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Education
I think the way that I got started in science in general is the way a lot of people get started in that, when I was in highschool taking classes, I was good at it. When you're good at science, I think you get pushed to keep doing it. And I liked what I was doing, so I did well. I actually went to high school at Dunwoody high in north Atlanta and had a really good chemistry teacher who pushed me to excel and take a lot of science and take AP classes, so when I went off to college I was really prepared for science and I took a lot more science classes, and I got into working in a lab fairly early on, and I really liked doing it.
So when you're really good at science in college, what they tell you is that now you should go to graduate school, and so you apply to a bunch of graduate schools, and I ended up going to Vanderbilt. I kept being pretty good at what I was doing, so once you graduate and get your Ph.D., the next thing you do is called a post-doc, so I went and did that at Harvard for a few years, and if you're relatively successful at your post-doc, that's really where you have to make a decision about what you want to do. I'd always really enjoyed training people and teaching people, and so I knew I wanted that to be part of my job, but I also really liked doing research. So coming to an academic school where my job would primarily be focused on research and teaching research, but I would have the opportunity to interact with students, was the way that I wanted to go.
There are some aspects of science education, and it's more later on, that can be viewed as both good and bad. There are those times when it's very competitive, and you end up competing with people who you are friends with, to graduate, to get good grades, to get into certain labs. That can be good, because it pushes people to do their best and to excel because they know that they're going to be compared to others. But it's also a bad thing, because it can mean that people who are friends can end up competing against each other.
When I was in graduate school, there was a woman who was in my class, who I remain very good friends with, and we chose to go to the same lab, and early on her stuff worked really well and she was very productive and she was one of those people who came and worked from about 9:30 to 4:00 every day and I was there hours and hours and hours, and what I was trying to do just didn't work as well. So we went through a time where it was really hard to stay friends, but it worked out fine, and we're still good friends today- we were maids of honor at each others' wedding.
Teaching
It's interesting that to teach high school you have to get all these certifications and everything, whereas we're pretty much tossed in front of a class and told: 'here, teach.' I've given lots of seminars and stuff like that, but I'd never had to actually stand up and teach a class, until they kindly let me teach the first two days of medical biochemistry. So they tossed me up in front of the medical students on the first two days- and so I couldn't go to the class and see what teaching was like, because I was the first person to go. And they gave me very nebulous topics to teach on as well: it wasn't 'teach on this pathway,' it was 'oh, teach them about cell biology and teach them about genetics.'
I had a course at Vanderbilt, which I think is a really valuable course and probably all graduate students, and probably undergraduates should get it, in how to present papers, and how to stand up in front of a crowd, and get my point across. So I think that's a valuable thing, but that doesn't teach you how to teach, and I guess that's something all of us learned along the way.
Mostly I teach biochemistry and genetics. The majority of the teaching I did last year was either to medical students, who have no interest in biochemistry and just want to wear a stethoscope and a white lab-coat, and walk around the clinics, or the Physician Assistant students, so it's a very different level of teaching. So I guess my goal is to try and teach people something that they didn't know, but make sure that I teach it in such a way that it's interesting, and that it doesn't go over their head, in addition to not boring them to tears by giving them too little. It was challenging to figure out how to do that for both medical students and for Physician Assistant students because the classes are taught at a very different level.
The actual thing that I find most gratifying about it is that I'm actually trying to teach students how to think - so we'll talk about an experiment, and how to set it up, and how to make sure that you can look at it and interpret it and make sure that you can get the answer out of it that you want to get out of it. The science is very gratifying also, but I think that teaching aspect of teaching people how to do research is probably the most gratifying thing.
Research
What I'm most excited about right now is actually taking advantage of the new information that's so easy to get your hands on. For example, we have a gene that we've discovered that kind of bridges the two projects that I work on- it's something that's important for regulating the cell cycle, because it regulates how something is exported from the cell nucleus. We've discovered the gene in yeast, which is where we do most of our work. We use it as a model system because the things we study are so basic to how cells work that they're pretty much the same in yeast as in higher eukaryotes (http://monster.educ.kent.edu/~compclub/inquiry/science/biology/eukaryot/eukaryot.html), including cells in you and I.
So what I'm really excited about is taking this gene that we've discovered in yeast, and basically taking all the data that's currently sitting there in my computer, and what we've done is we've gone in and we've identified the human gene just by searching databases, and we're currently doing experiments in yeast to look at the function of this gene, and we're doing experiments now with the human gene- and we were able to just call up a guy in Japan and have him send us that gene, because he had already cloned the DNA, and he happily sent it to us.
