MySciNet

In Person: My Boss With Stephen Hawking Disease

2013-01-11T17:30:00Z

A protege pays tribute to the humanity and resilience of immunologist Alan Houghton.

The second thing he said was "I work 2 days a week," and I knew that what he was saying was, "I'm alive."

In July 2002, I interviewed for a project manager position in physician and immunologist Alan Houghton's research lab in New York City at the Sloan-Kettering Institute. He was a professor at Cornell University, department chair, and head of a laboratory with two dozen people whose funding was equivalent to that of a small biotech company.

When I met him, Alan was strapped to a robotic wheelchair whose weight seemed to exert its own gravitational force. His assistant warned me not to try to shake his hand because he couldn't move it. Alan suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and had been chairbound for 7 years. He seemed vulnerable in that absolutely motionless state, but I was aware of his eyes as they scrutinized me.

In the first 5 minutes of the interview, he had already ascertained what I knew about the job, why I wanted it, and how I intended to fulfill the role. When he finished with the standard questions, Alan swiveled his chair and took me to the lab to meet his group. He disappeared down the hallway of the research institute, navigating the narrow corridors with the skill of a New York City cab driver. Challenged to run behind his chair, I yelled, "Coming!" In the lab, Alan swerved around benches, orange disposal bags, and tall round chairs to introduce me to everyone.

Alan's chair was the flying carpet that freed him from a declining life in bed. A black sensor the size of an Eppendorf tube sat at the end of a flexible arm in front of Alan's chin and played the role of a computer mouse. He controlled the chair's movements by nudging the sensor with his chin to select and activate the desired commands. It was a sort of miracle, I thought, that technology and Alan's chin worked together to allow him to move independently.

Back in his office, he asked me: "Where do you think you'll be 10 years from now?"

I was honest: "It's the first time I'd be a research project manager, so I'll give you a better answer in a year."

The next time I saw Alan, it was a few weeks later, on my first day working with him. He welcomed me to his office with a short list of the projects I would manage. I sat on a chair next to his and became a spectator to Alan's modus operandi. To introduce me to the projects, he gave his computer short orders, like a soft tam-tam of a children's drum: "Open," "File," "Third one down," "Send." When he was done, he lulled it with "Go to sleep." Seeing my eyes still fixed on his computer screen, Alan explained: "Dragon is the voice-recognition program that enables me to work independently on the computer."

Starting that day and continuing for the next 4 years, Alan, Dragon, and I worked together for at least an hour every day. I looked forward to this trio work. We worked on grant applications and reports, papers, presentations, lectures, letters of recommendation, forms, budgets, and lots of other things. Research funding, students, and ideas moved in and out rapidly. I felt that I'd become the happiest project manager in the world.

"Team Alan" included his personal assistant, his home health aide, his wife and sons, his closest collaborator, and many other people in the lab, the institute, and the hospital, all of whom valued and cared for Alan. His innate dignity, self-reliance, and respect for others never made him an easy patient. It was months after I started to work with Alan that he timidly began to ask me for help: to scratch an itchy eyelid, to straighten a twisted foot, or to pop a candy corn in his mouth.

Alan's sense of gratitude and humor never ceased to touch me. One morning at 7 a.m., after we had spent the night working on a grant application, Alan asked me: "Would you like to call your husband and tell him you are late?" We burst together into a relieving laughter.

A few years after I started working for Alan, I walked into his office and I found him reading a scientific article about ALS. I asked: "Alan, is there any good news about Lou Gehrig's disease?"

"I call it the Stephen Hawking disease," he corrected me, and his lips extended effortlessly into a large, hopeful smile. After fighting this illness for more than 10 years, it was obvious that Alan had a survivor's form.

I left Alan's group in 2006 because my husband got a job as an independent investigator at a research institute in California. When I said goodbye, I left a kiss on a close friend's cheek. I took Alan's resilience for granted and abolished any dark thought that his disease could cause his condition to deteriorate. A year later, I was shattered to hear that he had lost his lung power, voice, and consequently his Dragon's help. Alan was out of the lab for a long time. His e-mails became shorter and less frequent.

Eventually, I resettled in Melbourne, Australia, with my husband and daughter. I returned to New York in 2011 for a scientific session and paid a visit to Alan. A long, wrinkled tube bound to his neck fed Alan life-supporting oxygen. One-third of the room next to his bed was filled with instruments more complicated than those in any doctor's office I had seen.

The first thing Alan said to me was "I missed you!" Clearly, he had forgotten the episode when I spilled Coke on his shirt and tie right before one of his lectures. He could have no clue just how much more I missed him in those intervening 5 years and regretted that his health was declining.

The second thing he said was "I work 2 days a week," and I knew that what he was saying was, "I'm alive."

I planted another kiss on Alan's wet cheek and returned to Melbourne, already planning my next visit to my dynamo boss with Stephen Hawking disease.

In Person Guidelines

Your essay should be about 800 words long and personal in tone. Please send us your submission as an editable text document attachment in an e-mail message, addressed to snweditor@aaas.org (Subject: In Person submission); Microsoft Word format is preferred, but OpenOffice format is acceptable. Please do NOT include photographs or other attachments with the original submission.

We will give each manuscript we receive careful consideration and contact you within 6 weeks if we decide to publish your essay. Most essays will be edited prior to publication. If you do not hear from us in 6 weeks, feel free to submit your work elsewhere.

Rodica Stan is a postdoctoral research associate at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in Melbourne, Australia.
10.1126/science.caredit.a1300003

How Not to Attract Minorities to STEM

2012-12-07T17:30:00Z

Research shows that large admissions preferences stymie studies in science and technical subjects.

???[A]mong the top twenty-one college producers of future blacks with science doctorates, seventeen were HBCUs and none were Ivies.??? ???Richard H. Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr.

One spring day some decades ago, while I was serving as a very junior faculty member at what was then called a predominantly Negro college, a student asked me for advice. I mention him because of an eye-opening new book I???ve just read that throws light on an important issue in science education: why students from underrepresented minority groups are less likely to pursue science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) degrees than other students.

The book is called Mismatch, and it's by University of California, Los Angeles, law professor Richard H. Sander and legal journalist Stuart Taylor Jr. My long-ago student, whom I'll call Terry Fide, ranked among the very top seniors at one of the very best of the Southern colleges established after the Civil War to educate exclusively African Americans. For more than a century, resources had been distributed unequally among the races, so the college???s facilities, its academic standards, and the academic preparation of its students could not match those of selective white colleges.

Prestigious white institutions were just beginning to recruit talented blacks. Because of Terry???s excellent grades and record of campus leadership, one of the country???s most famous universities had admitted him to its graduate school with an ample fellowship. Campus officials, including his ecstatic major professor, were pressing him to accept. But the prospect of going there, Terry told me, scared him stiff.

Richard Sander

Smart, hard-working, and ambitious, Terry had emerged from the segregated schools of his Southern hometown to become not only the first of his family to attend college, but also the first to even finish high school. He knew that in academic preparation and cultural sophistication???not to mention in Graduate Record Exam scores???he lagged far behind the much more privileged classmates he???d have to compete with at the world-famous institution.

A less renowned, but still very respectable, school had also made him an attractive offer. At that institution, a recent graduate of Terry's college was already holding her own as a graduate student in the very department that had accepted him. She assured Terry that he could do the same. No one he trusted could vouch for his chances at the super-elite university.

Terry turned to me, I suspect, because I came from a highly ranked graduate school, not to mention a much more privileged background. He thought I should have a realistic idea of what he???d be up against.

At the famous institution, I surmised, the deficiencies in his preparation would surely place him at a severe, and possibly insurmountable, disadvantage. His fear and self-doubt would make things worse. The other school would be a stretch, but it would be a smaller stretch, and Terry's ability, drive, and confidence in his prospects there gave him a fighting chance, I thought. That's what I told him.

Close to despair, he asked me: How could he "let down" his professor and alma mater?

After some thought, I asked him what the point was of his going to graduate school. Was it to burnish his professor???s and college???s pride or to get the degree that would start him on the career he wanted? Would it better advance his prospects to drop out of a world-famous graduate school or to finish a well-regarded degree at a somewhat less prestigious one?

???That???s what I thought,??? Terry said.

Perverse preferences

Terry had intuited the conclusions of Sander and Taylor's new book decades before they did the extensive research that informs it. Subtitled How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It???s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won???t Admit It, the book argues that policies that increase selective universities??? minority enrollments by admitting applicants with test scores and other credentials well below the average of the admitted class ???systematically put minority students in academic environments where they feel overwhelmed??? and, inevitably, struggle. This, the authors add, especially harms these students??? chances of pursuing STEM degrees.

???Professors at any school tend to teach to the middle (or to somewhat above the middle) of the class,??? the authors continue. The data they marshal persuasively demonstrate that the larger the mismatch between the academic credentials of the mismatched students and the rest of their class, the graver is the danger that they will receive poor grades, lose confidence and self-esteem, drop hard courses, leave college without a degree, and learn far less than they would have if placed among more closely matched peers. Devoutly wishing to enhance minority students??? access to academic and career success, and disdaining universities??? self-serving desire to assemble racially diverse student bodies at the expense of young people already shortchanged by inferior K???12 schools, Sander and Taylor show that large minority admissions preferences are hypocritical and a severe disservice to many able students.

Since that distant spring when Terry was among the first minority students to receive a large admissions preference at a prestigious white university, giving such preferences to African Americans, Hispanics, American Indians, and some other minorities (but not Asians) has become widespread and entrenched. ???By 1980, more than three-quarters of the black students, and a majority of the Hispanic students at selective colleges and professional schools were there ??? because they had received a preference,??? Sander and Taylor write.

???The vast majority of students who are admitted with large racial preferences are talented people who are well equipped to succeed in higher education,??? they continue (italics in original). They cite research that conclusively shows that, at institutions from community colleges to world-class universities, able and motivated students of all races can and do thrive academically when they enter with credentials that generally match those of the admitted class.

Stuart Taylor Jr.

A policy of racial preference, however, sets up many unsuspecting students for failure and disappointment, depriving them of degrees and careers they would have attained had they attended colleges that suited them better, and depriving the nation of more STEM-trained minority professionals.

Discouraging STEM

The effect of mismatch turns out to especially damage minority students??? chances of earning STEM degrees. ???As seniors in high school, blacks were somewhat more likely than whites to report an interest in majoring in??? STEM???45% to 41% respectively, the book states, citing research on students at Ivy League colleges by psychologists Rogers Elliott and A. C. Strenta of Dartmouth College. These once-aspiring minority scientists, however, ???were only slightly more than half as likely as whites to finish college with a STEM degree.???

Why such high attrition? Wherever a college stands in the academic pecking order, STEM courses are always among its most demanding. ???[R]elative academic weakness, not absolute weakness??? explains why STEM students who enter college ???with comparatively low credentials and an interest in the sciences tend to stream for the exits???and into less challenging courses???after their freshman year,??? Sander and Taylor continue. Furthermore, STEM curricula are sequential, so disadvantage accumulates. ???A student who performs only passably in the first course of a sequence will be at a still-bigger disadvantage in the second and third courses,??? they write. ???A student who starts as a chemistry major and whose preparation puts her roughly in the middle of her class will probably do fine and will gain a greater sense of mastery and confidence with each passing semester. A student whose preparation puts her near the bottom of the class can easily feel progressively more lost, and the poor grades that take her to the bottom of a STEM curve add insult to injury,??? they write.

On the other hand, ???historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) such as Howard, Fisk and Clark Atlanta??? enroll students who are ???on average significantly weaker academically than the black students at Dartmouth and the other Ivies,??? the book states. Yet, because their students do not suffer mismatch, ???these schools were producing large numbers of STEM graduates.??? Many of these alumni go on to success in graduate school, though probably not mainly at the most prestigious ones. ???[A]mong the top twenty-one college producers of future blacks with science doctorates, seventeen were HBCUs and none were Ivies.???

Across the academic spectrum, ???over half of the STEM degrees went to students whose [SAT math] scores put them in the top third of their class; those in the bottom third earned about one-sixth of the degrees,??? Sander and Taylor continue. They write that research by psychologists Frederick Smyth and John McArdle, who were both then at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, shows that, stunningly, ???had all the black and Hispanic students in their sample enrolled at schools where their credentials were close to the class-wide averages, 45 percent more of the women minorities and 35 percent more of the men minorities would have completed STEM degrees.???

Encouraging success

That Terry had worse preparation than others admitted to that super-elite university was no reflection on him. His poorly educated family had encouraged, but could not assist, his studies. He had excelled at elementary and high schools that provided resources and opportunities far below those that more privileged students enjoyed. This disparity still exists today, as Sander and Taylor document in detail.

Colleges make the claim???clearly refuted by the book???s ample evidence???that giving racial admissions preferences enhances minority students??? opportunities for academic and career success. As Terry astutely perceived, in fact, these institutions perversely condemn to the bottom of their classes students who could succeed???many of them in STEM fields???in more favorable environments.

The argument Sanders and Taylor make is unpopular among academic administrators, and, they illustrate, it has been systematically suppressed. But the evidence that they present makes obvious that the solution to educational inequity is not to be found in continuing to mask it with racial admissions preferences that harm students.

