EP38: REBOUND with Researcher and Professor Dr. Ram Haddas

Dr. Ram Haddas' story is one of resilience and perseverance. He emphasizes the importance of taking action towards your dreams and never stopping pushing. Comfort zones can be dangerous, and it's essential to stay motivated and be responsible for your outcomes. Ram shares a personal story of taking on a new position during COVID and not having any data to publish. Instead of waiting for his lab to open, he contacted people with existing data and taught himself how to publish in areas he wasn't comfortable with, resulting in his first systematic review papers. Ram also highlights the value of seeking feedback and learning from failures. He shares a story of getting a lower grade in class and taking responsibility for his outcome by identifying areas of improvement and working on them. Despite facing numerous challenges, Ram is a testament to the fact that it is possible to rebound from difficult situations and come out stronger on the other side. He has experience in various roles, including as an athlete, soldier, entrepreneur, researcher, and now a professor, and has learned that failure is a crucial part of the process and can teach valuable lessons.

Transcript

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It's all about the rebound, right? We all gonna, like Michael Jordan said, I missed what, 6,000 shots, but I still won six championships, right? So we all gonna miss all these shots. We're gonna have all these bad days. We're gonna have some mood days, right? We're all gonna have things that happening not related to us, like this COVID, it lost in the family, if it's a financial crisis, you know, mortgage, you name it, but it all depend how do you look at it and how do you define it. So the best advice is don't give up and always take a full half of the glass. You know, there's no denying the fact that COVID-19 changed the world. The illness and the disease was bad enough, but it was almost overshadowed by the fear and the uncertainty that it brought. Without a doubt, there's literally no one I know who wasn't impacted by it in some way. Family members and loved ones were lost. Jobs dried up. Entire industries were changed almost overnight. But as bad as it was, it wasn't all bad. For Dr. Ramadas, a promising and productive career as a rock star academic got sidetracked when he was laid off from his job of several years in the midst of the lockdowns. While he was just hitting his stride with publications, grants, and awards, everything came to a sudden and sobering stop. He tried to take some time off to process and prepare, like he'd done in his early teen years after the loss of a trusted mentor, but it didn't stick. A week into his month off, he started researching MBA programs and before he knew it he was enrolled and studying in a whole new field. He finished in about a year and the process has made him not just a year older but a year wiser. He's now better equipped and ready for new challenges. He'd used the temporary setback of being laid off not the sulk and pout but to study and improve and it opened the door to a new and exciting position that he enjoys today at the University of Rochester. Check out my friend Dr. Ram Hadass in episode 38, Rebound. This week folks we have a wonderful guest, actually a former student who's gone on to do far more than the old professor here has ever done. Ram Hadass joins us today from, you are in Rochester, correct? That's correct. Awesome. So, Ram, we're going to get into your story, but definitely you have gone on to do great things since you left TTU-HSC. You got your PhD in Rehab Sciences. Quite a career already. You started out at the Texas Back Institute, spent some time with Medtronic, and now you're a professor of Biomedical Engineering and a Research Director at the University of Rochester. So Ram, welcome. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Awesome. So, we always start off kind of with a little bit of a softball. What did you want to be when you grew up? So I want to be like you, to be honest, over there. This is how I got started. Now I just kidding. You know, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm coming from a very low experience, high expectation. I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm also the first one in my family to, uh, graduate with a high degree of college. Also ex-military, we'll touch about it, but I wanna get the highest that I can. So if it's academia, which I decided to go back in the past year, trying to go, you know, a full professor positions, a dean level, a chair. I just wanna make impacts on people and help people. If it's my field, help deliver a better healthcare or just train the next generations like you're doing a great job with Texas Tech. Yeah. So you grew up in Israel and made your way to the U.S. So I guess start at the beginning for you wherever that was, time and or place. Yes. I would like to start my story actually with a little imaging exercise. So I want to take you and the audience and just make you think, go back to your early teenage lifehood, right? And think about the person that make the most impact of your life, the one that you care of all your basics needs. You know, the one that everything he say to you was worth, you know, like the most important things. And you know that you can go to sleep while he gonna take care of you. And I think about your life losing these persons while you're teenagers, right? You lost your leadership, you lost your guidance. I mean, you think that you're adults, you act like adults because you start, you know, dating girls, playing sports, thinking about scholarships, but you're still a kid in some ways. You're not making incomes, you didn't start college yet, you don't have a job. So think what would you do. So unfortunately, this is what happened to me when I was 16 years old. And I went through depression. I literally dropped everything on my calendar. I stopped going to school. I stopped practicing basketball. I started hanging out with the wrong people. I keep rejecting helps from families, from friends, from consoles, from schools. And I went to a wrong path basically. But after a year I realized this is not for me. I don't want to be hanging out with these people. I don't want to end up without a career. So I reached out to my family and close friend that actually didn't give up on me. And again, this is a good time to apologize again for all the troubles I did and all the friends I missed along these years. But like I said before, I lost my guidance. I lost my leader. And I thought that nobody can replace this person that took care of me all my life. My family and good friends and school councils, I mean, they recommend me to do everything just to finish high school diploma basically and join the Israeli military. Now the Israeli military, as an Israeli you have to serve for three years. However, they all recommend me to go with my family tradition and become a fighter and have a valuable service. And I have all the skills in the world not to become a fighter and do like a minor position like a HR or a chef or something else basically. But I choose to become a fighter for one reason, because I want to have a fresh start. Because I know that uniform is similar to the U.S. military. When you go to the military, they all get equal opportunity. They all show up on Sunday morning. They all buzz your hair on Sundays. We all look the same, get in the same shoes, same celery, same initial point, starting points. And that's what I want. So military boot camp was very struggling, very tough, a lot of punishments which I was obviously deserved, but it's put me straight in line. You know, it taught me a bunch of disciplines, but I was