Courageous Scientist Podcast

Dr. Jane Willenbring is an Associate Professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and will be joining the faculty as an Associate Professor of Geological Sciences at Stanford in fall 2020. Dr. Willenbring was also featured in the recent documentary Picture a Scientist. She tells us about her own awakening in deciding to come forward as a survivor of harassment, but also what it's like to have a vulnerable part of you be shared so publicly. Check out Jane's faculty profile page and Google Scholar page to learn more about her amazing research.

This week I had the absolute pleasure of talking to astrophysicist Rose Ferreira. I've been following and learning from Rose on Twitter for ages, and am so glad she agreed to talk to me for the podcast! Please check out her website at rosedf.net to learn more.

*Content warning - death of a child* In this episode I had the pleasure of talking to Dr. Jodie Wiggins, Teaching Assistant Professor at Oklahoma State University. Dr. Wiggins has found her place at the nexus of teaching and research after many years of searching, and loss.

*Content warning for: domestic abuse, death of a friend.* Tessa Logan is a graduate student at Stanford, and it was a long road to get there. Logan has persisted despite pauses, restarts, and personal tragedy. Hear how she decided to be like Dory and just keep swimming. To learn more about Tessa Logan find her on Twitter at @tessalationl. TRANSCRIPT Dr. Kate Clancy (Intro): Okay this is Kate Clancy and welcome to… uh. Oh wow! I was about to say Period Podcast. This is not Period Podcast this is the Courageous Scientist Podcast. (Laughs) This is what happens when you make the mistake of having two podcasts. -Interview Begins- Clancy (cont.): Today, I am doing my pandemic-only passion project/ interview and I am really pleased, today to have Tessa Logan with me. She is a graduate student in the Stanford Neuroscience Program. And Tessa is going to be, like all of our previous guests, asking three basic, but I think very important questions: what brought you to science, how have you showed courage in science, and what would you like others to know about being a courageous scientist? So thank you so much for joining me today Tessa. Tessa Logan: You’re welcome. I’m excited about it. Clancy: Yeah. So why don’t you tell us: what brought you to science? Logan: So, there’s one piece of it that’s sort of, um… I have always liked science. My mom, sort of, jokes  that I never outgrew the ‘why’ stage that two-year-olds start and that not entirely inaccurate. That’s a big part of why I really love science is I really like understanding how things work and why it is they happen and why does… you know? What causes it and that sort of thing. So there’s sort of that basic element of, I think it’s just a fundamental part of who I am as a person. I don’t think there’s any way to separate me from my love of science like you couldn’t possibly understand me as a person without that piece. More concretely, what brought me into science was what I am doing now, that I was very fortunate and got into an amazing lab in my undergrad at San Jose State with Rachel French and that was just such a fabulous experience. To go on a short tangent, she is an amazing PI and like a really fabulous mentor and she was really deeply invested in training us as scientists and I had no idea how luck I was, at least, not initially at getting into her lab. I happened to be looking into joining a lab at the same time that she was staring one up. She was friends with the professor who was teaching my genetics course and I had done well in the genetics course so she, sort of, recommended me. And so I feel like, while I did work hard in the genetics class, and I worked hard in my academics up until then there was also a very large chunk of luck in ending up doing hands on research in biology. And so my undergrad lab, we worked on modeling fetal alcohol syndrome in fruit flies so I got to do a lot of developmental biology and molecular biology. Learn how fly genetics works and a bunch of stuff along those lines. And I really really loved it. I loved every part of it. I had a project wher we were testing some things and we got sort of this set of conflicting results, you know upregulating in a pathway resulted in one thing and we expected downregulating in a pathway to result in the opposite but it didn’t. So then we ended up with this whole thing where it was just like… ‘Whoa. Wait. What just happened?’ And I was shocked with how much I loved the bafflement in trying to figure out how things work because that was not what I predicted and the, ‘Why is it not what I predicted? How do I explain what I actually saw?’, was so exciting. It was so fun. And Rachel encouraged me, very heavily to apply to grad school. I was, you know, really hedging my bets. I had started at a community college. And then I transferred to San Jose State, (Insert name) was, by the way, amazing and I loved it. Transferred to San Jose and definitely was not thinking about applying to Stanford. When I started looking at grad programs, I had some geographical constraints. I needed to stay basically, in the Bay Area here in California. I was planning on applying to some other places and I really felt like Stanford was way out my league, given where I was coming from. Turns out, it wasn’t and I was really glad to have been encouraged to apply. It’s been a really amazing fit and it’s been a really awesome experience being here. It’s been a really bumpy road here but that has less to do with the school and more to do with my personal life going sideways. So I definitely have had the chance to pursue different kinds of work. I started out after my rotations, I initially joined another lab, also a fly lab. And then I needed to take a leave of absence. A lot of factors went into that. One of them, quite frankly, realizing I was in an abusive marriage and trying to see if there was a way to resolve that. And it was, at that point, it had been more than a decade that we’d been married. Actually, trying to fix it made it dramatically worse, but also made it clear that is was time to be done. So that’s what I did. When I came back from my leave of absence, I also started in a new lab with a new project. Shifting with, now working on C. Elegans and I am on this project called, ‘Neuroplant’ which is really cool and I am really excited about it. And I think this was a really rambly response of how I got into science but it is also, kind of where I am now. Clancy: I think it’s a great answer. And I think that Stanford is very lucky to have you. I was really struck by and pleased to hear you saying about what happens when you get results you don’t expect. That is one of my favorite parts of science and I am always just so tickled when people are like, ‘But it didn’t do what I thought it would do?? I don’t know what that means??’ Logan: (Laughs) Clancy: My students can vouch for how ridiculously animated I get when they bring me results and it’s like, ‘But I don’t know?’ and I’m like, ‘But it’s awesome!’ It’s the… it’s my yeah… It’s one of my favorite things in science, for sure. I’m wondering, and this may link to some of the things that we were just talking about or it may not, if you would just like to say a little bit about ways that you’ve had to show courage in science. Logan: Honestly, coming back for my PhD has definitely been one of the really big pieces. It is something that I had to fight for, multiple levels actually, so I think one of the things that I had not mentioned is… (Laughs) after more than a decade of marriage and actively trying to have a child, and that had not happened, within about six months of starting grad school, I found, to my surprise that I was pregnant. And my kid is amazing, I adore him, he’s awesome. He’s now about five and a half. I… it sounds cheezy and cliché but he makes my whole world better (Laughs). Okay well let’s get teary about that. That’s alright. Honestly, it kind of feels like my whole grad school trajectory has been something that has taken courage. So, after a decade of wanting a baby and not being able to have one, I was definitely never considering terminating the pregnancy regardless of the timing but six months into grad school is not when I would generally advise trying to have a newborn or to be pregnant and then have a newborn a year and some change into grad school because that was definitely not the easiest time to navigate that transition. So there was a little bit of a fight, not from like a logistics perspective but from a mental perspective to come back to school after having the baby and after, sort of, having to navigate all of the changes that that encompassed. And after having my son was when I started to recognize some of the things that were really wrong in my marriage. And staring to see some of things that I might need to change in order to be comfortable raising a child in that household, and that was hard. Choosing to come to Stanford in the first place as a first generation college student, you know who sort of had come from the community college to the state college, don’t get me wrong because I loved San Jose State and it was an amazing experience and I got a stellar education there, but there’s this certain… reputation that a place like Stanford had and I was not feeling like I had met their… like I would meet their standards so coming here in the first place has been something that takes courage and coming back after maternity leave and then coming back a third time after I taking the leave of absence to file for divorce and get out of that household, all of those things took courage. I also failed the first time I went to college so backtracking… a ridiculous amount of time ago, I initially tried to go to college right out of high school and I did not have the kind of support that I needed. I also, as a first-generation college student, I didn’t know what I needed to know. Like I didn’t even know what I didn’t know which was a hard place to be and to try and figure out how things work and I was accustomed to being a really stellar student in high school and, as I’ve mentioned, I am very fond of science. So what I had done in high school was every chance that I had I doubled up on every math and science classes and asked them to quit making me take the art classes because, ‘I have to label my stick figures and nobody knows what I’m trying to make anyways and it makes us all sad.’ (Laughs) So I loved that art existed, I love that there are people who can do it and I am not one of those people. So my whole high school career I spent like arguing with people in charge about why they should just let me take the classes that I like and ignored the warnings that I was going to burn out because I was like… but you don’t understand, I like doing these things. This is fun. So I started college and I entirely disregarded the advice of my academic adviser. My very first semester was 18 units and I took molecular biology, chemistry, calculus, and… what was the… what was the fourth one? Physics? Something ridiculous. Clancy: Yup. You were like a kid in a candy shop basically. Logan: I was! (Laughs) Clancy: I get to take all the science! (Laughs) Logan: Exactly look at all the fun stuff I can take! My academic adviser was like, ‘I don’t think you understand. This is not a good plan, you’re going to burn out.’ And that’s exactly what I had been told in high school, ‘Oh you don’t understand, I’m used to this it’s fine.’ And she’s like, ‘It’s really not fine.’ And that I was… I was really persistent, and like I said, I was used to arguing with people about me taking the things that I like to take and, ‘Quit bugging me.’ So that’s what I did and, unsurprisingly, my first semester was not as successful as I would have liked. So I went from having pulled straight A’s in high school to walking away with a 2.3 at the end of my first semester. Then my second semester I had a bunch of personal life things hit. One of them was a friend of mine died in this really absurd accident and basically, one of the contributing factors was them doing things that I would have told them to stop because I was the mother hen and I would have said, ‘This is stupid stop doing it. You’re going to get hurt.’ And I wasn’t there, I was supposed to be there that night and I carried the guilt of it along with the grief of it for a very long time. And at 19 I did not handle it well or responsibly. So I stopped going to classes entirely. I drank a lot. Which was not entirely ideal either. And absolutely failed everything. I literally failed my entire second semester which meant that I also lost all of my scholarship, which I had already been in danger of loosing because I had scholarships… presuming that I would continue to get straight As or something l near that. So I failed out. My whole first year was basically just a waste. It felt like… so I went, I ended up moving 1800 miles from Colorado out to California. Started working at a hospital and finally after about five years there I started back to school at the community college. I think that piece, in of itself… it took a lot of courage. It was really hard to step back into a classroom after feeling like I was a complete failure as a student. That had been such a hard thing to deal with because… so much of my identity as a high school student or as a high schooler had been built around, you know, ‘I’m the good student. I’m the straight A student.’ It was a race to who would be the valedictorian and there were like three of us within like 0.005 GPA points of who would be the valedictorian and I did not win BUT… (Laughs) Clancy: But I hear you. Logan: That was who I was and then to turn around and walk away with actual Fs, was just… who was I if I wasn’t the good student? So walking back in after that was nerve wracking. Clancy: Yeah. I could only imagine. I mean it sounds to me like really the biggest act of courage is you showing up with these different identities and these different experiences and I… I think sometimes, especially folks that have certain majority or privileged identities don’t realize how much courage it takes to just show up. And not just show up, to show up. You know what I mean? That’s a, that’s actually a really remarkable thing and that’s something that we should be just noticing more, within our colleagues and our students. That that itself it is actually...  it demonstrates something pretty remarkable about your values and your work ethic as it does for anybody else who really decides to show up as there full self, unapologetic selves. You know? Logan: Yeah. Clancy: So I wonder, just as a final thought, if you could, maybe, answer the third question: what do you want other people to know about what it means to be a courageous scientist? Logan: I think one of the things that I feel like was the most useful thing that I’ve gotten out of my experience isn’t something that I have, rather intentionally, brought to the classrooms where I’ve had the opportunity to teach is, fundamentally, persistence matters more than perfection. I’ve screwed up a whole bunch of times. But if I keep trying, eventually figure it out, then that matters more than all of the times where I was not perfect. And there was rather a lot of those. And that’s okay. That’s part of being a human and part of being a good scientist. I think it’s also, at a very basic level, a part of learning to be a graduate student as well. Like that’s one of the things, talking with a lot of people in my cohort and talking with a lot of grad students on Twitter and around the world that that’s a thing that lots of use struggle with: what fundamentally a big part of being a grad student is you keep failing until you don’t. (Laughs) And that persistence, that thing where you keep going, the Dory, ‘Just keep on swimming thing right? That is fundamentally what it takes to be a good science. It’s not, ‘What did you know?’ It’s not, ‘Who did you know?’ It’s not, ‘Did you learn the right things at the right time?’ And I’m not denying that there aren’t opportunities that you can miss not knowing the right people or not knowing the right things at the right time. But that also doesn’t mean that that’s the end of that trajectory. Because I’m almost forty and I’m still not done with my PhD, it’s going to be a couple more years before I am. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t a path that I should have taken. It just took me longer to get here and it took a lot more tries to get here. But I’m really glad I am where I am. I have such amazing opportunities and I have such amazing people around me. And the kind of life that I get to live and the kind of work that I’ve get to do is so worth it. Clancy: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we can’t deny that there are people who have connections and support and stuff like that that give them more opportunities than other, but I think that you’re right. That there’s still something to be said for, ‘Persistence over perfection,’ by continuing to put in the time in order to get to do something that you love. I’m really glad you’re here. I’m really glad you’re a scientist and thank you so much for agreeing to do this interview. Logan: Thank you for having me I liked it. Clancy (Outro): Thank you so much for joining me for the Period… (Laughs) Gosh wow! Second time in a row. Thank you so much for joining me for the Courageous Scientist Interview. For those of view who want to support courageous scientists, there is not financial way to support, you don’t need to do that anyway. Again, this is a hard scrabble, freebie of a podcast. But what you can do is tell educators and students about it because hopefully they will be as inspired as I am by people like Tessa Logan. And if you want to learn more about Tessa and the other courageous scientists that I’ve been interviewing, you can go to Courageous-Scientist.libsyn.com (L-I-B-Y-S-N). Thank you.

Dr. Krishna Pakala is today's guest and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering at Boise State University. He is the Faculty in Residence for the Engineering and Innovation Living Learning Community and the Director for the Industrial Assessment Center at Boise State. He is the recipient of David S. Taylor Service to Students Award and Golden Apple Award from Boise State University. He is also the recipient of ASEE Pacific Northwest Section (PNW) Outstanding Teaching Award, ASEE Mechanical Engineering division’s Outstanding New Educator Award and several course design awards. Dr. Pakala puts students first and prioritizes getting to know them as whole people. This week was also the week of the #Strike4BlackLives, founded by Dr. Brian Nord and Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein and many more, following the most recent wave of protests around anti-Black racism and policing. If you would like to learn more, in addition to that hashtag please check out #BlackInTheIvory, founded by Joy Melody Woods and Dr. Sharde Davis, as well as the websites shutdownstem.com and particlesforjustice.org. TRANSCRIPT Dr. Kate Clancy (Intro): Wednesday June 10th was the Strike for Black lives, organized by a number of extraordinary Black scholars. I hope those of you who have work to do, like me, used it as a day to educate yourselves and plan the work we all should be doing to end Anti-Black racism in academia and beyond. To learn more, please visit shutdownstem.com, particlesforjustice.org, and take a look at the Twitter hashtag ‘blackintheivory.’ This is the chance to make the constant work of the Black scholars visible and I hope it gave, at least some of them, a day of rest. I have struggled with what else to say here because it’s a hard balance between trying to avoid being performative in public allyship and making sure you know people are listening while you try to get better privately. I do want to say though that it is nothing compared to actually trying to survive anti-Black racism so this is a rather small source of discomfort. While I practice anti-racism in my daily life and, make lots of mistakes, leadership in this area, as a white woman, is very much not my lane. Please check out the show notes of this episode at courageous-scientist.libsyn.com for more resources and experts in anti-racist work. -Interview Begins- Clancy: Hello and welcome to the Courageous Scientist Podcast. This is Kate Clancy, anthropology professor and aspiring courageous scientist. This podcast is a single season sanity project that arose from the global pandemic. I am releasing short interviews with aspiring scientists every week for the next few months. I want us to remember that we are connected and that we are all capable of doing good. I want us to notice that there is good work being done right now and many of us unable to do our work will pick it back up again soon. I ask each guest three questions: what brought you to science? How do you show courage in science? And what would you like others to know about being a courageous scientist? My guests show me what it means to have clear values, to stand in them even when scared, and how to approach obstacles. That doesn’t mean all courageous scientists overcome all obstacles, it means that we know that how we come out the other side is not an indicator of our worth. Today I am bringing you an interview with Dr. Krishna Pakala, an assistant professor in the department of mechanical and biomedical engineering at Boise State University where he’s been since 2012. He is the faculty in residence for the Engineering and Innovation Living Learning Community. He is the director for the industrial assessment center at Boise State University. Dr. Pakala has also served as the inaugural faculty associate for mobile learning and the faculty associate for accessibility and universal design for learning. Thank you so much for joining me today Krishna. Dr. Krishna Pakala: Thank you so much Kate. Clancy: As you know, this interview is pretty tightly defined. I only have three questions for you. So, can you just start by just telling me what brought you to science. Pakala: So, in India growing up, there are two pathways for people to take. One is whether you get into engineering, if you’re good with mathematics or you become a doctor if you like biology, physics chemistry kind of stuff. And I was eldest in my family and none of my family members were in engineering, so I decided to do engineering because I was very good with math. So that’s how I got into mechanical engineering. Clancy: And now you focus on engineering education. Do you want to say a little about what brought you along that path. Pakala: Sure. I never thought I would, you know, be in a professorial field or in engineering education per se. You know I always thought my degrees would eventually lead me to work in the industry, but my grandmother used to always say that one day that I would become a professor. And I asked her why and she said, ‘Because you were born on September 5th which is celebrated as a teacher’s day in India. Her husband, my grandfather died at a young age with a heart attack in his sleep and he was a educator, he was a school administrator, like a school principle, and she said that, ‘I can see that one day you will relive his passion and you will continue his legacy.’ And then it’s so coincidental that right after my masters at Arizona State, my advisor said, ‘You should pursue a teaching career because you have done well as a graduate student. There has been good feedback from students. I think we need a lot of people like you. While I was not totally sure about myself, that I would, you know, have me a PhD and I was scared because there was nobody in my family who got it. And then I went to University of Wyoming and when I went there, before I went there… I didn’t even know Wyoming was a state. And then, on top of that, there was the climate and everything but it was a great state school for education so I eventually got my PhD and then I was applying for both industry and economic places and the rest is history. Boise State was the first place to give me and offer and I never looked back since then. Clancy: I actually haven’t been to Boise yet but I have heard that it is really beautiful out there so that’s one of the places on my Midwest bucket list for sure. Pakala: Oh right now this is a perfect time to be in this city. I am what as known as a faculty in residence so I oversee a living learning community of first year students. Right now, everybody’s gone because of the, you know, situation so I have a river, within few feet right outside my apartment. The football stadium is right in front of me right now, I’m looking at it right now. The basketball stadium is right next to me, so it’s like we are nestled in this beautiful campus. Clancy: That’s so nice to hear. So, tell me, how have you shown courage in science? Pakala: When I first started, I started as a lecturer. As a lecturer with primarily teaching responsibilities. And then I went to a seminar or a welcome meeting by our former dean and there was something she said that stuck with me since then, she said, ‘We have and unshakable focus on student learning.’ And I said, ‘Yeah. That is something, that… I kind of like that and I think that is something I can go with that. I think I can do a lot of sort of things under that umbrella.’ Then my former department chair was very supportive and said, ‘You know, you have the full freedom to innovate the way you do things even though you are new. We want people to, kind of, be courageous and try new things.’ And that’s when I started seeing the value of technology in the education and how much we actually don’t use it. You know for some people a white board or a marker right now is technology. For them, transitioning from a chalk board to a white board. But there is so much that has evolved. Right now, if you look at COVID-19 pandemic, if many of us were somehow thinking how to reincarnate popular technology more so for student learning and teaching, I think we would not be panicking now. I think we just took things for granted. We thought these physical structures would still be there which, they will still be there, but I think that really helped, for me to be really at the forefront right now to say that we can handle this. I think that a lot of engagement, a lot of interaction, a lot of how we digitally connect with people because we all value human connections and there has never been more of an important time in our history that we somehow still keep those connections intact, even though we may have to do it digitally. But I think there are platforms set up right now, as long as we use it to spread positive message, that we can connect. So I have been really focusing on developing, you know, technological solutions for education. So I moved from a lecturer position and I said, ‘If I’m doing all of this and publishing, I probably should be in a tenure track position.’ But then, there is no typical tenure track position for people who are in engineering education if you don’t have that. So it has been a challenge to convince people that if you want to be innovative, you also have to be innovative in how you leverage people’s strengths. Right? Because nobody said this is how somebody should be working towards helping an institution. We just came up with that and we just… there is even randomness right now. So I kind of try to convince people, push push push, and finally to a point where they saw the value in it. Our entire department and our team created a position where I could focus on the bias scholarship model of learning where it would be looking at teaching and learning. So that’s when I transitioned to an assistant professor with the focus, primarily on looking at how do you enhance teaching and learning. In my case, it ended up, mostly, looking at how do I bring in interactions both in and out of the classroom that can help with the progression of the students. I view this general student cycle, because of my experiences being on campus overseeing first year students, is to look at what do we do to recruit our students from high school or even before that? How do you, kind of, bring them into your classroom? How to we keep them there? How do you make sure their progress towards that? How do you make sure they enjoy? How do you make sure they get a job? And then how do you still connect them as regular people? That’s the cycle that, I think, I want to be a part of. I just don’t want to be somebody who will just treat everybody as a number. I just think I don’t, I won’t have fun. I didn’t get into this profession if I didn’t think that was the case. If it is all transactional then I don’t think this would have been mine. So there were a few things along this journey, as you can imagine, where I had to show a lot of courage. I had to be… I wouldn’t use the word ‘political’ but be somebody who would say, ‘Okay I know that I am capable, but maybe I don’t know how to convince you or how to make the structure smooth but I am going to keep asking the question until you tell me, ‘No, we won’t do it for you.’ Right? So that really taught me how still go for your dreams because there was a time in my life where I had a very bad experience with an administrator to the point where they were questioning how I was doing things. They were saying, ‘Oh, you should not do it this way.’ When the 99% of my general population of students were very happy. While I respect one or two students whose opinion of their displeasure, I just didn’t understand what was the administrator’s rule. Was it to help everybody through the system and, kind of, say that this is how we have to go or almost to the point of harassing them? Right? Then I actually said, ‘Maybe I should think beyond just being a faculty member. Maybe I should also think about, ‘How can I also be more student-centric in the future being an administrator? So that’s when that person actually created this fire in me so now I have expanded my horizon to say I am going to be involved more. I am not going to just do classes, my scholarship. I am going to be involved in supporting the athletics. I am going to be involved in supporting the other entities on campus and I am going to just have fun. You know? Like right now I am almost living as if there is no tomorrow. What can I do right now to just make an impact and make sure that we all remember each other for something, even if I am not here tomorrow. Sorry if that was a long winded answer. (Laughs) Clancy: No that was a wonderful answer. I really love how your definition of courage really centers around… well around centering students and deciding that that service is a really big part of your identity and your work. It’s wonderful. So my last question to you then is: what do you want other people to know about what is means to be a courageous scientist? Pakala: I think courage can be something where, it keeps you going. For example, for me, the center of my focus, my energy is my students and student success is at the core of everything I do. There are times where people say, ‘Oh Krishna, you do too much. This is classified as service,’ or this or that. I don’t see that. I see everything to be aligned. If I am helping a scholarship committee, you don’t know how much impact that generates bringing the student in. So there is… everything is connected. I think that in my case, I have never imagined I would be in a tenured track position. To be honest, people still say, ‘Oh, you have to be careful. You have to do this to get tenure,’ and stuff and I’m at a point where tenure should not be about that. This should not be another PhD experience where people are saying, ‘Oh, we have one chance to get you and we are going to make it harder.’ I think this is the time where we should help folks like me and everybody else to say we want to empower students. We want to teach our students about how to not fear failure, why it is okay to fail, and what are you going to do to come back, and how we are going to provide you with opportunity to come back. Right? And that should not change even for a faculty member. So, I would say that… for all the administrators to continue to empower their faculty members so they can be courageous. For students to challenge the faculty members so that they show courage, so that they can be motivated. And for the faculty to say that they believe in the mission of the university and to support our students. I think that if we are worried about how our administrators reviewing us think. I think we are losing the bigger impacts that we could do if we focused on thousands of students that will make an impact. Who will probably remember you more, who will probably credit you for even a single thing you did unlike other things that they may or may not care. I think that’s where the courage should be to enjoy the simple things that you can connect with your students and your other colleagues rather than trying to, you know, look for checking a box. Clancy: Yeah and I feel like what I am hearing from you is… and this is coming up in a lot of the interviews actually is, really centering around what matters to you as opposed to centering your work around some outcome that’s defined by other people. Pakala: Yeah. Clancy: So, yeah. Pakala: Yeah, I think the other challenge being in my position, or in general, you know right now with everything going on, I’m from a foreign country, I still don’t feel secure to be here and even though people talk about diversity and inclusion, I know that I have to do ten times more than other people and still, when the time comes, it’s not… you know it’s good… you know that’s your job. You’re doing it, cool. But I feel like, we need to figure out a way; especially in the U.S where, it is diverse even though people complain about diversity, it’s more of the probably diverse country I’ve ever seen in terms of international population stuff but I feel like we need to leverage it more and support each other right now more than ever. You see how some things are happening around the country and we should channel our energy in our mission rather than something that is not defined by us, it’s by birth that we are coming in. There needs to be more visibility for everybody, them and people from the LGBTQ community. They keep saying those things but, unless you see it at your level, unless somebody comes to your door and says, ‘Do you want to take this responsibility.’ I won’t believe those things. Okay there is no accountability. If I left, I leave the problem here. If I stay and be bold, maybe this will not happen to anybody. Maybe I can be more courageous to empower other people. Clancy: Right. Well thank you for your work. Thank you for sticking with it. At times it is tempting for many of us to walk away. I really appreciate it. So, Dr. Krishna Pakala. Thank you again for joining me. Pakala: Thank you. Clancy (Outro): Thanks for joining me for the Courageous Scientist Podcast. Like I said this is a short-term passion project to keep me sane during the pandemic so, I don’t want your money. Please do tell budding scientist and scientist educators of all ages about the podcast because, I think they’ll like it. And if you have the means, send a few bucks the way of your local food bank. Please also do check out the show notes at courageous-scientist.libsyn.com (That’s L-I-B-S-Y-N) because I really you to learn about these scientists I have been interviewing. They’re telling you a little about their lived experience but they’re also all amazing scientists. I want you to learn about their scholarship. Alright, thanks for listening.

Dr. Jennifer Freyd is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Oregon, as well as the Founder and President of a new non-profit, the Center for Institutional Courage. Dr. Freyd spoke with me about her journey from studying cognitive psychology to institutional betrayal, to institutional courage, as well as the ways she has had to show personal courage along her scholarly path. Though we don't discuss it in this episode Dr. Freyd is also fighting for pay equity at her institution via a major lawsuit. TRANSCRIPT Dr. Kate Clancy (Intro): Hello and welcome to the Courageous Scientists Podcast. My name is Kate Clancy and as you probably know from previous episodes this is a short, global pandemic passion project just to, I don’t know, shine a little light into our days and get to know some really amazing courageous people. I am so excited by who I am getting to talk to today, one of my personal heroes, this is Dr. Jennifer Freyd. She is a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, she is a visiting scholar at Stanford and Jennifer is the founder and president of Center for Institutional Courage. So that should just give you the beginnings of the idea of why I am so excited to talk to Dr. Freyd. Thank you so much for joining me today. Dr. Jennifer Freyd: It’s my pleasure to be here. Clancy: So, as you know, since we talked about this before I started recording, I am going to be asking you the same three questions we ask everybody. So would you mind just starting with the first one: what brought you to science? Freyd: Well, you know I was an undergraduate in the late 1970s and I kept switching my major because I kept having new passions from fine arts to philosophy, ending up with anthropology. And near the end of my time in college I, on a lark, took an introductory psychology course and what inspired me to do that was one day walking through the library and seeing somebody’s textbook open with a diagram of the ear, explaining how hearing worked and perception and I thought it was so neat to understand perception. So I took this introductory