the same background and think the same things are funny. Those are the ways that...

In fact, my daughters and I interact, too, and my husband and I interact. The scientific part of my brain comes out more than they would want at home, but it's not engaged at home. That's why it's great to be here where it's engaged a lot, not just in my own laboratory, but when I have conversations with everybody here who keeps me, you know, I gotta keep on my toes to keep up with these guys.

Dave Weich
Thank you so much for taking the time. This has been great.

Katrin Hinrichs 
Sure, sure, thank you, that was fun.


Dave Weich
Work-Shaped Life is produced by the team at Sheepscot Creative. It's hosted by me, Dave Weich, edited by Bailey Cain and Michael Nipper, with production support from Benna Gottfried, Rosie Struve, Amelia Lukas and Kate Sokoloff. Next time on Work-Shaped Life:

Kimberly Howard
They were youth pastors. And so they volunteered every Sabbath with the young people. They were in their 20s, so they thought it was kind of fun. They took them on ski trips. They went backpacking and camping. And they would take me along, right? Because I was their baby, and I was like three or four years old. And then my sister came along, and we'd all go. But I saw them mentoring young people on a regular basis. And that continued even when they stopped being married and when they stopped being involved with the church.

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