Coach Kucera balances his love for coaching hockey with his love for medical research. | Chelsea Michaelson/The Minaret
Dr. Steve Kucera is the head coach of the UT club ice hockey team. During the day, he is an associate professor of biology and the school’s Chemical Environmental Health & Safety Coordinator. The two are linked though. After all, if it weren’t for his faculty position here at UT, Kucera might still be back in Albuquerque, New Mexico—where he worked on both his Master’s and PhD degrees at University of New Mexico-Albuquerque— and never would have been a part of the UT club ice hockey team.
Kucera’s story begins in Binghamton, New York. He was the first-born child to his father, a physician, and his mother, a homemaker. In fact, one of Kucera’s first hockey memories was courtesy of his father’s career. One of his father’s good friends was the team physician for Binghamton’s American Hockey League team. When he was on-call or out of town, he would ask Kucera’s father to fill in. Of course, he would bring his son to the games with him, to enjoy the seats right behind the goal.
“How cool is it when you’re a kid; you’re watching real bruiser hockey and you hear over the PA system ‘Dr. Kucera please report to the locker room. Dr. Kucera please report to the locker room,’” the younger Dr. Kucera said.
Living in upstate New York, obviously Kucera would pick up hockey. He began skating and playing at around 10 years old. While his first dreams may have revolved around a future in hockey, by high school, Kucera was set on becoming a geologist. Then, he met that teacher who would change his life. “I had that teacher in 10th grade. He asked me what I wanted to do. I said ‘I’m going to be a geologist’ and he said ‘No. You’re going to be a biologist,’” Kucera said.
It turns out his 10th grade teacher was right about his career path. In 11th and 12th grades, Kucera would assist in that teacher’s classroom with labs and tutored students. Meanwhile, Kucera’s dreams of pursuing college hockey were dashed when an opposing player broke his arm in three places during a game. His mom took him to the hospital, where his dad came down and upon seeing Kucera’s deformed arm, proclaimed “You’re never playing hockey again in your life!”
While Kucera did not play for a very long time after that injury, he would eventually return to play the game he loves.
After high school, Kucera went to nearby Binghamton University for a degree in biology. Once Kucera finished his undergrad, he attended UNM-Albuquerque for his Master’s and his PhD.
“[When] I finished, the country was kind of in a recession and it was hard to get a job in a university,” Kucera said. “University of Tampa is actually the first that I applied to. I had no experience applying to universities. I made my application on dot matrix printer paper—it didn’t even occur to me to go to the UNM Biology department and ask them for stationery.” Eventually, he would be hired, joining the faculty in 1994.
His first faculty meeting induced anxiety about his decision though. At that meeting, the president at the time announced that the university would be significantly cutting faculty lines. “I came to a place that was on the verge of going extinct. It was quite scary,” Kucera said. “I was like ‘wow, am I going to get fired after just moving here?’” Luckily for Dr. Kucera that fear never came to fruition.
While he was teaching, he was still doing research in his field. He was introduced to Dr. John Hardy, a professor at USF, whose team performed research on early onset Alzheimer’s. The pair hit it off and Dr. Hardy invited Dr. Kucera to join his team at Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, studying neurodegenerative diseases.
After a few years of research with Dr. Hardy’s team, the pair went their separate ways. Dr. Kucera moved on to administration, as an associate dean. “I only had three years as a straight faculty member. My fourth and fifth years, I was the Chair of the Faculty. And I was untenured,” Kucera said. “I was dealing with faculty member salaries and touchy stuff; it never occurred to me that people might punish me in the tenure process because I was in a leadership role as an untenured member of the faculty.” It didn’t matter; Dr. Kucera was tenured in January of 2000.
Then, about five years ago, Dr. Kucera was named the founding interim dean of the College of Natural Health & Sciences, a position he held until 2009. After spending almost 10 years in administration, the task of returning to research was quite daunting to Dr. Kucera.
The university gave Dr. Kucera space and resources to conduct research. At first, he decided to study proteins associated with neurodegenerative disorders in non-model organisms. However, his research path was changed by a student in his genetics class.
“A student approach[ed] me about her family, who has three cases of Down Syndrome on one side of the family—which is pretty unusual,” Kucera said. “They had talked to clinicians and were basically just told ‘it’s maternal age.’”
Maternal age is a huge risk factor in giving birth to a child with Down Syndrome, he explained. Once a woman hits 40, her odds of having a child with Down Syndrome are very high; about one in 100.
“Within this family, one parent is a male. The other two cases are female. Yeah, it could have happened by chance, but the likelihood is pretty small. The pedigree is very striking,” Kucera said.
“If you’re in this family, you’re worried about having kids,” Kucera said. So, he decided to take on the project and the university approved his research proposal just recently.
The first thing to do, Dr. Kucera explained, is determine who is the source of the extra chromosome 21 that causes Down Syndrome. If it’s the outside female that’s the source of the extra chromosome 21 in the one instance, then it’s very unlikely that this is genetic.
“From a scientific perspective, that might not sound very helpful, but if you’re a member of this family, just learning that is going to be very important because that’s going to relieve a burden that people have about a genetic disorder in their family,” Kucera said.
If he finds that all the members of the family are the source, then he will search for some kind of causative element that’s associated with this type of Down Syndrome. All three of these cases are the common type of Down Syndrome: non-disjunction Down Syndrome.
“When I stepped out of administration, I felt kind of lost because I had to change gears. It’s nice to feel like I have a direction again,” Kucera said.
If he can prove the genetic link and find a causative element, what will happen next?
“When I was doing work on insect life-cycles, people would ask me ‘how does that benefit anybody?’ The best way I can answer that question is to say ‘we really don’t know.’
“Pursuing this is going to have a real impact psychologically on human beings. If it never does anything more than help them, I don’t care.”
Years ago, a high school biology teacher inspired Dr. Kucera to change career paths from geology to biology and now he’s using that to help one of his students’ families. It’s true what they say: a teacher really can change your life.
April Weiner can be reached at April.Weiner@spartans.ut.edu.
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