psychology course and I fell in love with what was then called cognitive psychology: the study of thinking, memory, perception and decided that’s what I just had to do. It was really truly just falling in love. And so I just managed to get myself into graduate school despite not having a psychology major and I went to Stanford and I pursued cognitive psychology with great enthusiasm for really about ten years. Clancy: And since then you’ve had certainly a bit of a shift away from cognitive psychology. Do you want to say all what’s motivated that shift. Freyd: I think it kind of relates to your second question about courage because the shift required a lot of courage. I was in my early 30s, had mad something of a good name for myself in the field of cognitive psychology. Had tenure, was doing work that truly interested me that other people were building upon as well and in the area that I called Dynamic Representations’…had to do with perception and memory and around that time, two things happened. One was that there was a public increased interest in… what had been called different things but basically memories recovered of prior trauma so, especially prior sexual trauma and there were newspaper stories about it and it was touching to me personally in various ways as well and I realized, there are also memory psychologists. I knew a lot, but I had never really learned about this kind of striking phenomenon. And so I decided it was really important to understand and I delved into it, I learned a lot about sexual violence and hit the history of research on memory and trauma in general and for sexual violence and decided to start doing some research on this topic. And it was met with great consternation from my colleagues. Nobody was talking about sexual violence in academic psychology and I remember giving a colloquium starting out with some data, from other people, I hadn’t at that point collected my own data and about the rates. And it was like I had gotten up on a table and did something incredibly inappropriate because people were… some people were like scratching at their faces. It was really hard to describe and this was 1991 that that happened and, it would have been easy for me to have sort of retreated at that moment realizing that people did not like what I was doing, but for whatever reason, I’m just not made that way and if anything it kind of fueled my determination to study this topic and I developed a theory that it became called ‘Betrayal Trauma Theory,’ given kind of rapidly, and presented it in the summer of 1991 at a conference at UCSF’s (University of California, San Francisco) Medical School and really, at that point, shifted to more and more research on the psychology of sexual violence and trauma. Clancy: And so, as you said your sort of answer to that question was also starting to answer the second question of, ‘How have you shown courage in science?’ Can you share a little bit more about when you made that pivot and when you encountered obstacles… what that was like for you and how you persevered? Freyd: Yeah, I mean I’ve thought about it since you sent those questions and, there’s probably lots of different stories I could tell, but maybe one of the important moments there was, first of all just not giving up when my colleagues reacted with such unhappiness at my shift in interest and part of the message that came to me was this wasn’t an important topic and it probably wasn’t real and the data probably weren’t real and it was like a… it was not only inappropriate but, scientifically insignificant. And I knew, because I had read a lot of papers by then, that although there wasn’t a tone of research there was tons of research to say it was real. And I couldn’t imagine how it couldn’t be important. So, you know, I stuck with it. But within a couple of years, I found myself the target of a national organization that went after me. And this was extreme, this was a lot more than like colleagues in my department being realty bad and stuff, this was actual overt attack. And unfortunately for me, it involved my parents and they, and a lot of other people, really focused on discrediting me. And people in the media in the media like often, inadvertently I hope, broadcasted that message. It was humiliating and horrible. It took me some years, before I could speak at all in a public way about my suggestions, but it didn’t stop me from doing research. I just kept my head down and I did the research. In 1993, some more than two or three years into this, two years into this, I did speak out about the situation and why it wasn’t okay and I did that mostly because I was realizing it was impacting a lot of other people. Looking back, I don’t know how I had the courage to do that. I really don’t I certainly had the support of people close to me. I had an incredibly supportive partner and, at that point wonderful young children and very good friends, but very little support otherwise. I think it was just understanding that this was so important and some intuitive understanding that the backlash I was experiencing was part of the phenomenon and part of why I could not succumb to that pressure. That went on for years in the 90s and it started to subside near the end of the 90s and now I can, this is interesting to me, now students don’t know anything about that. My name was in so much popular media for a while there everybody knew about it but it just, sort of, shows how, with time, that certain things get forgotten and, to my relief, people don’t necessarily know about that but I think it’s important to, you know to say that scientists can get under a lot of personal attack for their work they’re doing and, in my case, intellectual work was put in personal terms, which I think was part of the point in discrediting me. So that was an extreme experience. Flash forward twenty years to 2014-ish, there was another, sort of, experience I had. I was doing research, by then my lab had been really going strong for twenty years. Developed Betrayal Trauma Theory where we were starting to study what we call ‘Institutional Betrayal’ and we had tons of data and by that time the country had really come around in talking about sexual violence in a big way. College Sexual Assault was now a topic. I was getting called from the press and the college really had turned around in a lot of ways. A big scandal hit my school involving an alleged gang rape involving athletes and there were protests, I was involved in various ways and the university administration asked me what they should do to handle the campus crisis and I said they should do what some people sometimes call a campus climate study, a survey of victimization rates which had not been done really in a big way at the school. At first they seemed to really want to support that but the when they looked at the survey, they really decided that no they were not going to support that and I think part of the thing that was going on too is I was openly critical in some ways of the university’s response and had even filed a report with the Department of Education on a suspected Clery Act violation. So you know I stuck my neck at them but I was proposing for really sound research that would really help the university and when they said no, they wouldn’t support or help this campus wide survey, I, somehow with my lab, figured out how to do it anyway. We got alternative funding and within a couple month’s we had done a big survey and it ended up being a really big contributor, in a good way, to the university but it took a lot of courage to do that when the administration seemed so clearly to be unhappy and had even said to the local press demeaning things about me as a researcher. Currently, I have put a huge amount of energy into creating a new non-profit, it’s called the Center for Institutional Courage. This has taken courage for me because of just who I am. I am an introverted person. I’m very comfortable in a laboratory, being a professor and I had to get out of that comfort zone to do this because founding a running a nonprofit involves all sorts of different skills. It really is probably a better thing for an extrovert than an introvert but I feel really strongly that the world needs exactly what I’m trying to create which is a research and dissemination organization to look at institutional courage which is kind of the antidote of institutional betrayal. Clancy: You know as a… as someone who does some work in this area and has been following in your footsteps for a very long time, it has been wonderful to see the center taking shape and I’m really excited about what it continues to do. Freyd: Thank you. Clancy: You’re welcome. I do have one last question: what do you want other people to know about what it means to be a courageous scientist? Freyd: A big part of this is being honest with yourself and what your values are and living your values. And each person’s values are going to be different so it’s going to look different for different people but I think we tend to be not courageous when we’re not living true to our own values. So for me, it’s really taking the time to think about what I really care the most about and prioritize and then say, ‘Is my living consistent with those values?’ and if I’m not, then adjusting what I am doing. And I think courage gets involved because, often, it’s easier to go along with what everybody else expects and go along with the status quo and when you detect that your own values are at odds with what you’re doing, it takes courage to change. People will resist it most likely. To me that’s what it takes whether it’s science or life. Clancy: I could not agree more. Any last thoughts or final words for our listeners? Freyd: I guess, you know, I can’t help but see in the response to the current pandemic all the themes that I’ve been looking at over the past 30 years showing up in various dramatic ways to the extent that the pandemic may impact people’s vulnerability to sexual violence and then you need to show institutional courage to protect people, for instance, who are ordered to be at home with abusers, to the response to the pandemic itself coming from various leaders whether those leaders create institutional betrayal through their inaction and dishonesty or whether they show institutional courage through their honesty and courageous moves. I just think it’s so right in front of our eyes right now and it just brings me back to why I think it’s so important to have a research center focusing on issues of institutional betrayal and institutional courage. Clancy: I was just having a conversation recently with folks about the fact that a lot of the university’s did at least some communicating in the early weeks of the pandemic and a lot have fallen silent now as we’re are all reckoning with how long term this is going to be and I know a lot of universities are reckoning with the fact that they are losing tens, if not, hundreds of millions of dollars because of what’s happening, but they aren’t necessarily talking to their people about it. But they’re not necessarily talking to their people about it.  Freyd: I agree with you. Clancy: That’s concerning. Freyd: Yeah the lack of transparency is a hallmark of institutional betrayal and when I say, for instance, if the university is asking faculty to agree to pay-cuts without telling the faculty what the budget situation is… that seems very problematic to me because you don’t, where’s the accountability? What is being funded and what is not being funded? So I agree with you completely. It’s really important that universities stay open with their information right now to make sure that we really come out of this in a healthy way. Clancy: Right, especially in times like this right? Times of crisis or when we have to double down on, like you said thinking through our values and staying true to them rather than acting in fear. Freyd: Right. Clancy: Well I guess, fingers crossed that our various universities figure that out. (Laughs) Freyd: Yes. Clancy: Well thank you so much for joining me. This was just wonderful, as it always is when I get to talk to you so thank you so much. Freyd: Thank you Kate, so great to talk to you. Clancy (Outro): Yeah and thank you everyone for joining me for the courageous scientist podcast. If you want to learn more and visit the show notes to learn more about Dr. Freyd’s work, it’s at courageous-scientist.libysn.com, you do not need to visit a Patreon or help fund this podcast in any way. All you have to do is try to give some money to your foodbank so thank you so much and have a great day.