happy. I was happy that I was treating like everybody basically. And I had a fresh start to work with. So I served for three years. I was a fighter for two and a half years. And then since I was the biggest guy on the team, I was the guy that carried the automatic machine with a bunch of training and jumping. And this is one of the classes I really enjoyed during my PhDs. I like sports medicine injuries with you, Toby. So I actually suffered a couple of back injuries when I was actually in rehabilitation facilities for over three months, and I tried basically everything. Every hydrotherapy, every type of treatment, ice, colds, everything besides surgery. I've tried a lot to go back to my friends in the battle, basically, but I wasn't qualified. Physically, I wasn't qualified, but I didn't want to give up on a meaningful service. So what's happened, I become a Krav Maga instructor. For those unfamiliar, Krav Maga is an Israeli martial art developed for the Israel Defense Forces, or IDF. It shares commonalities and techniques with Aikido, Judo, Karate, Boxing, and Wrestling. and wrestling. Through his experiences in the Israeli military, Ram became proficient in the technique and actually began teaching the discipline later in his service career. While he didn't know it at the time, its focus on real-world situations and extreme efficiency would serve him well in the future in academic and professional pursuits. I'm back in the game, I love what I want, I'm good at it basically. So then I decided to go and pursue my undergrad degree, right? But what you can do when you have a very low GPA, right? I barely, like I said, I barely finished high school diploma, right? All the classes including English by the way, I barely passed English and now it's funny because now I'm a professor at North America at New York and a writer basically. But he's a good example. So what you can do? So since I was a Krav Maga, I was kind of used my connections and went to a sport medicines program in Israel concentrating biomechanics in posture which actually become my specialties these days. So I started my undergrad degrees, right? And one thing was very interesting. So as an Israeli soldier, 99% of the Israeli soldiers, after finishing the service, they're taking a year, a gap year basically. Because you know, you know how stressed the situation can be, right? Showing up every week basically, Sunday morning, they buzz your hair, you're doing the same thing. You know, I used to have 16-hour shifts, eight hours off, in eight hours, you're four hours, you're cleaning, four hours you sleep basically and then so and so on for like six, you know, 60 days rotation, nine days rotation. So usually most of the Israeli soldier, they'll just take a gap year. They're going, usually go to South America, to India, going, just taking a break and then regrouping together and then go and start studying undergrad. There's only 1% that actually not doing this gap year and I'm one of these 1%. Since I was feeling that I was missing this one year in high school basically, I think this was the most impactful moment, event in my life. Because since then, and actually this is true all of this today, I'm always feeling I'm behind. All right, and this is what I kind of felt after I finished in the military. I said, okay, I'm back on my feet, I got my motivation, I'm actually good at what I'm doing, I'm a combat engineer license, right, I know how to build, to break, I'm also a Krav Maga instructor, so I really know how to go to contact and how to severely injure people or protect myself. And I have motivations because actually I'm good. I feel like, okay, I'm good at what I'm doing. If I do what I like, I'm really good at it. So I started this program basically and I gave up on this gap here and I said, you know, I just go straight. So literally I finished my service and the next day I was in school with all my peers, including all my good friends, just come back with a long hair, you know, from Brazil, six months in Brazil or Thailand or India for like eight months, they're all like happy and relaxed and I'm like all ready to go. Which led me actually to be on the Dean list for the whole four years because I felt so behind so I knew, you know, I'm going to give up on this because I need to catch up on my, because I don't have a good GPA, high school diploma. Rom's acknowledgement here hits home with me. Some people call it FOMO, others simply motivation. But I relate to the sentiment that feeling behind, feeling othered, feeling somehow less than is a double edged sword. On one hand it can be powerful fuel on our path towards success, but on the other it can eat you alive with a sense of inadequacy and even shame. came. Rao managed to leverage it to success, but it can be a volatile mixture. So these four years, and then I figure out, okay, undergrad is kind of, I don't want to say easy, but it was kind of enjoyable, actually. What is next for me? So I met with professors, people like you, and I asked them, what do you recommend for me to do? And it was actually offer a master program in this school that I went. However, the master program was in physical education. It's not exactly the sport medicines and the injuries. And you know, growing up as an athlete, and a tactile athlete, basically, I always was interested about these injuries, how you treat it, how to prevent it, how to help people not to suffer from what I personally suffer from, from slow back pain or any other injuries, basically. So actually, I started my master degree in Israel. And after the first week, I went back to the dean, knock on his door, and I told him, hey, listen, this is not for me. I mean, I don't see myself as a master at physical education, there's no PhD over here right for me, so he told me one thing. He told me, if I was you, referring like, not married at the time, no kids, basically, I'll just take all my stuff and try to pursue your career in North America. So I said, okay, I dropped the master degree on the same day basically. And I started research, what I need to do to start getting my master degree over there in America. So the one thing you need to do as a foreign student is a SAT and GRE. And GRE is basically, if you're not familiar with this, is basically a test, is a high level test. Usually the English that they teach you over there is nothing related to what we're all talking today. It's like high level literature in English basically. I mean, even today when I publish a lot of papers, I'm barely using the vocabulary I learned in this GRE test. So how do you take a kid basically that fail, almost fail in English, right, because it was, I literally miss a year in high school, which was an important year. And coming from a foreign country that my first language is not English, basically, try to teach these persons to have a PhD in literature, basically. So, you know, what you can do, you just go and you take classes, right? You try to prepare like every game, right? We're both athletes or used to be an athlete. You know how to prepare. You do whatever you can. You control whatever you can control and you put some hard work and pray for the best results. So, I took a full month of just English private classes, you know, one-on-one group classes, morning, night. I remember I was playing basketball professionally back at the time, I was coaching a youth team, I was a personal trainer because I dropped school, I had more time to coach other people because I knew I need some funds to move to North America. And literally every second I had, I just studied English, like heavily English. And again, it's not the English that you and I are talking right now, it's like high level English. So back in the day, the GRE scores, you actually