Beryl Lieff Benderly writes from Washington, D.C.
10.1126/science.caredit.a1200134

Time Off for Dad

2012-11-30T17:30:00Z

Paternity leave helps fathers and mothers advance their careers; too bad it's not more common.

???Paternity leave is truly important because unless you actually have policies for fathers as well as mothers, mothers won???t take them.??? ???Mary Ann Mason

While seeking a postdoctoral position at what is now the Carnegie Institution for Science in 2005, Daniel Gorelick did what many job-seekers are afraid to do: He asked his potential future employer about the availability of parental leave. The institution wasn't deterred, however, and he got the position. He took time off when his daughter Hannah was born a year and a half later. He used the benefit again 3 years after that, taking 6 weeks off to care for Simon, his newborn son.

Today, Gorelick is working to start up his own lab at the University of Alabama, Birmingham. He's determined to offer his own postdocs at UAB???as well as his graduate students and any other lab staff members who need it???the same advantages that he had. ???I would be very supportive of anyone who wants to have a family, because that is very important,??? he says.

Pro-family attitudes are becoming more common in the sciences, but the stigma hasn't gone away completely. Some senior scientists still believe that any life decision that takes time away from work demonstrates a lack of commitment. For them, parental leave is a sign of weakness, especially for dads.

This stigma also affects women, because, on the one hand, it means they have less help with early-stage parenting. On the other hand, parental leave may not become widely accepted until men routinely take it, too. Fortunately (for scientist-parents), that seems to be happening.

A test of commitment

Marc Goulden, a researcher at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, who has studied the issue, says that "constant and short-cycle requirements" in science careers make it hard to take off big blocks of time to bond with and care for a new child. It has gotten even harder over the last few decades: Today, with longer Ph.D. programs and extended (and sometimes multiple) postdocs, most scientists are pushing 40 when they are awarded tenure. Scientific training matches up with women's prime childbearing years almost perfectly.

Marc Goulden

Most academic institutions have recognized the problem, and many are improving their policies, especially for female faculty members. According to a 2009 report by Goulden; Mary Ann Mason, co-director of UC Berkeley School of Law???s Center on Health, Economic & Family Security; and Karie Frasch, also of UC Berkeley, in 2008, 58% of major U.S. research institutions offered at least 6 weeks of paid leave to faculty mothers after the birth or adoption of a child. Many institutions offer a semester off with pay.

But even if an institution has a good policy on the books, female scientists may still be reluctant to take significant time off for fear of damaging their reputations or losing precious time. Mason suggests that one good way of reducing this stigma is for fathers to take family leave. ???Paternity leave is truly important because unless you actually have policies for fathers as well as mothers, mothers won???t take them,??? Mason says. When men have access to leave as well???and take it???"then everyone takes it,??? she says.

Paternity leave

Paternity benefits, though, are far less common than maternity benefits. Although a few institutions offer a semester of paid leave for faculty fathers???Cornell University is an example???such policies aren't common. Only 16% of the institutions that Goulden, Mason, and Frasch surveyed offered faculty dads paid leave of a week or more. More common are other benefits, says Anita Levy of the American Association of University Professors in Washington, D.C., such as ???stopping the tenure clock??? or offering a reduced teaching load and fewer committee assignments to free up fathers' time for family duties.

Mary Ann Mason

When his son was born just 5 months after he accepted a tenure-track position in the Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Harald Junge, who studies vascular biology, got the whole package. Granted a full semester of paid leave from teaching, Junge continued to work normal hours in the lab during the first few months of his son???s life. He also took advantage of clock-stopping policies and leave from committees to maximize the time he could spend setting up the laboratory that he and his wife would later share.

Meanwhile, Zhe Chen, Jung's wife who is a neurobiologist in the same department took 3 months of unpaid leave to care for their son; as a new research professor, she wasn't yet eligible for paid maternity leave. Once Chen returned to work, they staggered their schedules so that each could spend time in the lab on a given day, while the other one took care of the new child.

Benefits for trainees

Below the tenure-track faculty level, explicit paternity leave benefits are rare. Goulden, Mason, and Frasch's 2009 study showed that only 8% of major research institutions offer male postdocs formal paid leave, and a much smaller percentage???3%???offered this benefit to graduate students. What's more, grad students and postdocs may not qualify for coverage under the federal Family and Medical Leave Act.

Last year, the National Science Foundation stirred things up by launching an initiative, called Balancing the Scale, to encourage family-responsive policies at universities with NSF funding. The initiative allows grant recipients to defer awards for up to a year while they care for newborn or newly adopted children, or to suspend active grants during their parental leave. The program also offers supplements to hire personnel to cover research duties when a recipient is on family leave, and promotes the idea of remote participation in proposal reviews so that travel-restricted researchers can more fully participate in professional life. The policies, not all of which are new, apply to NSF postdoctoral fellows and graduate research fellows. (They also apply to CAREER awardees, who have faculty appointments.) Both fathers and mothers qualify equally. NSF's scale-balancing policies do not, however, apply to postdocs and graduate students paid from research grants, at least not directly.

Kathleen Flint Ehm

Still, Kathleen Flint Ehm, project manager at the National Postdoctoral Association in Washington, D.C., says that NSF's engagement with the issue is a big deal. ???I think the agencies have had a number of mechanisms for doing these kinds of things, but it hasn???t been completely clear what is and isn???t OK, or what is and isn???t an allowable cost,??? she says. Having a federal agency like NSF explicitly promote family-friendly policies, she says, may encourage institutions to extend paternity leave benefits to postdocs.

Goulden agrees. Over the past decade, as major research universities have ramped up family-responsive policies for faculty members, he???s seen graduate students and postdoctoral scholars benefit, too. ???Having a federal agency like NSF pick it up, I think you could see some pretty rapid movement in those directions.???

Improvising

Keith Micoli

Explicit policies for postdoc dads remain rare. To help fathers ask the right questions and navigate policies at their institutions, Flint Ehm worked with Amelia Linnemann, a tenure-track scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, School of Medicine and Public Health, to develop A Postdoc???s Guide to Paternity Leave. The guide was posted online in May.

Keith Micoli, the director of the postdoctoral program at New York University School of Medicine in New York City, was finishing up his Ph.D. in molecular biology when his three children were born. He wanted to spend time with them, but his institution???UAB (coincidentally, the institution where Gorelick is now setting up shop)???had no formal policy for paternity leave. ???There wasn???t a lot of sympathy or support or suggestion that I take time off,??? he says. ???The discussions centered more on how to maintain the research productivity in the lab and how to minimize the disruption by taking a day here and there.???

Micoli's solution was to create a written plan to help other people in the lab keep the projects that he was involved in on track. His plan included detailed reports on the status of experiments that were under way, where to find things, and how to use his notebooks. And, mostly, he kept his work breaks short.

That's a common strategy for new postdoc-dads, says Sibby Anderson-Thompkins, director of postdoctoral affairs at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who serves on a National Academy of Sciences committee examining the postdoctoral experience. ???Oftentimes, men requesting time off are choosing not to take it immediately, or they are taking blocks of time over several weeks,??? she says. Women often want to take their allotted time off at once, or want to plan a gradual return.

Sibby Anderson-Thompkins

Those longer leaves can be harder to manage. Skills deteriorate, the lab may be short-staffed, and the work in other labs continues. ???In a competitive field, if you???re working on a problem that a lot of people are working on, you could end up getting scooped or you might miss grant deadlines or not be able to obtain the data you need to submit a fundable grant,??? Micoli says.

What's the solution? There isn't one, really. A strong support system can help though, at work and at home. ???We hear time and again from women who ask the ages-old question, when is the best time to have children? Is it graduate school or postdoc or faculty???? Flint Ehm says. ???The answer is, there???s no good time, and it???s all a function of having a support structure and a supportive partner who can help you do it whenever it is that you???re inclined to do it.???

Susan Gaidos writes from near Portland, Maine.
10.1126/science.caredit.a1200131

Ethics Across Borders

2012-11-02T17:30:00Z

Cultural differences in approaches to ethical issues create challenges for scientists working internationally.

Misunderstanding cultural differences can have disastrous consequences.

For today's early-career researchers???students, postdocs, faculty members, and staff scientists???doing science in countries other than their own is an increasingly common experience. Working internationally offers exciting professional opportunities, but it also presents challenges such as unfamiliar languages, food, climate, currency, and local customs. But the challenge with the greatest potential impact???one that can torpedo projects and even careers???is less obvious.

It is the need to understand and act on norms of ethical and responsible research that may differ considerably from those at home. Scientists' "assumptions and their training in research methods may not be shared with their collaborators. ??? Even their expectations about what mentoring and advising look like may differ across cultural and national boundaries," warns Daniel Denecke, associate vice president of programs and best practices at the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS), in an interview with Science Careers.

The same goes for expectations about who owns or controls ideas, data, and writings; what constitutes conflict of interest and informed consent; what responsibilities individuals have if they observe wrongdoing; and other complex issues that arise in scientific research. Scientists often "believe that science is universal, so it's easy to lose sight [of the fact] that the cultural preconditions for successful science may not be universal," Denecke says. Doing productive science with colleagues from other countries???whether you've gone abroad as an international student, postdoc, or more senior researcher, or are working in your own country with collaborators or subjects located elsewhere???thus demands not only "high-level scientific skills" but also attention to "cultural and social aspects [that] are not intuitive."

Getting these issues wrong can lead to consequences ranging from poor communication to disputes with mentors and colleagues and, beyond that, to accusations of research misconduct and legal trouble. Scientists new to international collaboration, therefore, need clear guidance on navigating this potentially tricky terrain, including appropriate practices for authorship credit, data ownership and sharing, legal and bureaucratic requirements, and much more. Knowledge of and adherence to the code of ethical and responsible research that prevails in the country where a scientist is working is a fundamental requirement of success. Arguing that practices at home depart from the host country's standards will not excuse or repair missteps you make while working abroad.

Universities offer training in ethics and responsible conduct of research, but "we've heard again and again that there's just a huge gap with respect to the international issues," Denecke notes. That's why CGS has undertaken a project in conjunction with 11 U.S. universities to develop best practices for training faculty members and students in these areas.

The power of norms

"One of the goals of this project is to help students think about labs as environments where science is practiced, [but] also [as] an environment that's shaped by culture and by norms," says Julia Kent, CGS's director of global communications and best practices and Denecke's co???principal investigator on the project. As noted in an article by Melissa Anderson of the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, those norms can vary on a number of levels.

Much depends on how research is funded and organized. The United States concentrates its civilian research in universities, with projects funded mainly by competitive grants awarded to individual faculty members. Some nations give larger roles to government-run research entities. The Chinese Academy of Sciences, for example, has labs on campuses throughout the country, giving national policy a far greater influence on research priorities than in the United States. Many other countries do a very substantial share of their science at freestanding research institutes. Each of these systems, along with many other versions practiced by countries around the world, creates its own specific incentives, obligations, limitations, and legal requirements that everyone working within it must understand.

Doctoral training also takes varying forms. Most U.S. Ph.D. programs require coursework before students can undertake their dissertation research. That dissertation research usually relates to a larger project directed by the professor whose grants support the students. In many European countries, Ph.D. students do not need to take courses, and they often work on their dissertation research quite independently, with professors acting as guides or advisers rather than as directors of overarching projects. Nearly everywhere, a central element of Ph.D. programs is the dissertation defense, which in many countries happens soon after the dissertation is completed. In China, however, students generally must publish in a recognized journal before they are permitted to defend.

Other differences affect daily life in the lab, especially norms concerning authority, originality, individuality, and manner of communication. In the United States, faculty members of all ranks are expected to function as collegial members of their departments, head their labs, and win funding. Japan's traditional koza or "chair" system, on the other hand, gives senior professors tight control over the activities and funding of a group of subordinates that includes not just students but also less senior faculty members.

Scientists everywhere work in teams, but teamwork takes different forms in different cultural and institutional contexts. According to a CGS paper, the factors shaping relationships and practices include "how strongly these units stress group work and achievement over and above individual success; the hierarchy or balance of power among members of the research team; the nature of the relationship between supervisors and students; and the extent to which student contributions to research are recognized and rewarded." In China, the paper continues, students often "see it as their responsibility to follow without question the directions of their supervisors." Their counterparts in Japan "often view their role as one of maintaining harmony within their research units." Americans, on the other hand, often strive to distinguish themselves, sometimes by offering suggestions or opinions that question those of superiors???a behavior that may strike newcomers from China, Japan, and some other countries as presumptuous or insubordinate.

Crossing the line

Misunderstanding cultural differences can have disastrous consequences. "[V]iews on scientific writing and plagiarism can be strikingly different from US norms," write bioethicists Elizabeth Heitman of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville and Sergio Litewka of the University of Miami in Florida, in an article. "[I]nternational trainees, especially from developing nations, have particular trouble with US standards of scholarly writing and are at significantly higher risk for committing plagiarism than their US peers"???a violation that in the United States will seriously harm, or even destroy, a career. This risk exists because many international students come from countries where "plagiarism is ill-defined and even commonly practiced," Heitman and Litewka continue. Scientists educated in "countries where memorization is a common pedagogical technique are sometimes surprised by US expectations that they cite sources for all direct quotations," they add. Individuals educated this way often assume that knowledgeable people "will be familiar with the original, authoritative source of certain material." Even "established scholars" in some countries view plagiarism as "a tribute to the person plagiarized," Heitman and Litewka note.