Vassiki Chauhan is a PhD candidate at Dartmouth in psychology and brain sciences. She has also been a courageous activist against sexual harassment in science. Hear her story, and then learn more about her amazing science: you can read her scholarly papers, or follow her on Twitter. TRANSCRIPT Dr. Kate Clancy (Intro): Alright this is Kate Clancy and this is the Courageous Science Podcast/ educational material for my humanizing science students in the middle of a global pandemic. I am joined by the rather amazing Vassiki Chauhan. She is a PhD student in psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth and someone that I am very proud to know so thank you so much for joining me Vassiki. Chauhan: Really happy to be here. Clancy: So Vassiki, as you know, there are only three questions that I’m asking in this nice, short podcast for those of us that might not have expansive attention spans right now. And so I thought I would just start with the first one: what brought you to science? Chauhan: So I’ve been interested in science for as long as I can remember, but I started considering science as a potential career for me when I was around fourteen years old. And I got my hands on a popular science book about the theory of relativity and also that dealt with Einstein’s life. And when I was growing up in India, all of my friends were either going to become lawyers or doctors or engineers. There wasn’t anything else that was really a valid option and I had to work within that framework and really negotiate with my parents about the fact that science could be a well-paying job for me and that I would have a secure future. I did go down the physics route initially and I got my undergraduate degree in physics and mathematics. When I was in my undergrad, I became really fascinated with biological systems and how they seem to get complex over time rather than simpler over time as the second law of thermodynamics would have us believe. And I did an honors project on the topic and I got really fascinated with the physics of biological systems and then I began thinking about how the coolest biological system you could study is the brain and it eventually led me down the path of neuroscience. I got a masters from Italy in cognitive neuroscience and met my current advisor there and ending up at Dartmouth as a result of that interest. Clancy: Now, Vassiki, that’s so interesting to hear. You’re not the first person that I’ve spoken to who has had, sort of a lifelong interest in science but also sort of had some convincing to do of their families. Can you tell me a little about, like when you made that transition from physics to more biology and brain sciences, was that a hard sell for any loved ones at all? Chauhan: It was a little bit and I always gravitated towards opportunities that had some financial security as well. So it’s always been important for me to have scholarships when I pursue passion projects and that can be a bit challenging. But as long as you can justify that you have your bread and butter taken care of, it becomes a little bit more of a luxury to pursue topics that might be a bit of a deviation from what you’ve being doing historically. So as long as I could find opportunities that could fund me, my parents became more and more open over time for me exploring new things. And once I had a PhD job offer, they were convinced that I was heading down the right path because PhD’s are prestigious and everyone knows that you get a doctor in your name at the end of it. So In think it took a while before my parents were fully on board with the life plan, but it happened eventually. And they were constantly supportive because I’ve always been someone who identifies as an intellectual nomad. I take interest in reading and literature, recently painting and I want a life where I’m not restricted by a definition or a box, even that of a scientist. So they have had to deal with how fluid I am as a person before so I don’t think it was any surprise to them that I was changing careers. Clancy: That’s also really helpful to hear. Right? That you sort of, thought ahead when you were making that transition and sort of prepared yourself kind of the opposite of how we were talking about this passion project of mine where I, sort of jumped in and didn’t really have a financial plan for putting this together to make it available. You really did think ahead and that’s pretty commendable. I wanted to move on to the second question actually: can you tell me a bit about how you’ve shown courage in science? Chauhan: So, there’s a public record about how that ended up happening fortunately and unfortunately in my case. I identify as a whistle blower.  I basically reported my personal experiences of sexual violence at the hand’s of a faculty member at the department I was pursuing my PhD in summer of 2017 which lead to a Title IX investigation and finally resulted in a lawsuit that me along with initially six other plaintiff’s filed against Dartmouth College that is now being somewhat resolved with a settlement. We’re still kind of ironing out the details and I’m particularly excited because it comes with not just hefty class settlement that benefits not just the plaintiff but allows, potentially nineteen other women who suffered at the hands of the three faculty members that we brought to court against but also the fact that it is accompanied by some programmatic relief like support for domestic violence and sexual violence… organizing, grassroots organizations on campus and provost diversity funds for hiring intervention for faculty from marginalized backgrounds. So it was really moving to be able to sit on the same table as Dartmouth administration and renegotiate for the values that are actions embodied. And sometimes courage is a hard word. Like often people call me brave and I to say that I would have rather had these things not happen then have to be brave. And I maintain that to this day like nothing will ever be worth it but the fact that we were able to come together and make something of this experience is meaningful to me. And potentially the only situation in which I would accept the word courage is that we were told repeatedly, even after private conversations we would have people say that, ‘We should focus on our career and pursue science and maybe one day when we have a faculty position, we can look back and change academia from within,’ but only do it once we had opened the door. And I feel courageous because I didn’t wait for that day to come. I saw something that didn’t align with my values system and spoke up about it and I don’t think I could have done things differently. Clancy: That’s amazing… and I feel like that’s something that I hope folks, you know one of the pieces that I hope they heard you just say, just to reflect back that amazing statement is that, of course you’d rather these things hadn’t happen to you. That you didn’t have to be courageous. And I think we need to pay attention to when science cultures and climates create conditions that force this on people. Right? That either we stand in our values and do things that are scary and potentially carry retaliation or give up our values. And that’s an incredibly unfair position that I’d rather you’d never have had to be in. I am so glad, even with all the costs that… I mean you know getting to hear that there’s a settlement in the works and you know, all these things that you are saying I am so so pleased for you. I can’t even tell you how great that is knowing how long you’ve been fighting. You and the many other folks in this lawsuit. As just sort of one final thought about this, maybe we should move to the third question: what do you want people to know about what it means to show courage in science? Chauhan: I think, I hope this is not too pessimistic, but I just feel like people need to know that sometimes showing courage costs you and that’s not all there is to it. I feel fortunate enough to be on a different path, on a path of healing, on a path of meaning making from where I stand right now. And what’s really jumping it to me is that in order to make sense of my own very personal and very traumatic experience, I have had to become privy to structural inequalities that exist in the society we live in and basically now a card-carrying socialist and a member of Democratic-Socialists of America and I’ve become more and more radicalized as a feminist. I think about things that I haven’t thought about before, that I’ve had the privilege not to think about and I’m a firm believer in the fact that institutions shouldn’t change one lawsuit at a time. So I don’t think that people should start talking about the accessibility or access for people with disabilities when someone with a disability files a lawsuit. I strongly believe that it takes courage for people to come forward and show what is wrong but hopefully these institutions can show courage as well in forms of gentle phases and act preemptively rather than reactively. But I guess, to be succinct, what I am trying to say is, what I’d like people to know is that courage comes at a cost but the opportunity you get from rethinking  why you take a courageous path makes you a better person in some way. It makes you the person that you want to be. Not to sound too cheesy but it’s definitely something that I’ve seen happen to me and my co-plaintiffs and other individuals moving forward. Men and women included, they have been creative about how they live their lives as an aftermath of this trauma and I have nothing but awe and respect for each and every one of them. Clancy: No, I think those are wise words and that courage does often come with a cost, I want us to not just think about the courage that individuals have to show sometimes in order to push against systems but that fact that true courage comes from leaders of organizations and entire organizations changing the way they do things so they don’t just… it isn’t just responses to legal issues, like you said but actually imaging a better world and then trying to live it from beginning. Right? That’s what any of us want all along rather than putting anybody in the position of being forced to be, like you said, being forced to be brave. You know, it would be nicer if we could all just do our science. (Laughs) Chauhan: Absolutely like it shouldn’t be that the institution is constantly thinking about liability as opposed to making the campus more livable for who it’s supposed to be for. Higher Ed is an interesting avenue because it really makes people think about whether the institution advocates for it’s constituents or the administration and everyone needs to be constantly evaluating the environment they’re in embedded in to make sense of what is motivating decisions that are made that we see in our newsfeed every day. Clancy: Absolutely. Any last thoughts or anything else you wanted to make sure to say? Chauhan: Yeah definitely, I mean… as you said, we should be able to do our science and not engage in uncomfortable experiences like the one that I’ve gone through but I definitely feel strongly about how things would change if academia a was a more inclusive place. Like I just want to send this message out to whoever is listening especially if you are from a historically marginalized background: if you feel like a campus didn’t see you, is to stay on it, and you are struggling with finding your place that’s why you’re here. You are paving the way for everyone else who’s to come and academia will be better because of you. So I just want to encourage everyone who feels out of place to know that they belong in the future. There is a place for them. Clancy: Oh Vassiki thank you so much. Such wise words that are completely important for our listener to hear so thank you so much. Chauhan: Thank you for having me. Clancy (Outro): Thanks for joining me for the Courageous Scientist Podcast. Like I said, this is a short-term passion project to keep me sane during the pandemic, so, I don’t want your money. Please do tell budding scientists and science educators of all ages about the podcast, because I think they’ll like it. If you have the means, send a few bucks the way of your local foodbank. Thanks for listening.

I am so pleased to share with you this week's CSP interview. Dr. Max Liboiron is an Assistant Professor of Geography at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Associate Vice President of Indigenous Research, and the Director of CLEAR, the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research. Please learn more about Dr. Liboiron and her team at https://civiclaboratory.nl/ .

Dr. Aunchalee Palmquist is an assistant professor of maternal and child health at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is an affiliate of the Carolina Global Breastfeeding Institute and is the co-host of the podcast Anthrolactology. In this episode, Dr. Palmquist describes her winding and worthwhile path to science. She stands in her goals of decolonizing and achieving justice within science, and uses them to motivate her work every day. TRANSCRIPT Dr. Kate Clancy (Intro): Hello and welcome to the Courageous Scientist Podcast. This is Kate Clancy, anthropology professor and aspiring courageous scientist. This podcast is a single season sanity project that arose from the global COVID-19 pandemic. I am releasing short interviews with inspiring scientists every week for the next few months. I want us to remember that we are connected and that we are all capable of doing good. I want us to notice that there is good work being done right now and many of us unable to do our work who will pick it back up again soon. I ask each guest three questions: What brought you to science? How do you show courage in science? What do you want others to know about being a courageous scientist? My guests have shown me what it means to have clear values, to stand in them even when scared, and how to approach obstacles. That doesn’t mean all courageous scientists overcome all obstacles. It means that we know how to come out of the other side is not an indicator of our worth. Today, I am bringing you an interview with Dr. Aunchalee Palmquist. An assistant professor of Maternal and Child Health at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Dr. Palmquist is an anthropologist and co-host with Dr. E A Quinn of the podcast Anthrolactology. -Interview Begins- Dr. Kate Clancy: So Dr. Palmquist thank you so much for joining me tonight. Dr. Aunchalee Palmquist: Thanks for having me. Clancy: So as you know, I have just three questions that I would like to ask you about the kind of courage that you’ve shown as a scientist or what it means to be a courageous scientist. So I’ll start with the first one: what brought you to science? Palmquist: What brought me to science…anthropology actually brought me to science. I took an anthropology class as an undergraduate and…. really not knowing much about the discipline and being completely inspired and drawn into this particular discipline that allowed me to understand human biology… human biology as a process in conversation with both natural and social environments. To understand, sort of, ecological perspectives of how different kinds of natural environments shaped the expression of human biology in different places and then also to unite that with more sociocultural understandings about how people interpret what’s going on in the body and different strategies to understand, make sense of and address different kinds of… different states of being, most particularly different states of illness and disease. And so I was really drawn to medical anthropology as a biocultural science, in the sense that it allowed me to unite both my fascination with human biology and with the sociocultural study of human culture and diversity. And so I just, I thought for a while, ‘I might go into medicine,’ but then I thought for a well, ‘Well maybe I’ll just do more applied kinds of anthropology,’ but really I couldn’t get away from this intersection of biology and society that has fueled my research