So now we can study how the gene works and how it regulates in real cells, higher eukaryotic cells, and in addition, we've also pulled out the homologue of this gene in the worm, C. Elegans (http://www.biotech.missouri.edu/Dauer-World/Wormintro.html), so now we can do more genetic experiments in a multi-cellular eukaryote. So basically we're looking at the function of this gene at all different levels. We're looking at a single-celled eukaryote like yeast, we're looking at a higher, multi-cellular eukaryote where we can still do some genetics, but then, ultimately, we don't really care what the gene does in yeast or in C. Elegans; we want to know what the gene does in humans.
What exists is the sequence of the gene. And this is the whole issue of the human genome- we're going to have a whole sequence of A's, T's, G's, and C's, but then we have to figure out what it means. Just because you have a book sitting in front of you, that doesn't mean you know what the story is- you have to go in and read it and figure out what the story is. So we're able to get a lot of genes and DNA, and then go in and do the experiments and figure out what it means.
Our goal is to figure out how well these processes have been conserved, from yeast to humans. As a young investigator, that's probably as big-picture as I get at the moment. My main goal is to get some data and publish some papers so that they'll ask me to stay here when my tenure decision actually comes around.
On gender and the sciences
The gender-bias [in science] is clearly changing- it's an interesting concept, because at the level of both my undergraduate work in chemistry and in graduate school, as well as in the lab where I was a post-doc, there were actually more women than men, in all three of those situations. So in the training process there are more women than men. Then I moved here: I'm the only woman out of 20 faculty in the biochemistry department. So far that hasn't given me any problems- I haven't felt any biases, well, that's not totally true- there are some older faculty here who call me hon and sweetie and most of them are on the verge of retiring or are retiring, and I'm very happy that they won't be around when my tenure decision is made in a few years.
I think I'm not terribly sensitive to stuff like that- but it was something I had to think about, because when I interviewed for jobs, I interviewed at many schools and I got offered many jobs, and I was coming here to a department that had no women in it. And I had to make sure and look around and say: 'is it that they have no women because it's a hostile environment for women, or is it just because they don't happen to have any women?' And actually there was a woman here, in the department, who didn't get tenure, about six months before I joined the department, and there was a man and a woman who came up for tenure at the same time, so I had to look at her criteria and say: 'is the reason she didn't get tenure that she is a woman, or did she not get tenure because she wasn't qualified?' And if she wasn't qualified, then I don't want them to make any exceptions for her just because she is a woman.
I basically came to the decision, based on numbers, papers, data, stuff like that, that she might not have been qualified. That probably doesn't tell the whole story- and that might not really be the case, but obviously I decided to come here and so far I feel like I've had no problems.
The downside of this job is the political junk- talking about how my lab is now full of people and I really need to get more space- so you end up in this battle with the other people over space. Especially for me, as a woman, being the only diversity that our entire department has, I get put on a lot of university 'let's look at the policy for how we do this or that or the other thing' type committees- so some days I'll have three or four meetings about this stuff. It's probably important, but it's a situation where it doesn't really matter what I think because ultimately somebody is going to decide how it's going to be done and it's probably not going to be me- regardless of all these meetings. That's the part that everyone doesn't like about this job.
It doesn't sound that bad, but it gets a little tedious after a while- because I have to come along to lunch or dinner with these visitors, because otherwise we look like a department full of white men, which we are, with the exception of me. If we want to look diverse at all I have to be there.
Some dean came to talk to our faculty, and there I am, the conspicuous only woman, so the dean starts by saying: 'Oh, I really care about what you people think,' which is probably total crap, but anyway, he said: 'So I want to know where you are as a department...' and nobody says anything. So he looks at me and he says: 'So, you're the only woman in the room- what do you think about that?' And I'm like: 'well, you know, I applied for lots of jobs and I decided to come here, it really wasn't an issue for me, and it hasn't bothered me at all and I like being here.' It was when I was brand-new here. They hired another guy at the same time they hired me, and he's right next door to me. And after I was done talking to the dean the chairman said: 'oh, let me introduce you to Jerry Shale, our other new faculty member.' And Jerry and I Ðwe get along great, we're good friends and everything- and the dean said: 'Oh, well Jerry, why did you come here?' And Jerry said: 'Well actually, I came because there were no women in the department.' (laughs) The dean almost fell over- I'm still not sure whether or not he knew Jerry was kidding.
The daily grind
My teaching load thus far has been pretty minimal- in fact when I first came here I was supposed to get two years without any teaching at all, and I'll have been here two years this summer, so essentially I agreed to do some early.
I guess on a day-to-day basis I still get to spend a lot of time in my lab, doing my own experiments. Generally the way I get to do them is that I usually come in at about 6am, and get some stuff done before everyone arrives who is going to converge on my lab- people who are going to need my advice, people who want to talk to me about their project, people I want to talk to about their project, and then around 5:30 or 6:00 in the evening it sort of calms down again and I can go back to finishing my own experiments that I started at that time in the morning.