get the score right at the spot, with the scores going from 200, which is the lowest scores, all the way to 800. To get accepted to a grad school in the US, you just need a combined score of 1000. So basically, 200 in English and 800 in French give you like a thousand, then you're in for grad school. Okay. So, I took the first GRE test and then you can see the results right away. So, I'm opening my results. After a full month, I'm eating English, dreaming English, everything, you know, all sticky notes everywhere you want to go with like some weird word that I never use since then. Look on my scores and I see my English score 230 out of 800 and then my math score is like 660. And then, you know, this was a very breaking like frustrating point for me. I'm like, I don't believe it. For a whole month, I just studied English. Actually, I lived more than a month. Just studied English all day, all night. I mean, I have my dream. I mean, what I should do, you know. So, this is where I actually go back, kind of go back to my high school time, teenager time, I said, okay, do I really wanna give up on that and go back to this career? And I was working a lot of hours, you know, as a personal trainer and a basketball coach, and we know this career usually tend to end early on, and it's usually not a stable career as you become older. So then I said, you know, I never give up. Like, I didn't give up when I was one of the teenagers, or I never give up as athletes, basically, I'm not gonna give up over here. So I decided to retake the test and I did only two weeks, two extensive weeks basically, only English, I dropped all my work basically. I went literally to some place like an island basically and just literally 24 seven just studied the whole thing, just English and then dropped the math. I said you know what, I think the math I'm good, I just need to improve my English score by a couple points to be able to accept to school. We take the test after a month, and it's fine, the math part I just taught myself a day before to kind of review the materials. I went again and I'm sitting over there, I take the test and they ask me, do you want to see the results? And I'm like, yes. I'm looking on the results basically, and I'm looking at my English test, and the score didn't improve in a single point. Nothing, 230 again. And then I saw literally start tearing, but then I'm looking down and I see my math score was almost perfect, like 780. I'm like, yes, I got more than a thousand. That's what I need basically, right? Yes, my English sucks, but again, it's not a real English, but I got my thousand. At the same time, I was actively applying for school, for 25 schools. And this is why I actually was approached by Indiana University with a basketball team that I was part of. And it was a special sport medicines biomechanics program over there where I had had opportunity to work with the UAS track and field team, especially analyzing the high jumper and the long jumper, which was amazing experience. So coming to the UAS basically is a foreign, right? Somebody literally failed English in high school, officially failed English again in GRE twice basically, and I'm looking for scholarships because as you know, you know, schools in America is not cheap, especially for people coming from overseas. You have to pay like triple the tuition and everything is triple, it's not more. So I look for a scholarship, I started looking for scholarships, and actually I tried, this is why I actually got and pushed myself to work with the basketball team and get some money from there. And then my advisor, my academic advisors, he told me, you know what, there's actually a TA position, teaching assistant position just open up. But I don't think you can pass it with your English levels. You have to teach actually undergrad students but I see your GRE score is like very low and your GPA is very low. And I told him, you know what, just give me a chance, you know, just give me, let me try it. And if I fail, I fail, but at least I know that I didn't do good. So, we're living in America and it was probably about two weeks I was already in America. And I'll never forget this day. This is, I think, two weeks in America is the day I actually start dreaming in English. So if you start dreaming in English, you know, okay, you already like got the language. So I start, which, what the good part was you stop translating everything from your language to English, which usually with Hebrew is everything is right to left and you mix the verbs and the nouns basically. And then it literally happened like two nights before my PEA exams. I went over there. It was like three professors. The conversation was so fluent. And obviously, I was so in a good vibes and high because I kind of my dream come through. I was able from failing high school, starting a master degree in something that I want, concentrating in biomechanics basically, how much I gave and felt through the way. If it's like I say, if it's high school, if it's an undergrad, if it's the military that kind of make me get my motivation back together, if it's my undergrad, if it's a master degree that I started and didn't finish, because I actually dropped because I didn't want it, I wanted to go to something else. So I was so happy. I went to this test and I aced it basically. Those guys gave me 100 and I went the next day to my advisor and said, hey listen, I think I can teach. I can teach. He's like, what, how the hell you did it? And I just did it, I was so high motivated. So our paths crossed after you completed your master's degree at IU. You come to the Health Sciences Center to work on your PhD. And I got to know you in my class, and certainly as you started working on your research. But you'd overcome pretty serious back injury. You had basically wrapped up your athletic career at that point. Coaching had kind of been part of your life, and I don't think you were able to do much of that in Lubbock. So I'm just curious for those big parts of your life, whether that was serving in the military, whether that was being an athlete when those seasons ended, what was that like for you? Were you just onto the next thing? Or was there some measure of you that still kind of missed that part of who Rom was? Yeah. So, you know, I'm still actually, I'm still playing basketball these days here and my local gym, 30 plus leagues basically, enjoying it, try to play as much as I can. You cannot take my athlete's life out of me, right? If it's, yes, my physically ability going to decrease with the years, as we know, with injury come, aging, I mean, kids, you become more and more busy with your life career, but the disciplines, this is what I'm taking for everything, the hard working, the maintenance, the not giving up, keep having a moving target. You know it's better than I, right? You finish one season, you have all the summer off, you're trying to work on one skill to become better for the next year, right? We're trying to move from middle school level to high school level or from a JV team to the varsity team or to college, you get a college, you always need to add those extra skills. So this is the thing, what's interesting about it, as soon as I finish one season or one chapter in my life, basically, I'm doing quick summary, usually take a day, maybe a weekend off, basically, I'm already on to my next goal. And with the intention is what I need to do to become better, all right? And you know it is playing sports, right? You know, when we're getting older, we're always wishing, okay, I wish I knew all this stuff when I was in my 20s, my 50s, because now I'm playing so efficiently. Because right now, in my 40s, early 40s, I'm still beating kids in their 20s, only because I know how to play