Practices and expectations regarding such questions are so variable, they continue, that one study found "country of origin [to be] a strong predictor of students' tolerance for cheating." In a comparison of American, Dutch, Israeli, and Russian students headed by economist Jan Magnus of Tilburg University in the Netherlands, Americans proved the least tolerant of academic dishonesty and Russians were the most tolerant. People whom Americans view as admirable whistleblowers appear to Russians???raised in a country with a long history of oppressive government and paid informers???as contemptible snitches.

Training to avoid trouble

As Anderson's paper suggests in its title, "anticipating challenges instead of being surprised" is the wisest, most constructive, and often the kindest approach in international situations. "It's very important to take into account research integrity issues from the outset" of any project involving people from different countries, Kent says.

Several international efforts have worked to clarify and codify differences in national expectations regarding research integrity. The current CGS study, however, "is not about harmonizing or coordinating policies, but about preparing young ??? graduate students so that they understand ??? how cultural expectations might differ across national borders, so that they can reduce the likelihood that all these differences might create problems down the road," Denecke says in the interview. "We're really trying to help graduate schools help their faculty to tailor responses to that need."

Aspiring scientists are equipped to take advantage of good information, suggests a U.S. National Academies conference report on international research collaborations. "[M]any of the individual characteristics that favor cross-cultural aptitude are found in most researchers," it states. "These include openness to others and to new information, tolerance for ambiguity, flexibility, curiosity, the ability to ask good questions, and the ability to quickly discern pattern." Along with improved training, those qualities will equip many early-career researchers to make the most of their international experiences.

Beryl Lieff Benderly writes from Washington, D.C.
10.1126/science.caredit.a1200122

Teaching Postdocs to Be Professors

2012-10-26T17:30:00Z

An NIH program readies teaching-focused postdocs???especially minorities???for lab-and-classroom jobs.

"What the program allowed me to do was demonstrate that I could teach an established course and also design my own course and teach it effectively. And it showed that I could balance teaching and research." ???James Mu??oz

Biomedical science has accomplished much in recent years, but one area in which it has made only minimal progress is increasing the diversity of scientists working in its ranks. Women are still dramatically outnumbered (and outranked) on the faculties of universities and academic medical centers, although their numbers have risen steadily. The proportion of biomedical scientists from other underrepresented groups???which the National Institutes of Health defines as including but not limited to African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native Americans, and native U.S. Pacific Islanders???has increased more slowly. In 2006, underrepresented minorities accounted for fewer than 10% of the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) faculty members at research universities in the United States; they make up 28.5% of the general population.

Yvonne Paterson

For 14 years, a National Institute of General Medical Services (NIGMS) initiative has worked to increase those numbers. The Institutional Research and Academic Career Development Awards (IRACDA) program has supported some 550 postdocs from a wide variety of backgrounds, placing most of them in tenure-track faculty jobs. The formula employed by the program's participating consortia???partnering a research-intensive institution with one or more institutions with a large minority enrollment???combines a mentored research experience with structured training in academic career skills, especially teaching. More than two-thirds of IRACDA graduates end up in academic careers, most of them at teaching-focused and minority-serving institutions.

Research plus pedagogy

IRACDA provides money to the 19 research-intensive "host" institutions, which they use to enlist and train postdocs. After being admitted to the program, postdocs seek out a research adviser at the host institution; an intensive research experience is at the core of the IRACDA program. But, in contrast to most other postdoc programs, IRACDA postdocs spend a significant part of their time taking pedagogy courses, including special instruction in how best to engage minority students. IRACDA postdocs spend the better portion of a year teaching classes at a nearby partner institution; there are 42 such institutions in all. IRACDA postdocs may fill in for a professor at the partner institution who is away on sabbatical, or teach courses that partner-institution faculty members aren't prepared to teach.

IRACDA postdocs also invite their students to participate in research at their host institution's labs, including summer research programs. Professors at the partner institutions may also take part in the research program, strengthening ties between the institutions.

At the University of Pennsylvania's PENN Postdoctoral Opportunities in Research and Teaching (PENN-PORT) program, which just had its 5-year IRACDA grant renewed for a second term, first-year postdocs spend about 85% of their time doing mentored research and about 15% taking pedagogy classes and preparing to teach at one of three minority-serving institutions nearby: Lincoln University, which is recognized as the United States' first historically black university, in unincorporated southern Pennsylvania; Delaware County Community College (DCCC), which is in Pennsylvania; and Rutgers University, Camden, in New Jersey. Postdocs spend most of their time during the second year teaching at their matched institution: first an introductory biology course and then an advanced seminar that they design themselves. In the final year, postdocs devote themselves entirely to research.

At any given time, PENN-PORT is host to between 15 and 20 postdocs, although only 15 are funded by the IRACDA grant; the rest are funded from other sources. Postdocs participating in the program don???t have to be underrepresented minorities, but about three-quarters are. (All of the postdocs Science Careers spoke to are minorities.) "The postdocs who go out into these schools are a real rainbow coalition," says PENN-PORT Director Yvonne Paterson.

Meet (some of) the postdocs:

Michael Wheeler Lipscomb

The opportunity to work at minority-serving colleges, helping train the next generation of scientists, was a major motivation for several of PENN-PORT's former postdocs, including Michael Wheeler Lipscomb, who was recruited by PENN-PORT officials while studying at the University of Pittsburgh, where he was doing a Ph.D. in immunology.

Teaching at Lincoln University afforded Lipscomb, who is now an assistant professor in the biology department at Howard University in Washington, D.C., a cultural opportunity he says he missed as an African American??who went??to "majority" schools most of his life. "It's pretty important for me because I didn't have the historically black college experience as an undergraduate or graduate ??? so it was a great opportunity for me to immerse myself in the culture."

Lipscomb continued his immunology research as an IRACDA postdoc, studying the interaction between dendritic cells and T cells in the lab of Janis K. Burkhardt. Now that he's at Howard, he says, he's been able to remain productive despite a heavy teaching load. He regularly recruits undergraduates to work in his lab and uses his research to reinforce his department's curriculum. "There's no doubt in my mind that I want to blend research and teaching," he says.

Michael Wheeler Lipscomb (far right) and his biology class at Howard University.

Behzad Varamini

Behzad Varamini, who did a Ph.D. in nutrition at Cornell University before entering the PENN-PORT program, relished the opportunity to make science click for students who had previously struggled with scientific concepts. His previous teaching experience was limited to being a teaching assistant at Cornell, instructing a predominantly white student body. During his PENN-PORT postdoc, Varamini taught at DCCC, where nearly 75% of his students were minorities. "That demographic presented different challenges [than the Cornell students], some of which I was ready for thanks to the classes I'd taken at Penn, and some of it you can't be prepared for until you're thrown in."

Over time, Varamini says, he learned to relate to his students and to adapt his teaching style to their varied educational and cultural backgrounds. "I saw students who came into my classes with their heads down, texting, and by the end of the semester they were asking me questions [like] 'How does this relate to diabetes?' or 'My grandma has cancer; is this sort of related to cancer?' "

Behzad Varamini

At PENN-PORT, Varamini worked in the research lab of physiology professor Joseph A. Baur, studying the molecular mechanisms of aging in transgenic mice. He produced one first-author paper and co-authored another during his postdoc.

Today, as a faculty member at Biola University in La Mirada, California, Varamini is finding it difficult to keep up his research output. Biola lacks an animal facility, for one, and he's swamped with a teaching load that includes physiology, an introductory biology lab section, and an advanced seminar on biological research methods, all in one semester. One of his colleagues studies aging in nematodes (Caenorhabditis elegans), and he's considering changing his model organism. "I either have to figure out a way to collaborate with someone in the nearby area or [I] have to adapt my models to C. elegans, which I'm ... trying to figure out how to do right now," he says.

James Mu??oz

James Mu??oz spent the first 2 years of his PENN-PORT postdoc doing research with neuroscientist Philip Haydon, studying how astrocytes affect neuronal function. When Haydon accepted a professorship at Tufts University (another IRACDA host) in Medford, Massachusetts, Mu??oz decided not to go with him because his wife was in the middle of a medical residency at the University of Pennsylvania. Neither he nor his wife was eager to uproot their lives. So, Mu??oz scrambled to find a new mentor and ended up working with neuroscientist Matthew Dalva.

James Mu??oz

Teaching general biology at Rutgers University, Camden, and then an advanced biology seminar at Lincoln University, Mu??oz found it difficult???yet rewarding???to balance lesson-planning and lab time. "Teaching, just like research, will take every minute you're willing to give it," he says. "It helped me learn to start balancing these things as a postdoc rather than as a new faculty member."

Now an assistant professor in the Division of Math, Science, and Technology at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Mu??oz is working to adapt his research to the constraints of a teaching-focused institution. Like Varamini, his institution lacks an animal facility, so he's now working on neurogenesis in fish.

A competitive edge

Despite the challenge of teaching heavy loads while continuing to conduct research, these postdocs are all grateful that they were able to find good jobs in academia. The job market for teaching-focused positions in academia is a bit better than it is for research-based positions, Paterson says, which could be encouraging some postdocs who otherwise would have pursued research-intensive careers to think about teaching.

Shiva Singh

That's what happened to Mu??oz. He began his doctoral program at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, with the aim of becoming a professor at a research university, but eventually realized he didn't like the idea of devoting his whole career to research. He pursued a PENN-PORT postdoc to make himself more competitive for faculty positions with a greater emphasis on teaching. That experience, he says, helped him land his job. "What the program allowed me to do was demonstrate that I could teach an established course and also design my own course and teach it effectively," he says. "And it showed that I could balance teaching and research."

Varamini had a similar experience. "A lot of the schools I interviewed with expressed to me, 'Hey, you have something that a lot of other folks don't.' And I think that's what got me a few of my interviews and eventually my job."

IRACDA Director Shiva Singh, chief of the Undergraduate and Predoctoral Training Branch in NIGMS's Division of Training, Workforce Development, and Diversity, has tracked the outcomes of the approximately 350 postdocs who have completed the IRACDA program. Of those, 69% took jobs in academia, nearly three-quarters of which were at teaching-focused colleges and minority institutions. Twenty-one percent found work at government agencies, nonprofits, or other educational organizations, and 10% took jobs in industry. Apparently, Singh says, IRACDA postdocs are finding academic jobs at a higher rate than their peers who do traditional postdocs. "Especially in the current jobs climate, I think the more tools we can give to the postdoc, the more skills we can teach them, the more likely they're going to find a job," he says.

Michael Price is a staff writer at Science Careers.
10.1126/science.caredit.a1200119

Perspective: Embrace Flexible Work Arrangements

2012-10-12T17:30:00Z

To achieve gender equality in science, shift men???s perceptions of what is professionally acceptable.

To increase the representation of women in STEM fields, make career breaks and part-time work more acceptable to men.

Joanne Simms and Jim Baker are married. She is a physicist and he is a computational chemist. Both are employed as senior lecturers and are working hard to get good papers published in prestigious journals to earn the notice and respect of their scientific communities. The couple has two young children, ages 8 and 5. For both births, Simms and Baker shared the parental leave. Since returning to work, both have worked 3 to 4 days a week, juggling work and family obligations. Both are on their way to obtaining full professorships.

This fictional picture of hard work and scientific achievement balanced with family life???yes, Joanne and Jim are fictional???would be most unrealistic if they were placed in the United Kingdom. For one thing, part-time professional working arrangements are still uncommon in most leading economies (including the United Kingdom), especially in academia, despite the fact that there is little evidence that working fewer hours leads to lower productivity. Also, childcare provision is still not flexible or cheap enough in the United Kingdom to allow parents to leave their children in a good daycare facility close to their workplace.

And then there is what Lesley Yellowlees, a leading chemistry professor and the first woman president of the Royal Society of Chemistry, described last June as a ???macho culture,??? where working hours are inflexible and never part-time, and recruitment is based on ???old boys??? ??? clubs. In the same interview, Yellowlees berated U.K. science minister David Willetts???s 2010 decision to axe the ??2.5 million annual funding for the U.K. Resource Centre for Women (UKRC), the only national body that promoted gender equality in science and technology through grants and career advice. (UKRC has now become a community interest company.)

The three of us would like to join Yellowlees in pointing out the implications of this kind of shortsightedness. We would also like to draw attention to some approaches to improving the working culture in science.

Sunk costs

UKRC's loss of public funding is just one of many examples of how the government has failed to provide the support that young, well-trained scientists need to fulfill their economic and scientific potential. (Broader science, technology, engineering, and mathematics [STEM] budget cuts are another egregious example, but that's a different story.) The result is what accountants call "sunk costs."

Nathalie Pettorelli

Training a future scientist is indeed relatively expensive: According to a 2005 report issued by the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the costs of training and supervising a postgraduate research student in one of the most laboratory-intensive subjects amounted to more than ??87,000 over the 3 years of his or her Ph.D. studies, including scholarships, bursaries, and fees remission; the salary costs of supervisors, examiners, and lecturers; research consumables; and indirect costs and estates costs.