ever since. So yeah, I would say that is really what drew me to science. Kind of all of these things within anthropology that allow us to answer these questions at the intersection of biology culture, human biology and culture. Clancy: I guess it makes sense that we have similar, I don’t know, similar rationalities for doing what we do since we’re in similar fields. But that was really lovely to hear. Thank you. So now for my next question: how have you shown courage in science? Palmquist: I think one of the ways that I show courage in science is that I… I have chosen to do research on topics that are somewhat controversial in service of things like social justice and disrupting the status quo of power and turning the traditional ‘white anthropologist goes somewhere far in the world to study brown people’. I am a scientist of color who studies white people. (Laughs) I study a really controversial topic which is infant feeding and more specifically human milk sharing. When I decided to kind of move full force into this topics I knew that what… I knew that what the findings were going to be, findings that really pushed against these major public health agencies and medical authorities telling women that what they were doing was wrong and harmful and dangerous to their babies and I did it anyways. And I did it knowing that I probably wouldn’t get a lot of funding for it. I do the research that I do a little more broadly in the area of infant feeding knowing that we’re up against large commercial organizations and entities trying to spread a lot of information about infant feeding that is not supportive of the diverse ways that people want to feed their babies. And there are a lot of commercial interests behind the kinds of research that gets funded. And I have to turn down lots of funding and so all of these little decisions that I make… (Laughs) seemingly little decisions that I make about where I get funding from, the kinds of research that I do, who I collaborate with and how I frame the kinds of research that I do, I think all represent different levels of courage. It’s not a popular thing to tell, you know, the larger public health organizations of our country that they missed the mark in some of the guidance that they were giving. That they’re spreading misinformation, social stigma. But the kind of ethnographic research I did on, particularly, human milk sharing was really people, mother’s voices saying that what they’re telling us about how risky this infant feeding practice is doesn’t reflect what I’m doing in my every day life and we’re not bad parents, we are not bad mothers for this type of infant feeding care which was more or less the rhetoric that was being spread at that time. So, I also, I think I really showed courage in the fact that I am really guided by my commitment to social justice to help equity and human rights in my research. I find that sometimes when I get invitations to do different collaborative projects or to think about starting a new research project that if I’m grounding myself in what is really important to me and want my work to reflect, it always comes back to these issues of decolonizing anthropology so fighting for social justice, centering racial equity, centering the voices of people of color and marginalized populations around the world that really helps me. But that orientation of work doesn’t always get you the biggest grants and the most… you know I am almost ten years passed my first tenured-track job and I still don’t have tenure (Laughs). You know so I think we’re not rewarded in the same ways that other scientists sometimes are for doing this kind of engaged work and this kind of political work, but I think it’s really important and so, at least from my perspective I think that shows courage to some degree. Clancy: It absolutely does. And you actually ended up answering, there’s sort of a follow-up question in my head of, ‘What are the values that are undergirding all of these really wonderful decisions and courageous decisions that you’re making?’ And what you’re saying around racial equity and social justice and everything, I mean that, you know when you’re holding true to your values, even when they’re costly I feel like it makes it a little easier to make, you know, to hold true to what you believe when you make those decisions. Which kind of leads me to the last question, or at least I suspect it does: what do you want others to know about how to be a courageous scientist? Palmquist: In think the thing that I most often tell my students who come from a range of disciplines is that, I mean, you have to… it’s so cliché, but you have to love what you do. Finding that seed of inspiration or passion for what you do and then kind of looking at where you see your contribution to the field, those things kind of fall from that. But you have to be, I think you just have to be really clear for yourself, like what are your values? What is it that excites you, inspires you, allows you to be in that space of the most creativity? And how do you hope to contribute to your discipline or your field or society and beyond? These are things that I think are really grounding, or have been grounding for me. I also think, in terms of courage in science that I feel like, especially young scientists and early career scientists, because of all the, you know expectations that you have, that academia has or that the field has we set expectations for ourselves, like we have to have this sort of linear trajectory. We’re going to do this and that and this and kind of fall in line in this path that leads from A to B in a really clear way. And I would just like to encourage young scientists, early career scientists to think about what might happen if you take an opportunity that doesn’t seem to really fit right now but that’s a really exciting opportunity and just kind of go for it and see where it leads. If we had the opportunity to talk about my career trajectory, it’s very much a zigzag (Laughs) up and down and sort of around about way of getting to where I am right now. And I couldn’t have predicted it, but along the way there were opportunities that I took that didn’t seem to make any sense at the time, but ended up giving me opportunities to learn to be an interdisciplinary scholar, to learn… work on quantitative methods, to work in institutions that were you know disciplines or fields that were quite different from my home discipline. So I think in that sense just… looking for those opportunities to broaden and expand your horizons and not being so concerned about doing XY and Z correct thing or quote on quote the correct thing because really we all have, our paths are all, they can call be very different. I think that once you have a chance to talk to lots of different scientists in this, sort of, series that you’re doing, you’ll find that there isn’t a recipe for success necessarily. Except for that people are really, they love science. They want to be doing it and they want to contribute to the greater good I guess. So yeah I mean not being so invested in having that clear directive that, you know, being willing to take some more opportunities to do some new things. That’s really been important for me. Clancy: Yeah, wow. So we do have just a couple minutes left. I was really struck by, you know, what you were saying about these different paths. Do you want to give just one example of one of those moments where you decided to take a chance on something and how it went? Palmquist: Yeah so when I graduated with my doctorate in anthropology, I was… I probably sent out that year maybe twenty applications for a tenured track positions and I didn’t get any of them. And then I applied for a couple of other, a couple of post-doctoral opportunities. There was an opportunity for me to go the National Institutes of Health. Their National Human Genome Research Institute had a branch, the Social and Behavioral Research branch and to do, to learn how to do social network methods. And it was really just, seemed like a cool opportunity but it was just one of those things where it was something to apply to and I really want a job. So I cast I wide net and I ended up getting and interview and I ended up getting recruited to come to the NIH to learn how to do social network method’s as an anthropologist and at that time my research, I was really interested in obesity and early developmental influences on obesity but I ended up in this situation where I was primarily, I was primarily a cultural anthropologist with some training in human biology being asked to learn to do things like really complicated statistical methods and work with different scientists from all different… social and behavioral scientists from psychology and public health and physiology and communications and statistics. And it was interesting and it was challenging and at the time I was like, ‘I have no idea what I’m going to do with this training.’ Now, looking back I’m like, that was really formative for me. I mean now I am an anthropologist in the department of maternal and child health in a school of public health. And that was… I probably would have never made that jump and be in the position that I am not had I not had that formative experience as a post-doc and it was like really interdisciplinary to learn new methods. I can’t do social network methods, modeling myself but I understand it conceptually and even  that training helps me to think differently about all kinds of things that I think about now like social support in perinatal and postnatal period and social media and social networks and how information gets disseminated through social networks. All of those things were, I am able to understand them much better because I had that unique opportunity. Clancy: That is so cool. And I love how it’s from sort of thinking about your values around social justice, ending on this expertise and understanding of social networks and the ways in which that that has sort of brought you to the career that you’re now. Thank you so much for doing this interview Dr. Palmquist I really appreciate it. You do a great service to the discipline of anthropology, it’s just such a pleasure to learn more about you and your work so thank you so so much. Palmquist: Thank you. I feel the same way about you. (Laughs) Thanks so much. Clancy (Outro): Thanks for joining me for the Courageous Scientist Podcast. I hope that you will check out our website couragoues-scienctist.libsyn.com, that’s L-I-B-S-Y-N .com. The reason for that is that these amazing role models that I have been interviewing are not just strong people; they’re scholars. They do lots of amazing things they publish great papers. They have podcasts like our guest today and I want to make sure you get to know the whole them. So check out the show notes, click on the links, and learn about the amazing scholarship of some really courageous people. Like I said, this is a short-term passion project to keep me sane during the pandemic so, I don’t want your money. Please do tell budding scientists and science educators of all ages about the podcast though because I think they’ll like it. And, if you have the means, send a few bucks the way of your local food bank. Thanks for listening.

Dr. Asmeret Berhe is a soil biogeochemist and the Falasco Endowed Chair in Earth Sciences at the University of California at Merced. Join me in learning about the brave ways Dr. Berhe has shown up for science by making hard decisions and refusing to be pushed out. Learn more about Dr. Berhe's research, watch her TED talk on soil mitigation, and watch her Story Collider on growing up and loving science in a war torn region. TRANSCRIPT Dr. Kate Clancy: Okay, so welcome to yet another round of ‘Ask a Courageous Scientist.” I am going to be asking the same three questions I’ve been asking of everybody and I have been really enjoying the variety of answers that I have been getting from some really astounding scientists. Today I am joined by Professor Asmeret Asefaw Berhe She is a Soil Biogeochemist at the University of California Merced and a full professor over there. (She) Does some amazing work on climate change and I am going to be asking her our three questions today. So, thanks for joining me. Dr. Asmeret Asefaw Berhe: Well, thank you for having me Kate. Clancy: So on to our very first question: What brought you to science? Berhe: So I was, you know, that nerdy kid who liked to read and loved to learn about everything. Through books and talking to folks and listening to radio as a child. I grew up in a household where reading was encouraged a lot. And listening to the radio so that you know about the world, BBC World, when I grew up for example, that was what we listened to in particular with my dad. And I think that just got me into trying to learn more and more things and I grew up, kind of, liking to learn new things not just liking to read, not just my own textbooks but the textbooks of my older siblings. And from time to time I would try to explain it to them, (Laughs) what is in their textbooks, as well as that could go as you can imagine for my younger siblings. They were mad. And that just made things, learning, exciting and interesting to me. So I grew up with the idea that I loved learning, I loved to learn about the natural environment around me and, kind of, that was basically, if you were, my gateway towards learning. And times afterwards I realized, in particular in high school, that I really liked science, in particular chemistry and I was good at it and physics and biology. I had amazing teachers that encouraged, that… you know kind of desire to learn too as well as my parents. And the combination of really getting excited by figuring out new things and learning, you know, new things about the world, that I did not realize were there before. And the fact that I could read and even get more out of that experience, the encouragement from both my parents and the teachers that I had kind of set me on a course to study science. I sought out to study chemistry as a pre-med on the undergraduate level until I studied soil science which was the new thing that I found when I came to college. I really didn’t know too much about soil before then. All of those meant that I got hooked. I realized that not only is this stuff interesting, but it’s also exciting and I found things that I could learn… new things, over and over again. And that just made the learning process exciting for me and science became something that I just fell in love with. And I’ve been learning science since then for a long period of time. For context, where I learned science early on was in Eretria where I was born and raised in East Africa. And it was not easy to necessarily keep focusing on science at the time that I grew up because there was an act of war going on. And so my education had to go on at a time where there was an active armed conflict happening right outside the capital city where I grew up. People’s lives and family’s lives were being interrupted left and right because of war and the combination of family members disappearing because they were getting arrested or God knows what or going out of the town to join the independent struggle. Some leaving the country, exiled to save themselves from what was going on. So there was a lot of disruption happening in the lives of people around us at the time. And so, I think in some ways the idea that my parents kind of brought us into this, that whatever we do in life, we need to be thinking about school and life because that’s about the only wealth, especially in this kind of climate, that the only guaranteed life, path in life is education to take you somewhere. Because you can’t trust anything like wealth or connections. Even peace, as we worked on kind of getting a demonstration in real life at the time that I grew up and they tried to reinforce on us just focus on your school. Whatever you do, try and not lose focus on that school because that’s the only way that… guaranteed way that your life can be set on a good trajectory and a