efficiently. So thinking about having this knowledge plus the physical ability. That old man skill, dude. Yeah. Those crafty old vets, like they know where to be and where to push and what to do. And yeah, you're absolutely right. If I'd have known that when I was 18 years old, it would have been a different game, man. Yeah. Yeah. And so combine this with the ability to dunk or to like, you know, play aggressive defense or like play 40 minutes full court press. This is, I'll be something else, but you know, this is life. And the only thing we can do is look at the health part of the class and kind of see how we can get better, right? So you come to Lubbock and complete your PhD and then go into this academic life and you've been in multiple places, almost like entrepreneurial, went on to get your MBA. So talk to me about some of the differences that you've seen in your different roles, whether that's athlete, soldier, businessman, or now academic and researcher. I wanna start with my first story. So I'm moving to, going really quick to my master degree. I'm about to graduate my master degree, working on my thesis work, and again, it was sport medicines, but I realized that, okay, I need to have more clinical experience in my life to be able to make the impacts I want to make. Like I said, help patients, I mean, work with clinicians, I mean, generate ideas to better treatment or personal treatment for patients, especially focusing on low back pain. Then I decide to shift to my PhD where you're a part of and go to a clinical program with a dissertation in science. Now you were one of my first classes over there basically. So I come with, again, more motivation than before because I'm like two years in America right now. I'm already passing all my English classes. Apparently, I can teach as well, right? And now, I'm actually in my clinical field because I was literally was told by clinician like you, like you in physical therapy and surgeons how to become my things. And then, I'm taking the first class with you. And I remember I didn't get the grade I wanted to get. If you honestly remember it, I come to you and it was actually a line of students outside your room. And I remember, I'll never forget it, all of them literally coming in and out and they keep asking you to bump the grade ups basically. And I was less in the line basically because I only have a different class, I let them pass and I came to you and I spent the most time and you just told me right away, I'm like, you came to me first thing, I cannot change all your grades, it's like you know all these policies and I'm like I'm not here to change my grade, I'm actually here to see what I did wrong, how to be better in my next classes. I mean, do you remember this conversation? I do, yeah. And since then, you helped me a lot to realize the system and how things working, and literally, I got A grades. After that, all my classes were A grades, including neuroscience, which was the hardest class in the program, all the advanced biomechanics, computer science classes I took, and during all of them, I was an A student. And this is just one example how I literally, I just came to seek for feedback, not for training Greg, is how to become better. So one thing I want all the audience, and I'll be thankful for you, is like, you know, this is okay to fail. I mean, the question is why do you think about it? And you know, sometimes when you go into high school or college, they try to put us in a grading system, right, A, B, C, or D, basically, which is not always valid to your real life. Not always if you're a B or C students, means that you're not a good, you cannot be a good profession, right? Or you're just not taking the right place, or not good at taking the classes, or just like me, this is not your first language. I remember like two questions, I actually knew the materials, and you told me, I know you know it, but I didn't read the questions correctly, because it was literally a language barrier over there basically. But I didn't complain, I said, okay, this is good, I need to know what to work on and thank you for that. So then actually after that, I just met with my advisor and I said, OK, I need to know, I need to get from my short-term goals what need to be done to graduate from this school. Now if you remember, I wasn't the first student on the PhD program to start with. I was number four or five, but I was the very first one to graduate from the PhD program at Texas Tech with less than three years. I literally knocked down all my classes. You saw me a lot in the first year. I took like 15, 16 credit per semester for four semesters back to back, finishing the whole things. You were part of my dissertation committee, so you saw how I was like living in the lab, day and night basically, collecting data, trying to push all this stuff and finishing the first one and finishing in less than three years. So then I just had to cover this and say thank you to you because you gave me a really good lesson basically and you helped me to see that okay, this is okay to temporarily fail as long as you see the long-term and the benefit. And as long as you learn the lesson, this is the most important thing. And we actually, we had a faculty development session just today and we were talking about how students have changed over the past 10 years. And certainly, and you know this as a professor, a lot of students are really just motivated by that grade. It's not so much about what I'm learning, it's I just want that A, that GPA, that's the most important thing. What do I need to do to get that grade? The thing I most respected about you was, yeah, you wanted to perform well, but you wanted to learn. You were interested in understand. I'll never forget, we had a brace rep come in from, I won't mention the name, but a reputable, well-known manufacturer of knee braces. And as a biomechanist, you're looking at this knee brace, manipulating it, like, this, the knee's not this simple. And I remember just how analytical you were in saying that there's more than just one plane in the knee, so this doesn't really do what they're saying it does. And as a professor, you know, sometimes it pains you to give someone the grade they earn when you know darn good and well they've learned more than a B or a C level. And someone else who didn't gets the A, but that's just kind of how it goes. So I will applaud you for sure for – part of me almost takes a little pride knowing that you did better in neuroscience than you did in my class. That's a hard one. Yeah, yeah. Awesome. That's part of the process. So let's get back to the questions that you had before. You've obviously been in a lot of spaces and completely different roles, whether that's as an athlete, whether that's as a soldier, whether that is more in the entrepreneurial space or business space of research, and now the more traditional academic role of teaching, scholarship, and service. So I guess, what did failure teach you along the way that has helped you in all those different roles? Yeah, so first of all, the first thing is that one thing that I can tell is that dreaming is not enough. You have to take some actions, you have to be active, you have to make action towards your dreams. I mean, yes, all of us want to be billionaires, right? But what do you do to make, to do that? Yes, all of us. I want, I always want to be helping clinicians. Okay, what I did from having a sport medicine degree all the way to working full time with top surgeons, physical therapists, and effective trainers. You need to make an action all the time. Which kind of leads me to the next thing. So, these terms like arriving is a lie and retirement is a lie. You never stop pushing, right? If you start, if you stop pushing, you