Every year, however, a high proportion of these young trainees leave STEM, many for jobs that do not offer opportunities to fulfill their economic potential and will not be as fulfilling as their first career choices. The bulk of these STEM-leavers are women: A report released earlier this year by the Royal Society of Edinburgh, for example, showed that 73% of female graduates are eventually lost from STEM fields. (The number for men is 48%, which is bad enough.) Worse, the report went on, 11,000 female STEM graduates are economically inactive in Scotland. (According to a UKRC report, at any point in time, the number is 50,000 for the whole United Kingdom.) The Scottish report estimated that increasing women???s participation in the U.K. STEM labor market could be worth at least ??2 billion, or roughly 0.2% of the United Kingdom???s gross domestic product. The personal costs to those former scientists are harder to quantify, but the costs they bear are no less real.

The loss of human potential is always an outcome to be deplored, but it is, we argue, especially deplorable when women leave the STEM community. Perhaps the most compelling reason to regret such a loss is simply that so few females stay in science and reach top positions. In the United Kingdom, the number of female professors is slowly increasing. But according to 2010 U.K. national statistics, about 80% of professors are men, in all disciplines combined. Women only make up some 5% of the fellows of the Royal Society; only two of the 44 fellows appointed in 2012 are female. Even in more female-friendly disciplines, such as biology, men still make up the bulk of editorial boards for international journals. By our count, women make up fewer than 5% of some of those boards.

Seirian Sumner

Several studies have then demonstrated that diversity has a positive impact on financial and organizational performance, highlighting the costs of losing these women from the STEM community: A report by McKinsey & Company in 2008 found that ???[o]n average, women use five of the nine leadership behaviors that improve organizational performance more often than men.??? In particular, women were found to spend more time developing people, defining expectations and rewards, being a role model, providing an inspiring vision for the work, and fostering participative decision-making (while dedicating the same amount of time as men to intellectual stimulation and efficient communication).

Shifting the culture to achieve gender balance

How can we stop this predominantly female brain drain? If Yellowlees is right, then reaching gender balance demands that we challenge the culture of scientific workplaces. There must be something very wrong with the culture indeed for such large numbers of bright-eyed schoolgirls???who often outnumber boys in science classes???to leave STEM.

The poor provision of low-cost childcare and the paucity of flexible working arrangements send the message to practicing scientists that there is no room for anything less than a 100% time commitment in STEM. Yet, we would argue, many scientists???not just women???see work-life balance as important. Flexible parental leave, part-time work schedules, and affordable childcare are portrayed as female-specific issues, but male scientists have come to consider off-putting the competitive and all-consuming nature of academic careers. The current culture in science, therefore, is not attractive to many of either sex, but it appears to push women out at a faster rate than men.

Yet, you don???t need to be an overly competitive male working long hours to be an innovative and productive scientist. Working flexible or part-time schedules does bring its own challenges, but, we would argue, these can be amply overcome with determination, great organization skills, focus, and efficiency. To increase the representation of women in STEM fields, make career breaks and part-time work more acceptable to men. This has the added, practical advantage of giving women more help at home.

Legislative changes often drive social change, so why not try to change the traditional perception of the roles of men at work and at home by amending legislation about parental leave and rights? Employer incentives could also play a role. The Athena SWAN Charter for Women in Science rewards U.K. university departments for good gender equality employment practices. Making such official recognition compulsory for consideration by funding bodies, as Chief Medical Officer for England Sally Davies suggested last year for all medical schools, would be a powerful and achievable beginning toward recouping sunk costs.

Perhaps we would do well to revisit a feminist concept of the 1980s: To achieve gender equality in science, shift men???s perceptions of what's socially and professionally acceptable. School is one of the best places to start changing attitudes, but female scientists can also lead the way both as partners and as mothers. Men who adopt family-friendly attitudes could be held up as role models. Only when it is socially acceptable for men and women to have an equal chance of staying in STEM, taking a career break, or adopting a flexible work schedule will women no longer be the largest component of the sunk cost in science.

Nathalie Pettorelli and Seirian Sumner are research fellows at the Institute of Zoology of the Zoological Society of London. (Sumner, a mother of two small children, works part-time.) Liz Else is an associate editor for New Scientist.
10.1126/science.caredit.a1200115

Spotlight on Diversity

2012-08-31T17:30:00Z

Filmmaker and physicist Aziza Baccouche, who is blind, showcases the challenges and successes of diverse scientists in a new documentary series.

"We know power is work over time, that strength is endurance over time. So I endured a lot of obstacles, but at the same time I created strength and vision and wisdom and endurance."???Aziza Baccouche

Aziza Baccouche???Dr. Z, as she calls herself???has made a career connecting scientific research to the people it could affect, such as informing patients about medical developments and getting more minority students interested in science. Her medium is the screen, and she tells the stories of science through documentaries. But Baccouche, a Ph.D. physicist-turned-filmmaker, will likely never clearly see any of her finished products: She became legally blind at the age of 8, and ever since she's relied on her wits, passion for science, excellent memory, and what she calls her vision to achieve success.

Baccouche obtained a Ph.D. in theoretical nuclear physics at the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2002. But while earning that degree, she was bitten by the film-production bug. Realizing that a research career wasn't for her, she founded a production company called AZIZA Productions a couple of years before graduating. Through her company, she began making films and short documentaries for science nonprofit organizations, working together with a small crew consisting of two cameramen, a sound technician, and a video editor. Now she's working on her first large-scale public documentary series focused on underrepresented minorities in science, including both ethnic minorities and people with disabilities. Baccouche's series debuted this week on a Washington D.C. Public Broadcasting Service local affiliate station with a pilot episode titled Over the Hurricane showcasing the work of African-American atmospheric physicist Gregory S. Jenkins.

Science Careers spoke with Baccouche about her experience as a science student with a disability, her passion for science, and her goals for the new series. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

: A.B.: I had a tumor in my brain that developed when I was a child. When I was 8 years old, it caused this disorder called hydrocephalus where the tumor is blocking the cerebral fluid in the brain and that automatically creates pressure within the ventricles and it starts affecting different parts of the brain, and in my case it damaged my optic nerve.

: A.B.: I've always been very passionate about mathematics since I was young. When I got to high school, I had a great physics teacher and I fell in love with physics. It's mathematics applied to the real world. And my teacher was a very dynamic teacher, and I decided during my senior year that physics was what I wanted to go into when I went to college.

: A.B.: I had some difficulties transitioning to the college environment, being legally blind. My freshman adviser recommended that I think about majoring in another subject. He would say that you need sight to do physics. Sighted people think that it takes sight to do certain things, but I didn't let his recommendations deter me from going on. Certainly there were points where I was struggling through the coursework, not so much because I didn't have the intellectual ability to do the work, but more it was dealing with accessibility [to information]. With my sighted peers, they could easily flip open their books and look at the chalkboard and so on, but a blind person doesn't have that flexibility.

: A.B.: I developed a very strong memory. On the spot I had to be able to recall equations, formulas, that kind of thing, so in that respect, it gave me an advantage because I didn't have to waste time flipping through pages. We know power is work over time, that strength is endurance over time. So I endured a lot of obstacles, but at the same time I created strength and vision and wisdom and endurance. I do a lot of motivational speaking to young kids and I talk to them about this concept of sight versus vision, that sight is a physical ability which I lack, but one of the things I've acquired over time is vision. Vision to me is more of a mindset.

: A.B.: In 1998, I was assigned to CNN in Atlanta and did my fellowship there. I had the chance to meet the chairman and CEO of CNN at the time, Tom Johnson, who supported a film that I produced which aired on CNN later. It was a film on African-American kids in science and engineering. After that, he assigned me to the Washington bureau and I continued to produce for a few subsequent years for science and tech stories while I was doing my Ph.D. at College Park. It was a nice little setup because when I got tired from doing physics, I would go into CNN Washington and work on stories. I did a story on quantum computers. I did another story on the concept of voodoo science. Small little stories here and there when I had the time to do them.

: A.B.: The thing that I tell people all the time is that it doesn't take sight to see science; it's being able to visualize it in your mind. One of the things when I was doing stories for CNN that I learned is that in television, for me, being blind can be an advantage. I insist when I interview people for them to be descriptive of what they're talking about. "What are you talking about? Who are you talking to? What are you pointing at?" And so in the grand scheme of things, it's advantageous because you get great natural sound bites from the people you're interviewing. It helps engage the audience, and people explain things more clearly.

: A.B.: I opened my production company a couple of years after I did my Mass Media Fellowship. It's like on one hand doing assignments, and then combining that with being an entrepreneur. What I've been doing the past few years is producing documentary films for science-based nonprofit organizations who are interested in promoting their science programs and things like that. But with this new show, I'm very excited to getting back into reaching a mass audience.

: A.B.: It's about this guy, Greg Jenkins, who is a physics professor at Howard University [in Washington, D.C.], and he embarked on these adventures in conjunction with his research with students and other scientists during hurricane season. We partnered with him to film his work. We went to Barbados and after that, we caught up with a NASA team in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, during its expedition flying through Hurricane Earl in 2010. The scientists were doing experiments while flying through hurricanes. So of course we flew through Hurricane Earl, too.

: A.B.: Right now we're just kind of testing the ground to see how effective the programming is, how it's received, and testing it with our target audience. We've concluded this first pilot and we have a series of stories we're trying to work on. We are really trying to find an underwriter who will support us for this series. The first film was funded by the National Science Foundation.

: A.B.: One of the things I'm trying to focus on is connecting science breakthroughs and research with the human experience. This is the theme of the series. How does science affect our lives? How do we connect to it? How is it making a difference? I'm interested in doing a film on proton therapy, for example, because I have a tumor in my brain; it's the tumor that affected my eyesight as a child. It's a benign tumor but it continues to grow, so over the course of my life I've had five brain operations. The advantage of proton therapy is that there may be a procedure I could undergo in the future that uses targeted radiation to target the tumorous tissue and that could potentially kill off my tumor. Since I'm the one telling these stories, something like that helps me connect to the audience, for them to see that there's really a human component to the science.

: A.B.: This effort plays into the whole concept of, ???How do we increase the number of African-Americans, Latinos, and so forth, going into science???? It's important that they have visibility, that they have role models. Otherwise they just wind up becoming business people or going into law. The young kids like to see that there are folks they can connect with and go into research with. We've intentionally oriented it to be engaging for adults and enticing enough for children so that adults can sit down with their child and watch the programming with them.

Over the Hurricane airs on WHUT Howard University Television on Thursday, 30 August, at 7:30 p.m. EDT. For future air times, please check Baccouche's Web site for details.

Michael Price is a staff writer for Science Careers.
10.1126/science.caredit.a1200098

Science Training and Mental Health

2012-08-10T17:30:00Z

In the wake of the Colorado shootings, the scientific community should pay more attention to the psychological wellbeing of emerging scientists.

???How many of us saw something frighteningly familiar in the accounts of the circumstances leading up to the shootings????

Does the scientific community have a responsibility for the mental health of its trainees?

In light of the Aurora, Colorado, shootings, which resulted in the deaths of 12 people and was allegedly carried out by a troubled former graduate student in neuroscience, it's a compelling question. It is especially compelling to those of us who have lived through scientific training and experienced its dehumanizing effects. There is something especially destructive about failure for those of us who have always considered ourselves high-achievers.

I do not mean to suggest that the scientific community is responsible for the shootings. On the contrary: That was a heinous, individual act. I am suggesting, rather, that it would be a good thing if that event were to motivate some self-analysis within our community about whether we're paying as much attention as we should be to the psychological well-being of science trainees and early-career scientists, from the undergraduate years through the postdoc and beyond.

When I heard about the background of the shooter???a science graduate student who withdrew from his program and, according to one widely cited report, failed preliminary exams???I felt a desperate need to start such a conversation, because I am sure that many science trainees who suffer and fail could excel if they just had a little more support to help them build resilience in the face of failure.

The 2004 University of California, Berkeley, Graduate Student Mental Health Survey, from the Berkeley Graduate and Professional Schools Mental Health Task Force, concluded: "Almost half of all graduate students participating in this survey reported an emotional or stress-related problem that significantly affected their well-being and/or academic performance in the last twelve months." Almost 10% of those surveyed had seriously considered suicide. "In spite of these high levels of reported mental distress," the Berkeley task force concluded, "respondents commonly perceived no need and no time to use mental health services.???

That was in 2004. Things are worse now, and things are worse still for the members of the underrepresented groups we're so interested in recruiting, because they???we???are more isolated than our peers, by definition.

How many of us saw something frighteningly familiar in the accounts of the circumstances leading up to the shootings? According to press reports, until graduate school the alleged shooter had a stellar academic career and no encounters with the law except for a speeding ticket. How many of us were reminded of someone we once knew, or of a rumor we heard at a conference about a student/postdoc/faculty member with a bright career who flamed out? How many of us have watched unstable peers break down at group meetings or after having too much to drink at parties?

Some of us may even have been reminded of our own struggles. Sure, none of us walked into a movie theater and opened fire, and that is a very important difference. But we may have been reminded of what we felt like during a particularly bad patch in graduate school.

Why should the community care? It's not only because trainees are suffering; it's also because intellectual health is linked with psychological health. Most of us are at our most productive when we're well adjusted???when we feel respected, valued, and confident in our potential. Unfortunately, that describes a rather small fraction of the science-trainee population.

