Career Path for Esther Florsheim

Fast Facts:

• Number of years in school: 29
• Favorite class / subject: Immunology
• Hardest class / subject: Chemistry
• First Job: Hostel Receptionist
• Dream job as a kid: Explorer
• One word you would use to describe your current job: Dynamic

Though she doesn’t travel across the world as the heroes in her childhood books did, she is excited to be an explorer of a different kind of world – one that can be seen through a microscope.

Imagine holding a long pole topped with a cutting tool, clipping branches off super tall trees in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, ducking out of the way as branches crash down to the forest floor. Esther’s first science-related job was as a research assistant in a plant ecology laboratory. For this job, she would help to gather parts of trees like the leaves, flowers, and fruits. After collection, she would help to identify and prepare these specimens for display; no small task in one of the most biodiverse forests in the world.

Not a scientist overnight

It took a while to figure out that she wanted to be a biologist. “It’s not something that happens overnight”, she says. As a child growing up in Brazil, Esther read stories of adventurers that would travel to faraway places like Egypt. They would solve mysteries and act as detectives, which inspired her to be an explorer. Through the world of biology and being a scientist, Esther’s work might not be what she imagined when she was a child. It may not be filled with travel to far away places, but she is still an explorer of the tiny, microscopic world and is solving mysteries and discovering new things!

It is her spirit as an explorer that influenced her academic path. She applied to the University of São Paulo’s Biology undergraduate program in her home country, Brazil, -but she can’t recall why she chose biology other than it being easy for her in high school. Florsheim wasn’t sure what she wanted to do! But in school, she got to learn about many different topics in biology, slowly discovering her passion for learning about infectious diseases and immunology.

Florsheim joined an immunology lab while she was a freshman – a move that was completely by chance. She knew that she wanted to get some research experience and needed to find someone to work with. One afternoon she waited outside of the offices of some researchers she had heard about and ended up talking with the first person returning from lunch. After that conversation she ended up joining their lab. “It was completely random,” she says of the choice to work in the lab. She ended up working on immunology and allergy experiments, liking them so much that she continues to work on these topics as an assistant professor in the Biodesign Center for Health Through Microbiomes at ASU!

Esther points out that people tell nice stories about how careers get started but it doesn’t always work like that. “Sometimes you don’t know why you are doing something, but you just do it and see how it goes. Many times, it’s just by chance that you find the thing you are interested in”. Even so, she points out that people have plenty of agency, or control over what happens, by taking the initiative to go talk to people, attend events, and explore new things.