slowly start dying. If you get to your comfort zone, I think this is the worst and most dangerous zone you can be, right? And this is where, you know, this is where all the athletes kind of start retiring. You start kind of getting some weights, getting some health issues. So I think you always need to stay kind of your tippy toes with some level of motivation. I have to be able to go full time the whole time, full speed the whole time, but if comfort zone is try not to be there too much. I'm actually right now, I can share with you a story. I start a new position right now and we're building a new land basically. And I actually, since COVID, I was actually sitting a year out. So I didn't have any data to publish right now, right? Because I cannot generate data. I cannot use the data from my old place. So what I'm doing right now, I actually go in contacting people with existing data and try to reteach myself how to publish in areas that I'm not so comfortable to publish with. And actually just the earliest weeks, I got my first systematic review papers came out and I never, I'm a biomechanist, I'm all about numbers and equations and you know, and planes and vectors and this is the first time really reading 2000 papers and try to summarize everything to like one paper to do everything. So this is what's quite an experience but again, this is not me to sit down and just look and wait for my lamp to be open or something to serve me some stuff. You need to be active, you need to go and approach and do something to make your dream come true. And then on top of that, I think that something that really I learned a lot is just don't be afraid to be responsible for your outcomes, for the actions, your outcomes. I got a lower grade in class. I remember it was a little lower. It was like B plus or something or A minus, something like that. But for me, it's considered to be low as a PhD student. But again, I took it for responsibility. I said, OK, you know, in these two questions, actually it was a language barrier. So I literally took and worked on that. In these two, actually I didn't study correctly because I had decided maybe in a different way. I mean, and then this was in this table, maybe I need to look over more of these tables or the readings. So everything just try to, don't blame anybody. I mean, you be responsible of your own outcome, basically. You can always can blame the weather, the politicians, the war, you know, there's hundreds of reasons I can mention right now, you know, especially when playing sports, you can, you know, the floor is too slippery. I mean, he was pushing you, finally you're the referee, but, but, but stop, stop ignoring the big one. Yeah. I, I saw a quote, maybe a stat this week, Ezekiel Elliott got released by the Cowboys and they showed his productivity before he got this huge contract versus after. And it's just night and day, his productivity and looking at, you mentioned like once you feel like in your mind, you've arrived, man, it's over like game over, you've got to stay hungry. You've got to stay committed to getting better. And obviously I've seen you just continue to have this upward trajectory everywhere you've been. You've just been so productive and have really made an expert out of yourself in a really short order. How many peer review publications are you sitting on now? Just as a PI, 60 basically, 60. That's incredible. But it's going to be a lot. It took me some time. So this is, you know, it wasn't easy. You were actually on my first five publication. You were actually on them basically. You helped me a lot, so thank you, thank you for that. But it's literally a learning process. But again, just for the audience, I know that not all of you had this traumatic experience or lost your guidance or lost your parents when you were teenagers, but all of us had a failure. I mean, it all depends on how do you decide what action you're taking after the failures, right? Back in the times, I actually apparently I didn't take the right action. I, I truly choose to sit out for a year basically, the most important year for development, right? Just before college or before the military basically. But, but this is it. But I think this what's happening is I actually keep motivating and drive, giving the drive to never, never stop trying, never stop being inspiring. You know how many failures I got. You were part of my first publication. It took me years to get my first papers out. But then after that, you know, it was basically a storm of all. Man, it's hard enough to publish. The thought of me going to another country and publishing in a language that's not my native language just blows me away. Like the resilience and it's hard enough to do it in your native language, but to do it in someone else's as your second or multiple, man, that's even that much more impressive. Yeah, but think about it, this is just a skill. Don't forget, it's nothing special, just a skill, right? And like every skill, you can develop it. It all depends on the amount of time you're putting of it. I tried to master it because I knew that publication and academic will be my career and my passion. So this is why I try and spend so much money and times and efforts and took so many failures. And you know, it's publishing your papers, right? I mean, you get, I got 60 papers accepted, right? I got over 200 rejections of these papers, basically. But you cannot give up. You just take it, you change it, you take it to different journals, you take it back, you change it. I mean, you're part of the process and you know how these things work. So typically, for those not familiar, a PhD prepares you for a pretty limited number of jobs formally. I mean, it certainly represents the fact that you've got resilience, you can stick to a long lengthy project and stick to deadlines, but it prepares you typically for academia. It's almost like a pyramid scheme. We as PhDs cultivate you to become a PhD so that you can be a professor, but you didn't go that route right away. And so you've had a few spots since then and you've now ended up as a professor. But talk to me about Texas Back Institute, Medtronic, and how did you know when it was time to move on versus maybe, you know, opportunities that came along that you passed on? Great question. So I'm finishing my PhD at Texas State Health Sciences Center. And then I started applying for jobs like you're all teaching us. I obviously applied for jobs. So the most common things in basic science fields, you usually go for post-docs before you can be a professor. And this time is usually is about two to three, four, sometimes five years that you kind of getting all your papers get published. You're kind of getting all this record, getting your CV thicker. You're also learning from a different professor at the different aspect and kind of more, become more specialized in your field. And then when you feel mature enough, you go out and somebody give you the chance. So I applied for a bunch of these postdocs position. I also applying for assistant professor positions. And then I gave one guest lectures for somebody that actually was a surgeon in the audience about my dis-rotation. And you were part of it and actually your name was on the title and everything. And he just invited me, he said, wow, your thing is amazing. I mean, I'm part of a private spine hospitals, basically, contain 21 spine and neurosurgeons, basically. They call myself private academia because they're private hospitals, but they're very academically, they get a lot of publication, a lot of award, nice, research foundations. And they said, why will you come and give us a talk and let the guy decide what you think? Kind of like a shark tank thing. And I'm like, OK, I already gave all