Protecting our intellectual and mental health means viewing us as more than bags of facts and esoteric skills to be deployed for the sake of advancing the scientific and technical enterprise???or to advance the careers of our advisers. Scientifically and personally, we are individuals, with individual gifts and skills that should be respected. Everyone has a story, needs, feelings, hopes, fears, desires. We should be recognized and nurtured.

One of the things that make us so special is an urgent desire to work hard and to achieve???but that same quality makes us vulnerable to having our self-image shattered by failure or disrespect. Under intense stress, even well-prepared students may fail preliminary exams or qualifiers. Experiments usually fail. Yet, far from being taught that failure is a part of science, we sense that our advisers???themselves stressed out and desperate to achieve???are losing faith in us, with dire consequences for our self-images and our futures.

I speak from experience. Anyone familiar with my byline will remember that I wrote a monthly column detailing my experiences from my first year of graduate school through my postdoc. I shared my encounters with failure, the sacrifices I made, and the capricious nature of the graduate school system as I experienced it. Six years after finishing my Ph.D., I am still trying to prove that I???m not useless. It???s still that raw.

The part that's probably worst for our mental health is the gradual realization that in pursuing science, we have not set ourselves up for the success we expected. Instead, we find ourselves stuck in postdoc positions with few alternatives besides a long shot at a faculty position or a wholesale career change. Years of being beaten down have left us psychologically ill-equipped for wholesale changes. We have become risk-averse. That same risk aversion makes us unlikely candidates for starting companies or going for a high-stakes, high-risk scientific prize. What a waste.

For all the discussion of diversifying the workforce???we???ve opened the pipeline wide, and things are more accessible now???have we made things better for everyone? Or will we continue to repeat the same neglectful and abusive behaviors? If we choose the latter course, any pipeline gains are likely to be in vain and short-lived. The process for completing a degree and being a competitive member of the scientific community is not aligned with the realities and expectations of junior members of the community. When we decided to pursue a Ph.D.???a necessity for the careers we thought we wanted in academia, government, or industry???we didn't understand the cost of the choice we were making. This lack of understanding is why I began to write about the challenges I faced. How could I have known that I would be looked down upon for seeking a life outside of the department? What opportunities, relationships, and other elements that contribute to adult life outside of the lab will trainees forgo in order to be perceived as good, so that they can graduate? How long did it take before I forgave myself for moving away from the traditional path I trained for?

When will we start worrying less about the pipeline's leaks and do more to address the corrosive nature of the pipe that we funnel people through? When will we start to truly value the people who come to science wanting to bring their very best? Assuming this conversation takes place???honestly and publicly???how are we going to fix things?

Former science graduate student and postdoc Micella Phoenix DeWhyse wrote a column for Science Careers from 2002 through 2008. Micella Phoenix DeWhyse is still a pseudonym. Discussions on the forum, Facebook, Twitter, or e-mails to the editor or to micella.phoenix.dewhyse@gmail.com are welcome, as she is considering turning her columns into a book.
10.1126/science.caredit.a1200090

Q&A: A Career on the Fence

2012-07-27T17:30:00Z

A graduate school dean and former Olympic athlete reflects on science, fencing, and how the two activities have benefited each other.

???When I was tired and exhausted with fencing, ideas about my research work came to me.??? ???Mark J. T. Smith.

With the 2012 Olympic Games set to kick off in London, Science Careers decided to have a chat with electrical and computer engineering researcher and former fencing athlete Mark J. T. Smith about what it's like to combine science and serious sport. Smith served as head of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University, West Lafayette, in Indiana, for 6 years and is now dean of the university???s graduate school. Smith was the national fencing champion of the United States in 1981 and 1983 and a member of the U.S. Olympic fencing team in 1980 and 1984. He carried the Olympic torch toward the opening ceremonies in the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta, one of the last torch-carriers. The following highlights from the interview were edited for brevity and clarity.

: M.S.: I guess I grew up as a little kid very interested in science and the space program and things like that. At 6 years old, I was always tinkering and experimenting with things, so I think that was first. And then I started, as most kids, having an interest in sports activities, maybe about that same time, but I didn???t think of that in connection with a career.

: M.S.: The strongest influence was a cousin I had who had a workshop in his basement. He would build a lot of the Heathkit units, oscilloscopes, and radios. I fell in love with electronics, and this was something that I wanted to understand and explore.

: M.S.: I was heavily influenced by a demonstration that I saw when I was an undergraduate student at MIT [the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge]. There was a graduate student and a professor, they typed some words into the computer, and the computer would take a little bit of time and then it would pronounce the words for you. And this was just the coolest thing I had ever seen so I decided that signal processing was what I wanted to go into. Then Tom Barnwell at [the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta] and I talked about projects that might lead to a good thesis, and I started in the direction of looking at sub-band coding, which was a way of trying to represent speech at low bit rates so that you could store speech with high quality.

: M.S.: I was on the swimming team and the fencing team in high school, and I just had a good time in sports. I was better in fencing than I was in swimming, and so when I went to MIT, I continued with the fencing and I was on the varsity team there. I entered my first national competition when I first started graduate school and I took third place, and that put me on the international squad in the United States. This was 1978 and there was an Olympic Games coming up in 1980. That was the first time I recognized that I had a shot at making an Olympic team.

In 1980, I went to the president of Georgia Tech, and I presented him with a proposal. I wanted to take off for 6 months to train for the Olympics in Europe, and I didn???t have the money to do that, and so I asked if there was any way that he could help me. He said, ???Well, give me some time to see what we can do,??? and I thought that was a polite way of getting rid of me. A few weeks later, he had a check for me for $1500. So I went to Europe in preparation for the Olympics and ended up making the team. Now, 1980 was disappointing because that was the Olympics in Moscow and the United States boycotted. But I continued for the next 4 years as a graduate student and made the 1984 team.

: M.S.: It wasn???t anything that I had to make a conscious effort to do. Working in the laboratory, sometimes you just get stale and you are ready to do something athletic. And then when I was tired and exhausted with fencing, ideas about my research work came to me. It helped me create a nice balance between work and play. The other thing I was fortunate about is that I was in signal processing, so a lot of what I did was mathematics. This was before the days of laptops, but I could work out a lot of equations and formulas with just a pencil and paper. And so while I was training in Europe, I could also be working on my thesis. Toward the end, I was writing my thesis while preparing for the games and the two activities complemented each other very nicely.

: M.S.: No, I didn???t see those two as being in competition. I had time allocated for fencing, I had time allocated for studying, I had time allocated for taking classes, and I became rather disciplined. But I think like many people who do a Ph.D., there were plateaus and then sometimes you have some ideas that you are very excited about and they wouldn???t pan out. That had nothing to do with the fencing; that???s just the way research work goes. But I kind of figured out an important part of the algorithm, and then after that it was pretty clear what my contribution was going to be and what my thesis was going to be.

: M.S.: No, just the opposite. There was one time I was in a competition and it ran over to the next day. But I had an exam that day; so I called my professor and I said, ???Look, I???m in the finals of this competition, is it all right to miss the exam???? And the professor said, ???Just go ahead and win the competition and we???ll handle your final exams when you come back.??? That is an example of the kind of support that I had along the way.

: M.S.: When I was training for the Olympics, it was up to me to make the team. I managed my own time without any third-party oversight. However, once the U.S. team was selected, which was a few months before the games, we had structured weekend practices in addition to our individual home practices. We all worked very hard.

Mark J. T. Smith checking fencing weapons at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, California.

: M.S.: Usually when you make it to an Olympic team there have been several major international competitions that you participated in before, but the Olympics is quite special. I made the Olympics in Los Angeles, and so I was representing my country before a stadium of, I don???t know, 70,000 people. There???s just a tremendous amount of excitement. It was like being a celebrity for 3 weeks. But, interestingly, when it came down to the competition, all of that went out of your mind, and you focused strictly on whom you were competing against.

: M.S.: I fenced each touch for each touch so I didn???t focus on what the score was. Sometimes people get depressed and they???ll fall apart if they???re down by 3 or 4 points. I didn???t let that worry me and I think it???s just because I was very heavily focused.

But of course you want to win; you want to plan for the future. Every time I fenced somebody, I always observed what they did and sort of anticipated what I would do the next time I fence them. It???s a very mental game because you???re trying to figure out your opponent; your opponent is trying to figure you out.

: M.S.: Yes, certainly, you have to focus when you???re in a science field. Fencing, on the other hand, you can practice things and you can schedule making noticeable progress in your game, as opposed to research where you can???t schedule breakthroughs.

: M.S.: Every once in a while, I would run into a certain fencer who I had trouble beating. I would study the habits of the fencer and then I would figure out moves that I needed to do that would counter those actions. So I spent a lot of time studying my opponents, maybe more so than my teammates. And that???s kind of what we do in engineering: We analyze and then we look for solutions.

: M.S.: Winning my first U.S. national championship, because I had no idea that I could do this. I surprised myself and everyone else so it was a very nice experience.

: M.S.: Certainly having achievements in fencing boosted self-esteem. But I???ve always been cautiously optimistic about things that I do. I think in research work, it???s also a little bit different because, at least in my community, it???s not a competition. In research, your joy comes from making a contribution that someone else will be excited about and can build on, and then they make a contribution, which you can build on.

: M.S.: I never thought of it as being a liability. Most people had some hobby or activity that they did so it wasn???t that unusual. In the scientific community, people will judge you on the work that you present at conferences and the work that you present in journals. Early in my career, I never put anything dealing with fencing on my bio because I felt the two were separate. And then a little bit later I???d mention it because it was a natural icebreaker. So, for example, if I was going to be giving a talk, many times people would mention, ???and he???s also a fencer??? and everybody would find that to be kind of interesting and people would feel more comfortable talking to you.

: M.S.: It???s important to have some form of exercise in your life. It???s important to balance family life and your research life as well. If you???re going to be in an academic career for several decades, you???re not going to survive if you don???t have that balance.

The second thing that I would say is it???s very important to establish partnerships with research colleagues because many of the important problems now are interdisciplinary, and so working in teams you will have a better chance of having a real impact than if you???re trying to work by yourself.

Elisabeth Pain is the contributing editor for Europe.
10.1126/science.caredit.a1200085

A Capital Job for a Midwestern Transplant

2012-07-13T17:30:00Z

Tiffany West helped turn Washington, D.C.'s HIV/AIDS??effort into a??widely admired program.

???I was at CDC with all these kids from Harvard and Yale and that really did build my confidence. That was a turning point in my career.??? ???Tiffany West

In 1998, Tiffany West???s college roommate suggested they enter a lottery that chose students from their school, the Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans, to do summer internships at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta. West, who grew up in Florissant, Missouri, had been to Georgia to visit relatives and driven past the CDC campus, but that???s about it. ???I knew what it was and where it was, but it just looked like a giant fortress on Clifton Road,??? says West, 34, referring to the thoroughfare that abuts the campus.

Today, West is bureau chief of the surveillance and epidemiology branch at the Department of Health???s HIV/AIDS division in Washington, D.C. She is credited with helping to turn the city???s HIV/AIDS program from an embarrassment into an emblem of what can be done by local governments with talented employees and solid links to academia and the community. ???I wasn???t a super overachiever like the geniuses I work with,??? says West, whose father is a truck driver and whose mother works for a home healthcare agency. ???But a lot of times there are really smart people who aren???t able to speak up. I speak my mind.???

West???s CDC internship did not start off well. ???They had me typing and filing,??? she remembers. ???I said, ???I don???t want to do this all summer. You have to give me something else.??? ??? Her boss loaned her an intro-to-epidemiology book and moved her to a project that made public education videos about disease outbreaks. ???I didn???t know what epidemiology was,??? West says. She ended up being selected as the summer intern of the year. ???I was at CDC with all these kids from Harvard and Yale and that really did build my confidence,??? she says. ???That was a turning point in my career.???

West returned to New Orleans and a brutal schedule, completing her undergraduate degree while working what she not so fondly refers to as ???vampire days" at The Gap, a clothing store. ???I was night manager, 8 p.m. to 3 in the morning, and I???d go home, go to sleep, and go to class at 9:30 a.m., and then get out at 2 p.m., study 2 to 6, and take a nap from 6 to 7:30 before returning to work,??? West says. After completing her degree, she took a 6-month break and then entered a master???s program at Tulane University???s School of Public Health, also in New Orleans, in 2001. She continued to work the vampire shift at the Gap through part of 2002.

A highlight of West???s time at Tulane, where she studied epidemiology and community health evaluation, was a fellowship with the Indian Health Service that took her to the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation in South Dakota. She worked on an injury prevention program, and it opened her eyes to the difference between theory and practice. The Sioux had had many injuries related to kids riding in the front seats of cars, so the program installed children???s car seats. One day, not long after she arrived, she saw a man who had received a car seat drive up to a 7/11 convenience store, his baby lying in the front seat and a brand new, empty car seat in the rear. ???That was a life-changing experience because it gave me an alternative viewpoint about health behavior,??? she says. ???It taught me a lot about messaging.???

For a year after graduating from Tulane, West worked as a chronic disease epidemiologist at the Louisiana Office of Public Health. Then she landed back at CDC, which introduced her to the HIV/AIDS world. As a public health analyst in the HIV/AIDS prevention branch, West supported the National HIV Behavioral Surveillance (NHBS) project, an ongoing effort that studies prevalence of infection in specific risk groups in cities. ???I was really happy at CDC,??? West says. ???It wasn???t necessarily what I expected: Working there is like being in military???it???s very hierarchical and very structured.??? She enjoyed the work and took a special interest in D.C.???s public health department, which in 2005 received a drubbing from DC Appleseed, a grassroots organization that focuses on that city's problems. ???There was all this talk about defunding them from projects,??? West says. ???I was the [NHBS] project officer for D.C. and said I???m going to make sure they don???t get defunded.???