Coordinating it with teaching is just like any other thing- there are days when I have to take a break and go teach a class, or I have to go have a meeting, or I have to go have someone's committee meeting, and it makes it a little harder to get my own stuff done.
What's good about it is that I don't have a boss- I don't have someone looking over my shoulder saying: 'how many hours are you working?' I really enjoy teaching people in the lab, I really enjoy doing the experiments, I enjoy seeing the outcome of other experiments- it's really fun. And you have to really enjoy that to want to do this career, because it's hard. You work really hard. And you shouldn't do it if you don't want to do it. And I want the people in my lab to feel the same way I do- I want it to be a really fun environment where people enjoy being there- people in the lab have a lot of fun, we go out, we do stuff, but we also work really hard. So I want to set the example for them- if I want them to work hard, then I have to work hard. I can't say to them: 'well, I expect you to be here on Saturday,' if I'm not here on Saturday.
So I guess sometimes it gets a little frustrating. Sometimes my husband calls me and says: 'oh, you know, are you coming home ever?' (laughs) But at this point I can do it.
There are really mundane and boring aspects of science- in any kind of science you're going to end up doing the same cookbook procedures over and over again, but there's always the morning you come in and you've spent the whole day before doing an experiment and you're going to see the result that morning, and you're going to see it and you're going to be the only one in the world who knows the answer to that experiment right at that moment. To me it's also a puzzle- nature is this huge puzzle, like how cells work, and amazingly we're being paid to come in and try to work out this puzzle every day. And as we get more and more pieces to the puzzle it gets more and more complicated to try and figure out exactly how they fit together and how they're interconnected. I'm still sort of amazed, every day, that I can come in here and do this.
On tenure
It totally stresses me out- it's what everyone is worried about. But I think it's the wrong approach to just be stressed out about tenure- what we all have to do is do our research, and be productive, and work hard during these beginning years and hopefully everything will work out fine. For a professor in the medical school all that really matters for tenure is having a lot of grants and bringing a lot of money into the university. Most everything else is pretty much irrelevant- so as long as I can do that, which I'm doing a pretty good job of right now, and write some papers, I should be OK. But it's a huge hurdle. They just had two people down in the micro department, two women, actually, who didn't get tenure- one of whom was an excellent teacher- but it doesn't matter- all that matters is research and money.
Outside interests
There's not that much time for outside of my work, but I go to the gym and I run a lot- people from my lab and I run in a lot of the local 5k and 10k runs- we'll get together on Saturday morning and go run a race and then have breakfast somewhere. I play tennis on very rare occasions. I try to keep the garden in front of my house from being a total disaster area. And lots of other things are of interest to me but most of them I haven't got any time to do.
The yeast club
It's basically a chance for faculty, students, technicians- anyone who wants to go, to go hang out on a Friday evening and have a couple of beers. It's essentially a really good opportunity for casual conversation- sometimes we just talk about baseball or football or whatever. But very often we'll just talk about issues facing students or faculty or whatever. Basically it's a really great opportunity to get to know people on a less formal level. Certainly the students have no problem coming and hanging out with us.
Advice to students
I'd give them the same advice I give to everybody about their education if they're interested in doing research science. In high school it's tough, but certainly you could contact people at a local university and see if they'll let you come volunteer in their lab for the summer or something like that. Certainly as an undergrad, the advice I would give people is to get into a lab, go find someone who will let you wash glassware or something, so you can see what the environment is like, and then hopefully eventually get to do some research, because it's the kind of thing that you absolutely should not do unless you absolutely love to do it. It's not something you should do because you think you should do it- so basically get some hands-on experience working in a lab, and talk to people: talk to undergrads, talk to graduate students, there are lots of people around there willing to talk.
I'm not convinced that it's necessarily true that there are too many Ph.D.'s, there are probably too many Ph.D.'s for the academic jobs that are available. But, for instance, I think we're responding to that at Emory by sort of scaling back the graduate program. We're not really scaling it back, but in some cases we'll have 15 slots for graduate students, and if we don't have 15 people that we think are truly extremely well-qualified and have the potential to go on and have successful careers in science, we won't fill those slots up. So we make a concerted effort to only train the people who only have the promise and the drive to be successful.
There are many, many other opportunities in terms of things people can do with Ph.D.'s in any kind of basic science, including working at companies, doing more education- there are lots of opportunities at smaller schools, and there's even government stuff. There are lots of things, and I think those are things that are being emphasized more nowadays, and also editorial work and writing- I think we're doing a better job of showing the students where the options are, versus even ten years ago, when if you went into anything besides an academic job, you were essentially a failure.
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