these talks so many times since my disrotation defense with you. I don't mind to do it. I come over there. I show them it was nothing related to spine surgery. And my disrotation for the audience, it was about low back pain, right, in recreational athletes, so people like most of us that go to the gym and get some low back pain and what we can do after that or the next day in order to help them to mitigate this low back pain. So I just showed you stuff, I put a bunch of like EMG sensors measuring neuromuscular activity, a bunch of kinematics, a bunch of cool videos of skeleton landing, obviously I just came out of academia and I showed them a bunch of cool graphs, MATLAB codes, and they're amazed. I finished his things and I got an offer from there the next day to join the team as a director position. So then I'm sitting over there, you know, with their offers when I couple of other offers from academia for a postdoc position and paying very low, I have to say. So basically, you finish your PhD, you say, okay, I'm ready to start paying my debt. But the postdocs is actually paying you, some places paying lower than your PhD. And I'm like, okay, what I should do? So then I have this debate basically, what I should do, because the postdocs you kind of keep growing basically. You still have a mentor and somebody to guide you and you still can use this time to publish. And usually they can give you more tools to publish faster. On the other hand, I was feeling and I still have the confidence and the motivations to go and be independent. So I actually took the second position and decided I know that I will not have academic mentors, right? I know I'm going to be the only engineering in the room and have nobody consulting with even with the small questions, but I like, I really like the challenge and I really like the opportunity because I felt that over there I can make way more impact than back at the time in academia. I'm writing in a different position right now in academia, but back in the time with not enough publication, not enough experience, I couldn't, I didn't feel I could do enough impact over there basically. And I also was eager like to go and work with actually patients and see patients. And since then I saw thousands of patients with, it's funny how I started with low back pain and right now I'm specializing in deformity patients, people citing my papers and cervical myelopathy and fell back syndromes and all these events are a failure. So I choose the second route and I won't lie to you, the first year was a hell. I mean, I still remember myself calling my advisor at Texas Tech University asking about simple question, hey, what do you think about this? What do you think about that? And at some point I realized why I keep calling my, you know, my old advisor basically, I have to take a decision. So as you can imagine, I did a lot of mistakes along the way, which ended up to be the best lessons. And it took me like two, almost two years to get on my feet. And after two and a half years, where literally the clock was counting down, and I got the threat from all the insurance, they don't start bringing money, we may need to have to cut your position. Then literally the next week, I got my first grant, which was nothing, it was $25,000, but it was one of the lead cervical spine society. So, again, 25 grants is nothing, basically, but this has opened the gate. And right after that, I got three grants, 200 plus each of them, basically. My team, it was literally just by myself. For the first two years, I'm the one that built the lab together, physically built the lab together. Some of the videos on YouTube, you can see that. I'm the one that's calling patients to schedule them. I'm the one that's literally putting the sensors on the patients, the one that's processing the data, making the report, physically upload the reports from my lab to the patient's chart, and then scheduling with the patients the next follow-up, and then still attending with surgeons' meetings, basically, making all the reports for the surgeons, writing a published paper, et cetera. But then after the second year, boom, my team, I grew up and my team become seven. And again, I'm private institute, seven people training after me, a full waiting list for my internship program I developed with a local university, whether UT or Texas Women's University or UT Southwest, just waiting in line to come and do their internship with us. So then getting those grants, everything went basically in a nice path, nice trajectory, right? I get all these awards, basically star winning, best papers, all these conferences, all my talks become podiums. I was selected to be 20 on the 40 in the biggest finance society, got these awards. I was actually a distinguished alumni from Texas Tech also in 2018. I'm getting more and more grants, and then I'm thinking, okay, I'm on the right trajectory. I mean, nobody can stop me. Then COVID hits, right? And obviously I wasn't the only one to get affected. I wasn't the first one, but I got laid off. Ron finds himself on the fast track to success with publications, grants, conference presentations, and awards. But like many of us, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, his job evaporated in the midst of the lockdowns. He could have pouted and sulked. He could have blamed and gotten angry. Instead, he got to work on a new path. So what do you do? I got seven years in with a great facility. It's really, I had a bunch of mistakes at the beginning, but grew up a lot, you know, have a big team, bunch of supports, get my salary support, me and my team for the next couple of years, got publication. I was back in the day, I was averaging over 10 publications per year as a PI. I was building this oil machine that nobody can stop. But sometimes God or other people think different and we have to cut some sources. So I was forced to be home for over a year. So then I'm, but now I'm in different positions. I'm not the same freshly graduate PhD with like two publications. Now I got over like 40 back in the days publications. I do have all the grants and money I can bring with me. I also have all this knowledge. And so I actually took the time and literally for a month, I say, you know what, for a full month, first time in my life since my high school, remember, because I skipped this gap year and I never took my thing. I said, you know what? I'm not gonna do nothing for a month, basically. It didn't work out well. After a week, I got back, you know, to do my stuff. After a week, like, you know, talking with people and, you know, colleagues, I decided, you know what? Where I wanna be in myself. So I always wanted to be in an executive position. And I always kind of knew I'm kind of good in business orientation. So I said, you know what? I'm gonna use this time because I know how long this COVID is going to take. I'm going to use these times and go back to school to pursue my MBA degree. I'm going to jump right in here and return a thank you that Ram provided to me earlier in this episode. You know, it's uncommon for pivotal moments in our lives to be recorded and therefore are reviewed whenever we want to hear them. However, that moment, that phrase, and that idea that Ram just shared just now, that he was going to use COVID as an opportunity to level up his skills and pursue an MBA, was a light bulb moment for me. At the start of this podcasting thing, way back in December 2022, I'd set a goal of releasing 150 episodes this year. Now I'm going to fall short of that, but that's okay. I'm still out here grinding. But one of the reasons my episode release rate has dropped since that time this particular episode was recorded is that I found Ram's idea so fascinating. I decided he was