The next year, the head of the HIV/AIDS program at D.C.???s health department offered West a job as a public health analyst. West???s academic adviser at Tulane, epidemiologist Manya Magnus, had recently moved to D.C. to work at George Washington University (GW) with Alan Greenberg, who had headed CDC???s HIV epidemiology branch. Magnus lobbied West to join them. ???She said they were doing all these awesome things and that I had to come,??? West says.

West quit CDC and packed her bags for D.C., which she had been to just once before on a site visit. ???Everybody thought I was crazy,??? she says. ???All my CDC colleagues, my dad, but it was the best decision I ever made.???

Tiffany West

Working with Magnus, Greenberg, and the rest of the team at GW, West evaluated the health department???s program, recruited new people, and came up with a playbook. A top priority was to issue an annual report about HIV cases in D.C., which, as DC Appleseed noted, the health department had never released. Soon they started issuing regular reports about the city???s epidemic. They adopted state-of-the-art techniques such as analyzing differences in average and cumulative viral levels in neighborhoods and various risk groups to assess the community viral load, a metric for guiding treatment and prevention efforts. (See this related story.)

Throughout the next 6 years, West was promoted to bureau chief and helped turn the city???s HIV/AIDS effort into a widely admired program that has received accolades from formerly vocal critics, including DC Appleseed. ???I had a lot to live up to,??? West says. ???There were a lot of people expecting me to fail, but I didn???t. You have to believe in yourself and put in a lot of hard work. There are not a lot of people in public health who work harder than I do and want to make a difference more than I do.???

West says she may return to school to earn a Ph.D. someday, but for now she plans to stay put. ???Every day I come to work I???m making a difference,??? she says. ???I know that sounds Pollyannaish but with public health it???s not clinical medicine where you treat a patient, they get sick, and come back. With public health you???re trying to do something on a scale that???s different from clinical medicine.??? Besides, it beats working the night shift at The Gap. ???This is my calling,??? West says. ???This is what I???m supposed to be doing in life.???

Jon Cohen is a correspondent with Science.
10.1126/science.caredit.a1200078

Career Q&A: Equality for Quality

2012-06-22T17:30:00Z

Curt Rice of the University of Troms?? discusses why helping women prepare for promotions is both right and smart.

???There is another tricky thing here, which is that young women believe that this problem is solved.??? ???Curt Rice

Curt Rice is a professor in the Department of Languages & Literature at the University of Troms?? in Norway and also the university's vice president for research and development. Under Rice's direction, Troms?? put in place a new initiative???the Promotion Project???to promote more women to the position of full professor. These efforts were rewarded by the Norwegian government with the national Gender Equality Prize for 2011, which consisted of 2 million kroner (about $338,500). After hearing about the Promotion Project on Rice???s blog and in a webinar, Science Careers asked Rice what prompted the university to try and redress the gender imbalance at the full-professor level, how successful they've been so far, and how young scientists elsewhere can benefit from the lessons learned.

The following highlights from the interview were edited for brevity and clarity.

: C.R.: First, they face the same challenges that women in the workplace in general face. So, for example, research shows that in every European country, women do more of the work at home than men. And that is going to have an impact on women???s careers, so that???s a deep cultural impediment that many women are going to have to deal with, and that plays itself out in, for example, decisions to have children.

Then, in academia, there are some specific structural impediments. For example, the job of being an associate professor has two main tasks, teaching and research, but the promotion to full professor often is based exclusively or at least heavily on performance as a researcher. It seems to be the case that women spend more time on their teaching than men do, so department chairs in big surveys report that when they have extra teaching that needs to be done, they often ask women to do it because they are willing. And students report that when it comes to getting help on their term papers and so on, women are more generous with their time than their male colleagues. But that doesn???t count when they apply for promotion, and so women tend to be older when they are promoted.

When I???m in a leadership position in a university, do I really want to go to my women associate professors and say, ???Please spend less time on teaching???? I don???t want to do that because I have 10,000 students here who I want to get a good education. So, on the contrary, I would rather say to the men, ???Spend more time on your teaching.??? Except I don???t really want to do that, either, because it???s important that we have a profile as an active research institution. So this is one example of a situation where we have a structure that plays out differently for men and women.

: C.R.: There are two reasons a university should care about working on this. One is that it???s the right thing to do. Society is balanced, and student numbers are balanced, and in our case, it's even balanced at the level of associate professor, so it should also be balanced at the top. It just seems fair, and we want to be a fair employer.

But the second reason is that it???s smart. We believe that our university functions better as a workplace when we have gender balance at the top, and we believe???I mean there???s research on this, that???s what convinces us???that research groups function better when they are gender balanced. And we believe that leadership teams are more effective when they???re gender-balanced. That???s what has really been pushing us, especially in the last 5 years. We want to be better at providing research and education, and we believe that gender balance actually does make us better.

: C.R.: The Promotion Project from the last few years has been very important. We went to every department and we said, ???Who are the women who you, as the head of the department, think are within 3 years of being qualified to be a full professor???? So we identified a group of women and then, with each one of them, we said, ???What do you need to keep moving forward???? And of course, they have different answers. Some of them need an assistant to help with the statistics, and some of them need a new microscope, and some of them need money to pay an outside person to read through their book manuscript and give feedback.

And then, there is some research to suggest that women as a group have lower self-confidence than men, that???s why we decided that the heart of this Promotion Project would be to have each individual woman put together a portfolio for evaluation. We would hire an outside person and ask that person to write a report evaluating the portfolio and giving very specific feedback on what they need to do to qualify for promotion. And that has had a tremendous effect. So actually, about 10% of the women got feedback that said, ???You???re already there.??? They then applied officially, and we now have promoted several of them. Each department chair had individual meetings with the other evaluated women to make a plan for the next 2 years, and now they are working in a very focused way toward responding to what came out of those trial evaluations.

And it???s really contributing to changing the whole culture of the university. One of the chairs just told me the other day that there were three men in their faculty who had said that they want a trial evaluation, and the chair said, ???Great, let???s make that happen.??? So this Promotion Project is an example of choosing to make the situation better for women, and as a result you make it better for everyone.

: C.R.: It???s important for young men and women to think about their career path, so you should say to yourself, ???OK, I???m a postdoc now, and in 3 years, my goal is to have an assistant professor position,??? or ???I???m an assistant professor now, and in 5 years, my goal is to be an associate professor.??? I think the most important thing they can do then is to initiate that process with their boss and say, ???Let???s talk about my 5-year plan, and I think it???s going to be great for you if I can do this, because I???m going to be producing research, and I???m going to become more qualified and all that, but I can???t do it alone. I need some help, so what kinds of things can you do to help me???? In other words, they should contribute to making a culture where talking about career progress is a normal thing.

And then you also have to be assertive about discriminatory things. So when the teaching assignments are made, you have to be confident that gender is not a factor there, and if you need to ask questions to have that confidence, then you should ask those questions. It can be a delicate thing to do, so before an issue comes up, I think it???s good to ask, ???How many men and women do we have actually working at this university, and do we have any goals about changing that???????and just make it into one of the things that gets discussed. And then, when the teaching assignment comes along, you say, ???Well, I???m just asking because I want to know, but what about that guy down there, is he doing his share of the teaching???? So it is risky, but I think if the topic becomes a normalized topic then it???s easier to bring it up. Which is part of why I think a culture of career development is really an important thing to pursue.

: C.R.: There is another tricky thing here, which is that young women believe that this problem is solved. So women who are 25 years old tend not to be interested in gender equality issues because they think, ???I don???t want to be promoted because I???m a woman, I want to be promoted because I???m a good scientist.??? They don???t realize until they???re 35 or 40 and getting well into their careers that men and women are affected differently by the systems that we have. So what I would like to say to a 25-year-old woman is, ask potential employers how they approach the topic of career development. If you go to a place where there is engagement in helping young scientists become good senior scientists 10 years later, then, when you finally at the age of 40 realize that discrimination does exist and affects you, you'll be in a place where there are people who care about that career issue and can help you. I do believe that these days many more universities care about this. It???s still not enough, but I think that universities will change as more and more of their new young staff members express an expectation for leadership to invest in them. So it???s very important for people to ask this general question about career development, in part because just asking the question can contribute to making a change.

Elisabeth Pain is contributing editor for Europe.
10.1126/science.caredit.a1200071

Soldiers Becoming Scientists

2012-06-15T17:30:00Z

The Post-9/11 GI Bill and other programs are enabling some veterans to pursue careers in science.

"The military???especially deployments and being in a leadership position???forces you to mature a lot earlier than you would if you went directly into school." ???Jason Hettmansperger

Proposed in 2007 and enacted in 2008, the newest version of the U.S. military's veterans education program???variously known as the Post-9/11 GI Bill, the Webb GI Bill, or the New GI Bill???aims to provide returning servicemen and servicewomen with the opportunity to begin or continue higher education at colleges, universities, and professional training programs. Last year, the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) paid out $10.5 billion in educational assistance from its $69 billion budget, $8.1 billion of which supported returning vets on the New GI Bill.

Veterans are eligible to receive benefits from the New GI Bill if they have served on active duty after 10 September 2001. The program pays for up to 36 months (4 academic years) of tuition expenses, the amount of funding dependent on the amount of time spent in service. The New GI Bill also provides stipends for living expenses and books.

According to the 2011 VBA Annual Benefits Report, 116,499 veterans used GI Bill assistance during the 2011 fiscal year to pursue undergraduate degrees; 21,043 used it to pursue graduate degrees. Some of those veterans were studying science. VBA doesn't keep track of who studies what, but according to department heads and student veterans contacted by Science Careers, computer science seems especially popular among returning veterans.

Due to the increasingly technological nature of modern warfare, veterans today return home with not only determination and a solid work ethic???character traits of good scientists as much as of good soldiers???but also with technical and other important job-related skills. Approximately 38% of active enlisted men and women directly serve in technical or medical capacities. Many of the rest learn how to use technically complex instruments and become familiar with a wide range of technology, even if they don't serve in explicitly technical roles.

A 2009 report by the National Science Foundation says, "Post-9/11 veterans offer the nation???s engineering and science employers a diverse and pre-qualified pool of future talent. The vast majority of those who serve in the enlisted ranks of the nation???s armed services are high school graduates with strong cognitive aptitudes. ??? They have experience managing technical systems and solving complex problems. They know how to work in teams and how to lead."

Science Careers spoke with four veterans with scientific ambitions???all supported by the New GI Bill or other VBA funding???about their experiences, motivations, and scientific goals.

Sergeant Jason Hettmansperger

After he graduated from high school in Somerset, Kentucky, Jason Hettmansperger says, "I wasn't ready to just go to school. I really sought after adventure, challenge???and the military was able to provide me with the lifestyle I was after.???

Hettmansperger joined the U.S. Marine Corps (USMC) Reserve as a member of the military police. He served two stints overseas as a convoy and border security officer, first in Iraq (from 2008 to 2009), and then in Afghanistan (from 2010 to 2011). Between those tours, Hettmansperger enrolled in the University of Kentucky, working toward a computer science degree when he had time off from military service. He is now 27, has fulfilled his military commitment, and will start his junior year in August.

Hettmansperger says he always wanted to do something technical, but his experience in the military cemented his interest. "We had a lot of tools that were very technologically demanding in the Marines," he says. Having used some of the tools computer scientists developed in the lab gives him a respect for both the research and its applicability, he says. "Having seen it from both ends is an awesome thing."

Yet, the work Hettmansperger is most interested in has nothing to do with war. He was hooked on computer science, he says, by a University of Kentucky research project that allowed scholars to read otherwise unreadable ancient texts from Pompeii, under the direction of computer science professor Brent Seales. "They can't unroll these scrolls without destroying them," he says. "So they were able to take these scrolls and take a very accurate scan of them. So then they had programs that could digitally unroll it, and the scan was so accurate they were able to determine what the pages said. ??? I thought, all of this is happening right here at the University of Kentucky, and I could be able to participate in that," he says. "It made me realize that this is definitely what I want to do."

Hettmansperger believes his military experience has made him a better student. ???The military???especially deployments and being in a leadership position???forces you to mature a lot earlier than you would if you went directly into school," he says. That added maturity has "helped me to be able to have the focus and drive to take it more seriously than some of my peers." He plans to go to graduate school for computer science.

The New GI Bill "has been an exceptional resource for me because I don't have to get out and have a part-time job and put in 20 hours a week just to be able to pay for my apartment. I'm able to focus solely on studies."

Lance Corporal Aaron Cruz

Aaron Cruz comes from a military family. His stepfather, mother, and both grandparents served. But he didn't enlist right after high school; first he worked as a mail carrier.

At 25, Cruz enlisted in the USMC, serving as an Asian-Pacific cryptologic linguist working on "top secret" projects, he says. Now 30 years old, married, and just finished with his USMC contract, he's pursuing a computer science degree at Briar Cliff University in Sioux City, Iowa. ???I've always been fascinated by languages, and computer programming is just like learning another language," he says.