good course for the rest of your life. I think I took that to heart and, in some ways it was also an escape. Learning about school and science was an escape from the reality that was happening right around us. In many ways, science served as a distraction but also a motivating factor of, ‘This has to change’ and something has to be different in our lives and hopefully we can focus on education for a change. And that worked out so that was, kind of my path to science. Loved it because of early influences. If I had to sum it up I would say books, teachers, and parents especially and in spite of everything else that was going on around us those three held, and the interested persisted. Clancy: That’s amazing. That might be the most beautiful answer I’ve gotten so far. So thank you so much for sharing that. Can you tell me one way that you’ve shown courage in science? Berhe: I’ll tell you about courage that I feel like I’ve shown in science, I’ll switch gears and I will not be talking about my early education right now, but rather what happened when I grew up, completed my bachelors in Eretria and moved to the U.S., received a Masters at Michigan State and then moved to the West to pursue a PhD in Biogeochemistry at Berkeley, U.C. Berkeley. And I’ll tell you about that time because one thing I never, kind of, I was naïve and kind of didn’t appreciate as much was how different I would be from everybody else that was in such a big school and the most progressive and most liberal part of the country. Even there so I ended up being as far as I could tell, to this day I could never get my hands on data to confirm or deny this but, as far as I could tell, the only black student that was at that school at the department, so our large interdisciplinary department and graduate students… the only black person for a while. That kind of can give you an impression, it was a very interesting time where most of the people interacted fine with you obviously they minded their own business and everybody’s busy in grad school anyway. But there was at least one person that constantly made it his mission to undermine me and say all sorts of negative things. I wanted to work with this person so I tried to basically bury everything that was happening saying, ‘I don’t need to be friends with this person but they’re a really good scientist. I want to be able to work with them so I am just going to bite my tongue, do whatever they want me to do.’ It went on like that for two years. All sorts of messed up statements and actions that was taken on part of that person. Until I realized, I think it took a long time but it became clear to me that this person did not want me in that environment. And everything that they did to undermine my presence there, to undermine the fact that I was even admitted to the program, over the years cumulated into a final effort to basically, in front of audience, in front of other professors say extremely terrible things to suggest that I don’t belong there. It made it very clear that I do not belong there because I got my bachelors in Africa. Who did I think I was to just come to Berkeley and be able to get a PhD from this department. It’s just not how it should work the people should just not come from my part of the world and be part of this system that they created. That one was almost one of the kind of toughest times in my life especially since it happened at a critical moment in my PhD. And I felt myself just giving up. Just ready to give up and the very least leave that department and find another institution that I could complete my PhD because it became very clear that it was not worth it. This whole psychological toll that this interaction with this individual was taking on me was not worth it. So it required everything that I had and the amazing support of other mentors that I got at that time, new ones and family members and friends to get me to hold on… to just wait, give myself time to not rush into just withdrawing and leaving at that time. And I feel like that was probably what required the most courage because it was, you know, this had already happened two years of continuous and multiple versions of abuse and harassment at the hands of this individual and there were multiple things that were said and done privately and even in the presence of other individuals. I think the combination of all of those things, at the time, made it near impossible for me to stay. I couldn’t quite see what was the point of trying to do a PhD if it was going to cost me my sanity and if I had to continuously be fighting this person and this attitude that I didn’t belong. And there’s nothing that I can do t change where I came from. The only thing I figured I could do was show this individual that I was willing to work hard, I’m willing to do the work that I need to do to earn the degree and advance as I should. But, as you could imagine, this was incredibly hard. I basically decided at some point that he was not worth it. Let’s just move on, find another place to go to. And I think it took a lot of courage for me to be able to recognize that I had reached my limit obviously at this point. But thankfully I had just, you know, had found a new mentor that I was talking to that was willing to just be, say, ‘I recognize this is terrible. No one should be in this position, but let’s not let it ruin the path that you’re in. Let’s figure out a way out of this.’ And my partner, at that time, my boyfriend, who is my husband now who was with me when I went through a lot of it basically said the same thing. It took a couple of friends who saw the toll that it was taking but also how these incremental statements kind of, and actions had reached a critical point as far as how much I could take with concern. And basically, all of them making a plea to me to just hold on, just let it, process it, this is terrible but don’t make any rushed statements. Don’t leave the campus just yet. And I feel like that obviously made a difference, the fact that I stayed ended up being a really good thing because the new mentor that I found ended up being incredibly supportive. He is, to this day, as well as the other two mentors that I got. I ended up having a three-person advising team. That worked beautifully in my favor. That still continues to work beautifully but I think if I, that staying, the deciding to actually give those things a chance though, to me, it felt like it took everything that I had to stay in that environment where, granted a minority, but a member of that community, has made it  clear that I don’t belong. And said so in so many words in front of their colleagues. It was incredibly hard to process that emotion. And the fact that it was also sad to realize, even over the years after that, that I couldn’t do anything right in the eyes of this individual. But there were still, and it’s not like this individual started with me. There was record of all sorts of interesting actions and statements but, whatever I do felt like I can’t prove to people that I’m worthy of being in that environment. But a simple statement from this individual carried a huge weight to get me to be perceived as somebody who is unworthy, who is there with all sorts of shading. You know mechanisms, I don’t even know what those are at that point, but in their eyes, and in his eyes, I didn’t belong there because of my background. Somehow, I slipped in, and that was wrong. The fact that I slipped in through the admission process and whatever I did, didn’t seem to make a difference. In fact every, agreement that I had afterwards ended up being a trigger for yet another action for either that individual or people directly connected to him, in particular a couple of people. Even though there was this whole environment that I had, a community of friends, new advisors, you know, a couple of people, in particular one, made it their mission to make my life so difficult in science. And to this day it makes me upset when I think about these things because it required everything I had to hold on. To be able to stay and not leave that program. So if I were to think about, ‘When did I show courage?’ it’s to listen to the positive voices in my life, and regardless of what was happening to just hold on. And that act of holding on and not, kind of, making a rushed decision… well I guess it’s not necessarily fair to call it a rushed decision because it happened over a couple of years (Laughs). But still to make that decision and just get out of there… was probably the most courageous one I could think of. Clancy: Absolutely, no I couldn’t agree more. I mean that fact that you showed up every day while dealing with all of that abuse… and the fact that you did. So many people think that the wisest thing is to stick it out in the abusive situation and it does so much courage and fortitude and it’s so difficult. It’s a difficult path to change mentors… and you did it. That’s amazing. So I’m so glad you’re here. I’m so glad that you did it and I’m so glad you’re here. Berhe: Yeah changing was the best decision but it’s funny because it’s happened because I tried to report the individual that was just going… I had enough of the harassment and I tried to take formal steps to report the harasser, but his department colleague who was in charge of graduate students, who was appointed to look after the welfare of graduate students, just… she didn’t want to hear me. She didn’t want to hear this at all and so she kept dismissing me saying, ‘You’re not really saying anything. You’re not really reporting anything,’ even as I’m telling her, exactly the way I’m telling you. One thing I will give her credit for though is when I told her, ‘I really don’t know what to do,’ she named the individual who actually ended up being my advisor and said, ‘Have you talked to him? He tends to be a fairly reasonable person.’ And that folks can work with him, folks from very different scientific areas and backgrounds seemed to work with him totally fine. He was a little outside my field so he wasn’t necessarily someone that I thought about. But after my conversation with her, even though I was crushed by the fact that she didn’t want to hear me… she didn’t even want me to report this. It was kind of, you know, weird but at least the lead to the positive idea of reaching out to this other professor who ended up being… just exactly what you want. The advisor to be. And that was probably the best decision I made. Another great decision because if didn’t reach out to him and he didn’t agree to advise me going forward from that path then definitely, there would not have been a path for me to stay there. Clancy: So then that leads me to my final question which is: What do you want others to know about how to be a courageous scientist? Berhe: I think a few things that I think that everybody should no is: One, accept the fact that it sucks to go through something like this. It sucks to have somebody question you and your background and your integrity and denigrate you day in and day out. And everything that you do to be questioned and everything that you are and you integrity and everything to be put into question and your hard work, devalued… it sucks. And I think it’s important to recognize that as a human being. It sucks to go through something like this. But if I were to advise anybody to think through situations like this, what I would say is: one, make sure you surround yourself with supportive people. There is no substitute for that. There are plenty of people doing amazingly good science and there are plenty turns that science can take. And so it’s fine even if you don’t stick to exactly the scientific path you started out with because I think your welfare is way more important. I would choose a healthy climate, a low pace climate, and a healthy advising arrangement over anything. It’s not worth it. It’s not worth to lose your sanity and… you know kind of your health to suffer in so many ways trying to stay in environments like this. None of their credentials and accolades as ‘big deal’ scientists matter, at the end of the day, to you if they drive you insane. That’s, kind of, what I put myself through initially because I was naïve right?  I told myself that, ‘I don’t need him to be my friend.’ I just need to work with this incredible scientist who had accomplished so much and so I took the abuse and it escalated over time but I took it in all sorts of different ways because this person started doubting my… me in like the first five minutes. Doubting me in like the first five minutes of our interaction. Five minutes after we met he questioned my record and told me to take introduction to soil science if I wanted to stay in that program. And I say, ‘I got a bachelors in soil science… I actually was near the top of my class when I got a bachelors in soil science. Why would I need to take introduction?’ And he’s like ‘But this is Berkeley, its taught differently in Africa. And I’m like, ‘How do you know what I learned in Africa?’ Like what do you know about introduction… imagine having so much arrogance thinking an introduction to soil science course at Berkeley is not equivalent to even a bachelors degree at any other part of the world. I feel like that should have been a good clue right? But I just tried to ignore that. I tried to ignore so many things over the years so listen to that nagging voice in your head if there is, if there seems to be something wrong, do not ignore it, do not try to bury it. Surround yourself with the right community and it is okay to fall apart. Hopefully you have surrounded yourself with people that can pick you up at the time that you need support but it should be okay because I think maybe because I was pretty open about how broken up I was about this whole process and how sad I was about what was going on, I ended up finding incredible, not just mentors that provided the support that I needed but also friends. And a partner that saw exactly how much this affected me and where they are to provide the support that I needed at that time, in particular, the community that I needed at that time to have a positive community of people that did not have, that did come with those biases and baggage of opinions that clearly just one individual did and recognize that just one person is all it takes to do a lot of damage. You don’t need a large number of harassers or racists or misogynists to create a problem for underrepresented folks, all it takes is one. And hopefully our institutions recognize that and because we are able to do something about that one individual then hopefully not so many people have to keep suffering under one individual. Clancy: I couldn’t agree more. You know a lot of my research on harassment, one of the things that appalls me is when people push me on my methods or try to say that the percentages of some population I have been looking at are not that high, then I’ll say but… forty percent harassment, twenty percent, eighty percent harassment… these are all bad numbers because they’re greater than zero. Like… they don’t…. Berhe: (Laughs) Exactly. Clancy: What’s the minimal acceptable quantity? I don’t think that… I don’t think a non-zero number is acceptable because of the way, like you said one person can just do so much damage. Thank you for saying that and for prioritizing a healthy climate and telling our listeners how important it is to listen to yourself too. And I’m glad that you listened to your voice cause I’m glad you’re here. Berhe: Thank you. Appreciate that. Clancy: Thank you so so so much. I really appreciate this. Berhe: You’re welcome. I hope it’s useful, appreciate it. Thank you for doing this. Clancy: Absolutely. Clancy (Outro): Thanks for joining me for the courageous scientist podcast. Like I said, this is a short-term passion project to keep me sane during the pandemic so, I don’t want your money. Please do tell budding scientists and educators of all ages about the podcast because I think they’ll like it. And if you have the means send a few bucks the way of your local foodbank, thanks for listening.