right. I want to become a better leader. I want to grow as an administrator. And so I researched a number of programs, picked the one I thought best fit my needs, and I applied. I got accepted. I enrolled. Next week I expect to complete my first course, and I'm already enrolled for summer two and for the fall. The whole thing is helping me become a better teacher. It's equipped me with new ideas and skills already, and I feel like it's modeling the growth mindset that I've been yapping about to my family and to my students all these years. In short, thus far, the whole thing has been tremendous, and I owe it all to Ram for planting that seed. Thank you, my friend. And this is something I recommend to everybody asking me. Like don't do your MBA degree right after you finish your undergrad or right after you finish your master's degree. Usually I recommend to go out in the field, get experience, go do coaching, go do managing, go do whatever you're doing, basically. Get some real-life experience, and then when you go sitting in the MBA, you actually know what you want out of the MBA. Because I was sitting with all these kids in the MBA, I mean no offense, I was a kid like that back in the days. They have no idea what they're gonna do the next day basically. I already, half a day from my MBA I got an offer from University of Rochester Medical Center where I'm at right now for a high level executive position plus a professor position in the Department of Orthopedics and Biomedical Engineering. So I kind of knew and this kind of helped me to choose the right classes and choose the right skills what to do. And right now, this is what gives me the tools that I'm sitting in all these like insurance meetings and finance meetings. I'm not a stranger. So I'm actually understanding what I want to do while I'm still wearing the hat of the academic head, the research head, that I know kind of how to use this to help me to grow my career. So I think this is another example how I was in a trajectory that nobody can stop me and somebody did nothing relate to me. I think I can start blaming others or try to whatever all the hate that we had back in the days or just see what I can do. This is the situation right now. I'm here but I do have a family that supports but at the same time I will not take any positions. So jobs that I applied six years ago, I'm probably overqualified right now. And again, I'm either things I want to be there or they're going to pay me what I want to get there. But it ended up to be, I was almost over a year. So as you know, we were the PhD, my MBA, I literally knock it down within a year. Thanks to COVID, everything was online. So I never left my office, my home basically. I never actually pick up my student ID. I don't even need it. I really have a passion for speaking and for leading and for taking a more active role as an administrator. I've been kind of kicking around, okay, I can either just sit here and wait and I can be a year older a year from now and have one more year of experience, but in reality, I'm just a year older, but I really want to be a year better. And so you really took that opportunity to get a year better and you added a credential to your name. You added to your skillset. There aren't a lot of PhDs in the world. There aren't a lot of MBAs in the world. There are even fewer PhD MBAs in the world. So that's a really unique and marketable skillset. So I'm gonna have to talk to you offline about your program. I get enrolled. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And on top of that, instead of this, the gap year, because the MBA wasn't a full time, as you know, it's only like three classes, which, uh, after a PhD, three classes, it's less, that's hard. So I actually use the time and, you know, I was just before I got laid off, I was in a transition to like publishing 10 papers a year. So I said, okay, I have the skills of writing, right? I have the passion, I have the knowledge what I can do with it. So I start opening, volunteering. I'm very active in the North American Spine Society, the biggest spine society in the world actually. I start providing some educational content and create podcast and educational podcast and webinars basically for patients and for clinician basically. And I put I think about a dozen of them, basically, talking about sitting is the new smoking. I mean, TexNex, I have a bunch of this stuff. So I try to kind of dumb down all my high-level publication to kind of make it more accessible to the average person and to the average clinician that can use it, basically. So I try to be active with that. This is where I actually took the time and invest a lot of time of my social media parents. I don't have LinkedIn, because I'm ex-military, I can go to the other ones, but I put a lot of stuff and you know it. You can see a bunch of my stuff, but actually I'm start talking out to more crowds and more audience right now. My audience right now are not just a PhD scientist and biomechanist. I mean, I have a lot of like different level, different people from different level, different type of the region, different type of the awards basically that interesting in what I'm publishing over there. So yes, I took the times and I enjoy it. And the best thing is at this level, I got some feedbacks. You know, if you're talking about social media sports, people started getting contact me. And then when you get to this thing, it's actually, you've been doing something good. People ask you some questions, people are interested in your stuff, people try to come and work with you. People are actually willing to move from Texas with me to upstate New York. Okay, so you know you're doing something good and you're on the right path. You take the knowledge and the experience from the academic wars and the hostile wars and how to try to create a product out of it basically, including the marketing, including working with marketing people, you know, seeing this people building a P&L, which is basically mean to show the executive team that you're gonna spend and you're gonna make a return to your spend, ROI, all these numbers, which led me to become a judge in a bunch of hackathons. Right now, I think I did like, what, five or six of them already, judging hackathons and giving students and next generations kind of a critique about the products, which I'm really enjoying this stuff. I've been involved in some of the innovation space over at Texas Tech. There's an innovation hub. I don't believe it was here when you were here. It's relatively new, but the speed of higher education, especially at a state university, is just painfully slow. And then the innovation space in private industry is if we're not profiting, then we're not feeding our families. So there's a lot riding on the pace of innovation. And so I find myself trying to straddle those two as well. And sometimes it can lead to some frustration because it either feels like it's so fast I can't keep up or it's so slow that nothing's ever changing. Yeah, and you're absolutely right. I'm aware for both prongs and cones of academia. We know the IRB, regardless where you are, it's a pain in the neck. It's going to take forever. While if you are just a startup company, like you say, you're living by the dime. If you don't have outcomes in the same day or the same weeks, you won't have the next round of investors basically or your board meeting is going to knock you off basically. But academia changed, I can tell you. I mean I know that this academia started to become more software about it. I know at least in my positions they were actually aware of the fact that I have my own consulting deal and actually supporting it and allow me to use my resources to do this consulting. On top of that I'm