Cruz says that his military training, with its regimentation and rule-following, also pushed him toward computer science. "In computers, it's a lot more 'if X, then Y' mentality" than in other areas of science. "The military is so regimented that it's kind of like that. It was probably a safer field for me to go into than astronomy or psychology."

Another factor played into Cruz's selection of computer science: the job market. He noticed that people with computer science degrees were getting hired and receiving good salaries.

Airman First Class Cheryl Kastanowski

Although many members of Cheryl Kastanowski's family served in the military, she was the first woman to do so, and it was something of a last resort. In her mid-20s, she found herself in a dangerous domestic relationship. The best way to escape and gain the skills and resources she needed to start a new life, she decided, was to join the armed forces.

So in 1987, at 27, Kastanowski enlisted in the Air Force as a print journalist and photojournalist. In those days, she says, the United States was involved in no major overseas operations. She spent her time traveling from base to base, recording the goings-on of uniformed men and women. The work took a toll on her feet, she says. "A lot of veterans have problems with their feet, and I have horrible, horrible feet."

After leaving the Air Force, Kastanowski earned a degree in sociology from the University of Kentucky. She worked for several years as a social worker, but she didn't enjoy the work and wasn't making much money, she says. "I was at the point where I had to do something."

Then VBA's Vocational Rehabilitation and Employment (VR&E) program attracted her attention. Three years ago, she sought and received educational assistance under VR&E. She qualified because her foot injuries had caused severe arthritis in her knees and spine. VR&E covers tuition, books, and some of her living expenses.

Kastanowski is now enrolled in the University of Kentucky's plant and soil science program. "My grandfather was a minister in the Chicago area but was also a well-known horticulturist," she explains. "And it's in my blood, too." When she finishes her studies, Kastanowski plans to experiment with sustainable agriculture. She is especially interested in plasticulture, a technique pioneered at the University of Kentucky that uses plastics to improve aspects of agriculture. "I'd like to experiment with different plastics and fabrics in varying colors and thicknesses: how well they suppress weeds, help retain moisture, and how their use increases or decreases quality and yield," she says.

She is also interested in horticulture therapy, which harnesses the therapeutic properties of gardening. "We're hoping to offer more options for the disabled gardener, as well as promoting the healing properties associated with horticulture," she says. "I know how much it's helped me, and I'm sure there are many more out there like me."

Sergeant Jonathan Cruz

Jonathan Cruz

After high school, Jonathan Cruz (no relation to Aaron) enrolled in Lorain County Community College, in Ohio, to study biochemistry. He had known since he was a child that he wanted to study science. "What encouraged me to join the military was to acquire something I was lacking at the time. I needed some discipline, some motivation. ??? I kind of figured that the military would help me gain some of that.???

At first, Cruz served as a Russian linguist for a signals intelligence unit at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. Then he served two tours in Fallujah, Iraq, working with the 2nd Radio Battalion to intercept and analyze signals on local digital networks.

In 2008, after 5 years in the USMC, Cruz's contract ended and he enrolled at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), eager to learn whether his military service had given him the dedication needed to do well in college. Around the same time, Cruz and his wife had a son, adding an extra layer of difficulty to his educational goals.

Cruz excelled in his studies and finished his undergraduate education with three bachelor's degrees: biochemistry and molecular biology, biological sciences, and Russian. "Since getting out of the military and going back to school, I've become a sponge, absorbing everything," he says. In 2009, he participated in a summer research program at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he studied the genetics underlying autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease. He intends to continue studying the biochemistry of diseases. He recently was accepted into UMBC's master's degree program in applied molecular biology.

He hasn't decided yet what he'll do after the master's program. He may continue on the research track and get a Ph.D., or he may apply for medical school. Right now, he says, he's leaning toward a research career.

Cruz says his military experience instilled a work ethic that is rare among people who haven't served. "There's a significant difference between those who came back and those who haven't served in the military," he says.

In addition to being more focused, Cruz says, he takes on leadership positions more readily than his peers do. "I used to be a team leader at my unit, so I gained those leadership skills and learned the mindset of working in a team," he says. "I find myself randomly bumped into leadership positions. Some of them I volunteer for, and others I just find myself in. ??? Sometimes nobody takes the initiative, and somebody has to."

Mark Perks, a senior chemistry lecturer at UMBC who had Cruz in several of his classes, says that Cruz's maturity was evident the first time they met at a reception for new chemistry majors. Even when childcare emergencies required Cruz to miss a class, he would immediately ask how he could make up the work. "Returning students are committed," he says. "They're on a mission, and they tend to do very well."

Michael Price is a staff writer for Science Careers.
10.1126/science.caredit.a1200067

Often Wrong, Never in Doubt

2012-06-01T17:30:00Z

As head of the accelerator division at TRIUMF, Lia Merminga is a rare woman in the upper echelons of physics.

"Accelerator science touches upon many fields, and I find that very attractive. I can design and build accelerators that are used to study the most fundamental questions of our nature, to study the Higgs particle or dark matter and dark energy." ???Lia Merminga

While science as a profession has made strides toward gender equality, some fields lag???notably physics and engineering. For female scientists, cracking the glass ceiling in these fields requires not just dogged passion and dedication but also a refusal to be cowed by long odds.

A prime example is Lia Merminga, a rare woman in the top echelons of physics. Today, she heads the accelerator division for TRIUMF, Canada???s national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics, but she learned much of her determination and perseverance???not to mention her technical knowledge and teamwork skills???at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory???s (Fermilab's) Tevatron accelerator when she was a grad student.

"The motto of our experiment was, 'often wrong, never in doubt,' " Merminga says. The team printed t-shirts with that motto, written in Greek, acknowledging the fact that many of the theories they tested were eventually proved wrong. "But for at least a period of time, we were never in doubt that they were correct."

Likewise, Merminga never doubted that she could excel in science. After earning her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1989, she joined the accelerator theory group as a visiting physicist at Stanford???s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California. Three years later, she joined the Center for Advanced Studies of Accelerators (CASA) at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, Virginia. She worked her way up through the ranks and in 2002 became director of CASA's beam physics group. In 2008, TRIUMF recruited her to lead its accelerator program, making her one of the most senior scientists in Canada.

Today, Merminga manages her dream project: leading the design and construction of a new accelerator facility to produce rare isotopes for nuclear physics and medicine. "It has been a huge opportunity for me to expand as a scientific leader," she says.

When she comes home after work, her priorities change from nuclear physics to nuclear family. She's married to a fellow physicist, and they have a teenage son.

Science Careers sat down with Merminga at the February 2012 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (which publishes Science Careers) in Vancouver, Canada, to discuss her rise in physics, navigating the competing demands of being a scientist and being a mother, and the direction she hopes to take accelerator physics research.

These interview highlights were edited for brevity and clarity.

: L.M.: A friend of mine gave me the biography of Madame [Marie] Curie as a birthday present when I was 13. I was fascinated. Then, a physics teacher that I had in high school, who was superb, largely influenced me. She demanded excellence from us, and she gave excellence to her teaching. A woman who is so professional and who has such high standards???this was very inspiring to me.

: L.M.: Initially, I didn???t have any preconceived plans. I entered the physics department at the University of Athens. In my third year of undergraduate studies, I realized it wasn???t enough. I wanted to keep going.

My current husband became a postdoc at Fermilab and made me aware that they had a graduate program in accelerator science. I was fascinated by the fact that you are studying something that is quite deep. These are really very rigorous scientific questions but you have the opportunity to make progress in relatively short time scales compared to high-energy physics.

: L.M.: I feel I am contributing something to the advancement of knowledge and to the improvement of quality of life???for example, by working on accelerators that produce medical isotopes.

Accelerator science touches upon many fields, and I find that very attractive. I can design and build accelerators that are used to study the most fundamental questions of our nature, to study the Higgs particle or dark matter and dark energy. And here at TRIUMF, I work on nuclear physics accelerators and the cyclotron, which is used for materials science and nuclear medicine. So, you can enable science on multiple fronts.

: L.M.: To get people that used to work in separate divisions to work together and learn from each other. The division I am responsible for used to be split, and there are some historical differences and tensions between the two groups. I had to bridge those gaps and unite them. We???re making big progress.

Also, one of our challenges at TRIUMF is that our plans and our goals are typically more ambitious than our resources can support. But so far, we are quite successful in keeping our science program strong while building our new accelerator.

: L.M.: Ultimately I want TRIUMF???s accelerator division to be one of the top-ranking accelerator divisions around the world. There are certain prerequisites in order to accomplish that goal. Mainly, routine things need to be streamlined so they don???t require extra resources and effort or time, so we can focus on frontier research and breakthroughs.

: L.M.: I???ve been very lucky in my career. At Jefferson Lab, we were looking for somebody to be in charge of CASA, and the efforts we made to attract an outside person didn???t lead anywhere. Finally the division director, Swapan Chattopadhyay, asked me if I would consider taking the job. Now, I had no managerial experience before. So he was sticking his neck out big time doing that. He was the first one to recognize me as a scientific leader and give me the opportunity to grow in that direction.

: L.M.: My field is male-dominated; there is no question about that. I feel that men tend to be almost too assertive. There were times that I walked away from a meeting and cried because I perceived that somebody did not treat me respectfully. Not recently, but when I was younger and less established.

I feel it is very important to be good technically. And then nothing else matters. If you know your stuff, then you are okay. That???s my experience.

: L.M.: I???ve always had this feeling that people looked at you and tried to associate you with a familiar female figure in their life???either their mother, daughter, or wife. And that those associations don???t allow for straightforward interactions that focus on the technical aspects of the subject we???re dealing with.

: L.M.: Certainly things are a lot better now than they used to be when I was 35. I???m also more mature as a scientist and as a manager. Probably it is no surprise that people listen to me more carefully and respect my guidance now.

: L.M.: There are many days in the week that I think I don???t do a very good job either as a mother or as a scientist. When I am away, I worry about how he is doing, has he done his homework, and does he miss me. On the other hand, I would not have it any other way. I believe that seeing his parents pursuing what they really love might be one of the best lessons he could get from us. I???m hoping this will stay with him and guide his own choices.

: L.M.: I used to go to my son???s classes in elementary and middle school and give lectures. At that stage, boys and girls are equally as excited in scientific subjects. I think between middle and high school, we lose a large fraction of the girls.

One factor is that boys tend to be more aggressive in the classroom, and they are not as afraid to ask questions. I went to an all-girls high school where I didn???t experience this sort of competition. I think this gave me the assurance and self esteem to say, ???I???m also good, and I can pursue physics and math.???

: L.M.: Overall, things aren???t equal, exactly. I think it is getting better because I think men are accepting women in the workforce and in graduate schools. But I would not be surprised if young women are facing similar problems every once in a while.

On average, I don???t feel I???ve been discriminated against. If I???m invited to give a talk somewhere and I???m chosen because they want to have gender equality???by and large, I want to take this opportunity. And I try to do a very good job. But I will use the opportunity to be out there and say, "Yes, women can be as good as men, and better. We are also a significant force in this field."

: L.M.: When I was young, I heard a woman who gave a talk, and I think she was at a very high level at the National Institutes of Health at the time. She said she had two pieces of advice to young women starting up in scientific and engineering fields. One of them is, ???Stay focused.??? And the other is, ???Don???t take no for an answer.???

I found both of them to be crucial to my success???especially ???don???t take no for an answer.??? This may not have to do with my being a woman, but if you come up with an idea somehow the tendency is that people want to turn down the idea. They say either, ???We tried it and it didn???t lead anywhere,??? or, ???It???s not going to work.??? Don???t stop. Don???t. Just keep pushing. Not all ideas are good, but don???t stop at the first "no." To be determined and to persevere is very important.

Marissa Fessenden is a science communication student at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
10.1126/science.caredit.a1200063

Just Herself

2012-06-01T17:30:00Z

In her life and her search for gravitational waves, the MacArthur-winning MIT physicist Nergis Mavalvala is comfortable in her own skin.

???I am just myself, ??? but out of that comes something positive.??? ???Nergis Mavalvala

Nergis Mavalvala, professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, can check off a whole lot of boxes on the diversity form. She isn't just a woman in physics, which is rare enough. She is an immigrant from Pakistan and a self-described ???out, queer person of color.??? ???I don???t mind being on the fringes of any social group,??? she says.

With a toothy grin, the gregarious mother of a 4-year-old child explains why she likes her outsider status: ???You are less constrained by the rules.??? She may still be an outsider, but she's no longer obscure; her 2010 MacArthur Fellowship saw to that. In addition to the cash and the honor, the award came with opportunities to speak to an interested public about her somewhat esoteric research. ???That is the best part,??? she says.

Mavalvala and her collaborators are fashioning an ultrasensitive telescope designed to catch a glimpse of gravitational waves. Albert Einstein predicted the existence of these ripples in spacetime nearly a century ago, but they haven???t been observed directly yet. Theoretically a consequence of violent cosmic events???the collisions of black holes, the explosive deaths of stars, or even the big bang???gravitational waves could provide a brand new lens for studying the universe.

When she became a MacArthur fellow, former female students wrote to her saying that she was a model for what was possible for women. At different points in her scientific career, lesbian and gay students and colleagues mentioned something similar: They had been inspired by the example she had set for them.