building the team I'm building right now, is more experienced, I'm actually trying to build a more dynamic startup's environment basically. We are in a university setting, but however, kind of distinguish ourselves, but we like, you know, high-paced, dynamic, very active, talented people, group of people that come in and try to provide these services, and I think this is where the war is going right now, you have to get outcomes right away. Otherwise, you're out of the game, basically. And academia started to realize that. Yep. Well, I want to kind of wrap us up here. What advice would you give young Ram, 16 years old, experiencing loss? I mean, you find yourself across an ocean, teaching and researching in a different language, and you were having trouble passing an English class. So what advice would you give younger you? Wow, this is a very tough question. The advice, like I said, is don't stop dreaming. I mean, we all have failures, basically. We all have things, things that we don't like that happen to us. We can always blame other people, but don't stop dreaming and make sure you're doing some action toward these things. So don't stop dreaming and be a forever student. That's what I would do. And this is I think what I am right now. I'm like I said, I just turned 40 and I'm still, I just finished my MBA. It's literally officially done. Like I just did my taxes last week and literally I found myself being a student. But again, even like now when I'm a faculty and a mentor, extracurriculars, I'm still every day learn some stuff. So the advice is like, don't never give up. I mean, life are not easy. They won't be easy. I believe if we won't have this crisis, we're going to have a different crisis. I believe our audience, if they didn't lose their guardians, they probably have a different crisis. But don't give up. Things happen. I mean, nothing goes smooth in these lives. You know the learning curve, right, for things. Lives are passed. There's a bunch of obstacles along the way. And don't let the system judge you, basically, I mean, or decide what is a failure. You yourself decide what is a failure, what is not. I mean, being an A student or a B student doesn't mean you're not going to be successful in your life. Not graduating high schools or failing an English class doesn't mean you cannot be a professor in one of the top universities in New York, basically. So, don't give up on that. I think the best thing is, and it's kind of funny because I came from basketball, but learn how to rebound from stuff, basically. I love it. It's all about the rebound, right? We all gonna, like Michael Jordan said, I missed, what, 6,000 shots, but I still won six championships, right? So we're all gonna miss all these shots. We're gonna have all these bad days. We're gonna have some mood days, right? We're all gonna have things that happening not related to us, like this COVID, if it's loss in the family, if it's a financial crisis, you know, mortgage, you name it. But it all depends how do you look at it and how do you define a failure. So the best advice is don't give up and always look in the full half of the glass. Now if I would change anything, probably not because if I change anything in my life I probably won't get to what I'm here right now. That's right. The reason I'm here right now is because I went under all these failures basically which helped me develop this elephant skin to become who I am right now. No, that's a fantastic answer. Next to last one. I'm a big fan of music and I love the emotions that it can convey. What song would you pick as the representation or the soundtrack of your life? Or maybe what jam would you play before your team took the floor that you were leading? Wow, wow. So I'm the opposite. I'm not a musical guy. I like a techno music, basically. So I just like the high beat. But I would say, and it's kind of selling my ass. So, Idol of the Tiger, Rocky Balboa, basically climbing those stairs in Philadelphia, especially right now when I'm living a couple hours from Philadelphia, when he went to honor so many fellers with Andrean or all these losses and how many Rocky movies, series they have over there. And he fell so much and he got literally hit and he got physical pain, mental pain, and he never gave up. He keep climbing those stairs. So this music's Eye of the Tiger, and when he finishing and with his arms up at the end of these stairs, this is something that I usually, I used to listen before games, and this is why I'm giving to my kids. But basically everything high positive, high pace, something that kind of motivate you because you can do things slow, but when you're high motivated, you need to get something faster and be ready to knock it down basically. Last question, how could listeners connect? How could they get involved or read or connect with your work? LinkedIn is the best way, is the most productive way. You got also my email over there, my work email. Over there, the product can get this email from you or the LinkedIn, you probably can put it in the post. And it's the best way, just shoot me a message through LinkedIn. I mean, the same way we connected, I'm usually very responsive about that. Also, Research Gate, if you are a scientist and you're interested specifically about science, this is a social platform that you can share, easily share just papers, abstracts, all this stuff or idea. But LinkedIn, I mean, I went through a lot and I want to make an impact. So if I can help anybody, I mean, I'll be more than happy, especially if they're coming from your circle, from our circle, or we can see the hope. That's awesome. Well, I'll be connecting because I got questions about that MBA and we need to collab on another article together. Yeah, absolutely. We're overdue. Yeah, absolutely. All right, Ram, I really appreciate your time. Dr. Ram Hadass, PhD, MBA. He is currently assistant professor of biomedical engineering and the research director at the University of Rochester and a world-renowned expert in the spine and number one in Google for cone of economy. Which is- Yeah, I guess. Hey. One thing, one thing, yeah. You're the first number one I've had on here, so that's awesome. Well, thanks for joining us, Ram. It's been a real treat. Thank you for having me. For more info on today's episode be sure to hit the undone podcast.com website. Simply go to undonepodcast.com slash EP38 to see the notes, links, and images related to today's guest Ram Hadassah. I'll be adding more and more to the site in the coming months so check it out every so often. I know there are great stories out there to be told and I'm always on the lookout so if you or someone you know has a story that we can all be inspired by, tell me about it. Surf on over to undonepodcast.com, click that connect tab in the top menu, and drop me a line. Coming up, educator, researcher, and former collegiate athlete, Quincy Conley, will share his tale of working his way up through corporate America, and eventually over into higher ed. I've also got legendary University of Washington strength coach and founder of the popular Iron Game Chalk Talk podcast, Ron McKefree, coming as well as former NBA star and SIU Saluki standout Chris Carr. So stay tuned. This and more coming up on Becoming Undone is a Nitro-Hype creative production written and produced by me, Toby Brooks. If you or someone you know has a story of resilience and victory to share for Becoming Undone, contact me at undonepodcast.com. Follow the show on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn at becomingundonepod. And follow me at Toby J Brooks. Listen, subscribe and leave us a review on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts. Till next time everybody, keep getting better. Thanks for watching!