She embraces her role as role model. Something important is happening, she believes. ???I am just myself,??? she says. ???But out of that comes something positive.??? By being just herself, she is a source of inspiration for a wide range of individuals from groups underrepresented in the physical sciences.

The girl from Karachi

Mavalvala, who came to this country as a teenager to attend Wellesley College in Massachusetts, has a natural gift for being comfortable in her own skin. ???Even when Nergis was a freshman, she struck me as fearless, with a refreshing can-do attitude,??? says Robert Berg, a professor of physics at Wellesley.

While many professors would like to treat students as colleagues, Berg observes, most students don???t respond as equals. From the first day, Mavalvala acted and worked like an equal. She helped Berg, who at the time was new to the faculty, set up a laser and transform an empty room into a lab. Before she graduated in 1990, Berg and Mavalvala had co-authored a paper in Physical Review B: Condensed Matter.

Her parents encouraged academic excellence. She was by temperament very hands-on. ???I used to borrow tools and parts from the bike-repair man across the street to fix my bike,??? she says. Her mother objected to the grease stains, ???but my parents never said such skills were off-limits to me or my sister.??? So she grew up without stereotypical gender roles. Once in the United States, she did not feel bound by U.S. social norms, she recalls.

Nergis Mavalvala

Her practical skills stood her in good stead in 1991, when was scouting for a research group to join after her first year as a graduate student at MIT. Her adviser was moving to Chicago and Mavalvala had decided not to follow him, so she needed a new adviser. She met Rainer Weiss, who worked down the hallway.

???What do you know???? Weiss asked her. She began to list the classes she had taken at the institute???but the renowned experimentalist interrupted with, ???What do you know how to do???? Mavalvala ticked off her practical skills and accomplishments: machining, electronic circuitry, building a laser. Weiss took her on right away.

To catch a wave

In the early 1990s, Weiss, a pioneer in the measurement of the cosmic microwave background, maneuvered his research group into a new field: the detection of gravitational waves. Advances in laser technology made it plausible, but big practical challenges remained. Gravitational waves stretch and compress spacetime, subtly distorting objects they pass through. If they pass through a pair of objects, the distance between the objects changes. Up till now, those changes have been imperceptible.

In principle, a laser interferometer, with its two equally spaced mirrors, can use the change in interference patterns to register the passage of gravitational waves. The displacement of its mirrors would be tiny, however, roughly the equivalent of a thousandth of a proton???s radius. And just about anything can move the mirrors by much larger amounts: a car speeding in the distance, a seismic tremor, a clap of thunder. Even the distortion caused by the laser beam itself would need to be accounted for after the system had been shielded against all those external disturbances.

Setting traps in the desert

In graduate school, Mavalvala worked on proof-of-principle interferometers at tabletop scale. An actual detector would be huge: The greater the initial distance between the mirrors, the greater the change in distance and the better the chance of measuring a displacement. Size, however, brings its own complications. Two mirrors 4 kilometers apart would have to be aligned precisely with the incoming laser. ???If there is misalignment, the beam could just walk off into the desert instead of hitting its partner,??? she says. To ensure this doesn???t happen, Mavalvala devised an automatic alignment system for the complex interferometer.

Her thesis work was incorporated in the design of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), which is run by MIT and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) with funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF). In 1997, Mavalvala began a 3-year postdoc at Caltech. When the observatory went up in Washington state (there is also one in Louisiana), she stayed in the high-altitude desert in Hanford for days at a stretch to get the detector ready for data runs. In 2000, she joined the team as a staff scientist.

The cool stillness of mirrors

A decade into LIGO???s existence, no gravitational wave has been detected. But the Advanced LIGO (aLIGO), which should be functional within 3 years, is on the horizon. With aLIGO, researchers hope to detect waves from more-distant sources. ???The farther out you can look, the more galaxies, and hence more gravitational wave sources, are visible to you,??? Mavalvala says.

???Making the mirrors stay still,??? she says, ???is something we devote a lot of attention to.??? Using lasers to study a tiny displacement means having to contend with the momentum of photons impinging the mirror. There is also jostling from the thermal energy of atoms in the mirror and the suspending wires. Five years ago, her group demonstrated a novel technique to optically trap and cool a coin-sized mirror, bringing it to within a degree of absolute zero (0.8 K).

With that result, Mavalvala found herself at the forefront of an emerging field: quantum optomechanics. Typically, very small things obey quantum mechanics; classical mechanics governs macroscopic objects. But near zero Kelvin, even large objects should show quantum behavior. By exploring this blurring of boundaries, researchers in the new discipline hope to achieve theoretical insights with practical applications such as designing quantum information processors or building a more sensitive LIGO detector.

The genius of good mentorship

Mavalvala says that although it may not be immediately apparent, she is a product of good mentoring. From the chemistry teacher in Pakistan who let her play with reagents in the lab after school to the head of the physics department at MIT, who supported her work when she joined the faculty in 2002, she has encountered several encouraging people on her journey.

In the 10 years since, she has passed on her infectious enthusiasm for the LIGO project to many of her graduate students. ???That is exactly what we were hoping for,??? says Stanley Whitcomb, LIGO chief scientist at Caltech. ???When she speaks to reviewers from NSF, or casual visitors to the observatory, she always made it a point to present technical details clearly. At the same time, she conveys that the work is fun.??? The skill and desire to reach out to a broader audience, he remarks, is not a common trait among researchers.

This fall, Mavalvala will be a keynote speaker at Out to Innovate, a 2-day career summit for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students, faculty, and professionals in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. There, she will address her sexual identity and its connection to her work. Mavalvala says she was not aware of her sexual orientation as a girl in Pakistan or, later, as a student at the all-women Wellesley College.

Then, in her early twenties, she fell in love. Her girlfriend began visiting her at the lab and became part of her social life. The process was organic. ???I have never had negative experiences because of this,??? she says. ???My work environment was very supportive.???

???Some people venture into places others consider dangerous or unsavory. They are not foolish or fearless. They read a situation and have some confidence in reading it well enough, so they go there.??? In coming out, she says, she looked around and took stock of her work environment. Her sexuality, she figured, would make little difference to those around her. Her instincts proved to be right.

Above all, Mavalvala is at ease with herself. ???I am not someone who is, at all, ???in your face,??? ??? she says. ???I am quite happy to go unnoticed.??? But being the invisible outsider in academia is one item this quantum astrophysicist may now have to leave off her wish list.

Vijaysree Venkatraman is a Boston-based science journalist.
10.1126/science.caredit.a1200061

Doing Science While Female

2012-06-01T17:30:00Z

A new book looks at science careers across the stages of women's lives.

The most compelling argument is simple equity. Women who have the ability and desire to do science deserve the same opportunities to pursue their ambitions as men.

In 1969, Sue V. Rosser, then in her early twenties, entered the University of Wisconsin, Madison???s graduate zoology program. In 2005, as a dean of the Georgia Institute of Technology, she attended the meeting at which then???Harvard University President Lawrence Summers presented his instantly notorious remarks about the causes of women???s underrepresentation in the upper reaches of academic science. Summers acknowledged the ???general clash between [women???s] legitimate family desires??? and the intense time demands of fast-track academic careers.

But then he went on to cite ???issues of intrinsic aptitudes, and particularly the variability of aptitude,??? that are ???reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination.??? These comments ???appalled and shocked??? many of his listeners, ???who had worked and conducted substantial research on women in science for more than two decades,??? writes Rosser.

Rosser earned her Ph.D. in zoology in a speedy 4 years. Early in her faculty career, an invitation to teach a course on women and biology ignited an interest that led her to shift her research focus from doing science to studying women in science. Today, she is the provost and vice president for academic affairs at the University of San Francisco in California, with an appointment in sociology as well as women and gender studies. Her book provides an answer to Summers based on the experiences of women scientists during the two generations between 1969 and today.

Earning the top grade in her first science course, a 400-person introductory biology class, won her an invitation to work in the professor???s lab, which she did until she graduated. She also added a second major in biology to her long-planned major in French. Her professor strongly encouraged her to pursue scientific research. But he also often kissed and hugged her???and, she eventually learned, every other female student who worked for him. Back before sexual harassment even had a name, neither she nor any of her fellow victims knew what to do about abuse by so powerful a man, she writes.

Rosser was married by the time she entered graduate school. When she began to think about a dissertation topic, she was pregnant with her first child. The students of her primary graduate professor generally did fieldwork in Africa, but the professor told Rosser that she would do her research on specimens at the Field Museum in Chicago. An expectant mother, he informed her, wouldn???t want to take the risk of spending time in a developing country. During her second pregnancy, her postdoc supervisor took a different attitude: He unsuccessfully urged her to get an abortion because the birth would conflict with the lab???s grant-writing schedule.

Lives in science

I know of these problematic events, and a good deal more about Rosser???s life in academe, because she weaves her experiences into a detailed analysis of the stages of academic science careers, from college student to senior researcher and administrator. But the book is not a memoir: In addition to Rosser's story, it contains revealing examples and insights from several dozen successful female scientists, most of them academics, whom she has interviewed about their lives and careers.

Many of their accounts highlight what Rosser calls microinequities: incidents of unfairness that each could be considered minor but that over time accumulate and become a drag on a career. Collections of apparently small slights???not being invited to give a talk, not being included as a co-author on a paper, getting assigned more service responsibilities or fewer grad students than other faculty members, being left out of influential gossip networks???have impeded the progress of many able women over the years. The accounts and advice of Rosser and her interviewees can help readers recognize and counter such slights.

Rosser also gives well-deserved attention to the macroinequity that so many academic women still face: the clash Summers recognized between the tenure clock and the biological clock. ???Only one in three women who takes a fast-track (elite or research) university job before having a child ever becomes a mother,??? Rosser writes. This conflict, research shows, is now the primary reason why women leave academic science.

Rosser also highlights an issue that has received scant attention and deserves a good deal more: that many fewer women than men patent their work. Patents often boost, sometimes very substantially, the incomes of universities and individual faculty members and enhance the visibility and advancement prospects of patent-holding professors. Rosser urges women to develop the attitudes, skills, knowledge, and networks needed to secure patents, and explains the steps that universities and mentors should take to make sure women are prepared.

Gender and research

Rosser writes from a frankly feminist viewpoint, and gender explains a good deal about the choices, opportunities, obstacles, and stereotypes that people have encountered historically in scientific careers. It does not, however, explain everything. I happened to read this book while on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, near the national monument at Kill Devil Hills that honors two of history???s great technological innovators, the Wright brothers.

Sue V. Rosser

What do these famous, dead, white men have to do with the choices faced by female scientists who are seeking careers despite family responsibilities and hostile stereotypes? The Wrights also faced family choices and hostile stereotypes. Wilbur claimed not to ???have time for both a wife and an airplane,??? writes biographer Tom Crouch, which may explain why neither brother married.

For years, much of their time went into struggling to overcome the skepticism and negative stereotyping of the scientific establishment, which doubted that two unknown bicycle mechanics from Ohio with no formal education beyond high school had solved a problem that had confounded the best minds since the beginning of time. Their knowledge of bicycles had, in fact, provided insights that were crucial to their triumph: The flyer must be dynamic; the pilot plays a role in this dynamism; practice could teach the pilot to keep balance in the inherently unstable machine.

The Wrights, of course, were not academics or conventional careerists: They were visionary autodidacts. Through years of study and experimentation supported by the proceeds of their bicycle shop, they educated themselves in physics, aerodynamics, the anatomy of birds, and many other subjects. (Since we???re on the subject of technological women, the Wright boys learned mechanical skills from their mother, Susan, who had acquired knowledge of tools and a knack for making things in her father???s carriage shop).

The challenges the Wrights faced weren't identical to those that confront women seeking scientific careers. But the Wrights' experiences demonstrate that doing cutting-edge work in a difficult and highly competitive field can exact hard personal choices from anyone. As Rosser documents, the culture of science has stacked those choices very severely against women.

But as Rosser???s interviews also reveal, conditions for academic women have changed drastically. Research shows that today, female academics who, like the Wrights, choose not to have children progress in their careers as well or better than men.

Of course, some important changes are still needed to soften the needlessly hard choice that many women face between having children and having a successful science career. It's far from clear whether universities will make those changes in today???s buyer???s market for scientists, as we???ve noted before on Science Careers.

Rosser, unfortunately, chooses to argue for those changes on questionable grounds: that women are needed to meet an impending shortage of scientific talent and because they bring special insights to research. The first claim comports with neither the reality of today???s overcrowded scientific labor market nor the findings of the best experts who study it, who have concluded that no such shortage exists. The second is persuasive for medicine and certain areas of biology, but less so for other fields of science.

The most compelling argument is simple equity. Women who have the ability and desire to do science deserve the same opportunities to pursue their ambitions as men. Rosser???s gender-based analysis provides information that universities can use to help make that possible. It also offers guidance for women seeking to maneuver astutely in the competition for academic advancement.

The reality of today???s overcrowded labor market nonetheless means that many able scientists of both genders will be unable to attain the academic careers that they seek???and that many other talented women, as well as men, will forgo science in favor of careers that promise an easier path, opportunities for better work-life balance, and a more certain and lucrative payoff on their substantial investments.

Beryl Lieff Benderly writes from Washington, D.C.
10.1126/science.caredit.a1200062