Dr. Rebecca Shansky is an associate professor of psychology at Northeastern University. Dr. Shansky studies the behavioral neuroscience of rodents and has taken on her field's exclusion of female animals in research. As she points out, the way we talk about women has an interesting similarity to the way we talk about female rodents, and it's time for biases against "fluctuating hormones" to stop. You can learn more about Dr. Shansky's work on her website, read her Science commentary, and listen to her talk at the Mind & Life Institute Meeting in Gabarone Botswana (starting at the 6:30 mark). TRANSCRIPT Dr. Kate Clancy: Okay, thank you so much for joining me. I am… Dr. Becca Shansky: It’s my pleasure. Clancy: I am really excited to interview you. This is Dr. Becca Shansky of Northeastern University. She is an associate professor of psychology and we are going to do another courageous scientist interview. So Dr. Shansky, as you know, there are three questions to this interview. So the first question is: What brought you to science? Shansky: What brought me to science? I was a psychology major in undergrad and mostly because I really didn’t know what I was interested in. It seemed like a particularly interesting major that also wasn’t too demanding and it allowed me to take a lot of other really cool classes like painting and film and all kinds of artsy stuff that I was also into. But when I started taking neuroscience classes as part of the psychology requirements, that was when something kind of kicked on and I was like, ‘Oh, this is actually very cool.’ And I wanted to, I was really interested in research and I wanted to keep reading papers and discussing papers and that was just where I wanted my brain to find its place. So the people in my department were like ‘Well, if this what you like, then you should go to grad school.” And I was just like ‘Okay, I guess I’m going to grad school.’ (Laughs) But it was never this long-term vision where I was like ‘I want to be a professor or scientist.” It was more of an initial way of keeping myself engaged in something I found really really exciting and interesting. So from there I kind of just took it day by day. I went to grad school, I finished. I did a post-doc, I finished. I was like ‘I still like this’ so I guess I am going to just keep going. And here I am.   Clancy: Well, I for one am very glad you’re here. Shansky: (Laughs) Me too. Clancy: So can you tell me in what ways have you’ve shown courage in science? Shansky: So I think that I have shown more and more courage essentially in what I have been, how I have been willing to try and shape my field. So I have been studying rodents since grad school and my original thesis project was looking at sex differences and the way the brain responds to stress. Through there, I started to understand how few people were actually studying female animals unless they were interested in something very specifically female such as reproduction or reproductive behavior. Even though we’re putting all this research out there saying ‘This is the brain, this is how the brain works,’ in reality, we are only studying male animals, by and large. And, so I got really involved in a group of scientists who were specifically interested in sex differences. When the NIH made its ‘Sex As a Biological Variable’ mandate a few years ago which required people, all researchers who receive NIH funding to  study both males and females in animal research, there was a lot of complaining and a lot of misconceptions about what it meant to study females. And the biggest complaint I heard was that people, everyone would now have to account for the estrous cycle which is the hormonal cycle that rats go through. Some days they have really high levels of estradiol. Some days they’re low. There was a misconception there that fluctuation would mess up their data and I had heard that for a very long time and I started thinking about why people are thinking that about their research when males have different levels of hormones too and it has never seemed to be a problem. There was something about the complaint about the estrous cycle that felt very disingenuous to me. And it reminded me of the way that we talk about women in society; that we are hormonal. That the ovarian hormones are essentially the one thing that drives our brains, our behavior, and the way we think and act. And that’s not how we think about the role hormones play in males. Which, of course, males have plenty of hormones but have a wide range of emotions and so there seemed to be kind of a double standard there. So what I did was I essentially called all of this out in a perspective piece that I wrote for Science Magazine and it was really scary because essentially what I was doing was saying that my colleagues are sexist and it you know, whether or not they recognized it as such that having this double standard about what it means to do rigorous science in a female animals versus rigorous science in a male animal is not okay. So I was nervous because even though I have tenure now, I still am not necessarily the most successful person and they’re a whole lot of people doing research for a long time that still have a lot of power over me and my career. And so I was scared but I just felt so strongly about it that I wrote it and published it anyway. Clancy: Can I ask, have there been any particular consequences for your having done that? How long ago was that?   Shanksy: That was… the paper came out almost a year ago. It was may of last year. And there have definitely been some consequences and most of them, honestly, have been really good. I have been invited to speak at a lot more events and not just in… being invited to department seminars which I love to do but I’ve been more kind of global, big picture outreach as well. So I got to speak at ‘Hubweek’ which is a Boston based ideas festival which is very cool. Some of those things were cancelled because of corona virus but the piece that I wrote up, Science decided to put out a press release which they don’t usually do for perspective pieces and so it got picked up by the New York Times, LA Times, Science Friday so all of that and the little 15 minutes of fame have been really fun. And I’m excited that this is something that now a lot, not just scientists… you know I really wrote this piece for my colleagues but the fact that it’s getting, now recognized by a broader community is really good because it is that sort of public pressure that I think can help people really understand how to do science in the right way.   Clancy: I think that’s such an important observation and I am so glad that I followed up and asked you what actually happened afterwards because I think that most of us only think about the negative consequences when we stick our necks out. And of course there are plenty of times where we do that and there really are just costs. And I am not trying to make light of that but at the same time, there are times that you don’t just get to get that conversation going you know? You get to actually experience some really positive… I don’t know if consequences is the right word, you know some kind sort of positive effects sometimes too and I’m so glad that that happened for you. Shansky: Yeah Clancy: So, what do you want others to know about how to be a courageous scientist? Shansky: I think that, what I want people to know is that, I think as you just said, there can be it seems like being courageous is only truly courageous if something bad is going to happen to you afterwards and I think that’s not necessarily the case. You know I think this is… it has been really interesting over the course of my career to watch the progression of mentalities in terms of how to study female animals. You know it used to be, when I was in grad school, ‘It’s not important. All brains are the same. This isn’t worth talking about.’ to ‘It is important, but it’s kind of niche.’ to now everyone has to do it and now I think that people are really trying to think genuinely hard about how to do their science the right way and ‘Do I need to account for the estrous cycle?’ and ‘Is this important an important component of my research?’ Or is it just one of many potential things that could influence data and you have to kind of choose what your going to focus on in terms of experimental control. So I… the conversations that I have had over the last couple of years especially in the last year with my colleagues since the paper came out have been really encouraging to me. People really want to do a good job so it’s not just this burden any more but then it’s something that maybe is going to enrich their science. So I got off the main question a little bit but I think it really just comes down to just know doing what you know is right and saying what you know is right and I think, even if it isn’t immediate, people are going to eventually come around, maybe not everyone. And I know for a fact that people are still just refuse to incorporate females into their research and I am in the process of writing another piece that will kind of address that and figure out what the steps are for the broader science community including journals and granting agencies to really ensure that that SABV is a success.   Clancy: That was a… was that an acronym at the end? Shansky: Oh sorry, yeah SABV is the abbreviation for Sex As a Biological Variable which is the NIH mandate   Clancy: Well I can’t wait until your next piece is out. That’s really exciting. And then, of course, we’ll just have to talk all over again. To hear… Shansky: Oh well we’ll just keep talking (Laughs) Clancy: Well thank you so much Dr. Shansky. This was really wonderful to hear from you and to hear your perspective on this experience that you’ve had your piece in Science. Thank you so much   Shansky: Yeah this was fun. Thanks for having me. Clancy Outro: Thanks for Having me for the Courageous Science Podcast. Like I said, this is a short-term passion-project to keep me sane during the pandemic. So I don’t want your money. Please do tell budding scientists and science educators of all ages about the podcast because I think they’ll like it. And if you have the means, send a few bucks the way of your local foodbank. Thanks for listening.

Join Kate Clancy as she introduces her new podcast, and answers the three questions of this pandemic passion project: what brought you to science? How do you show courage in science? What do you want others to know about what it means to be a courageous scientist? Many thanks to Carrie Templeton for the logo and Janice Collins for music selection. TRANSCRIPT Hello, this is Kate Clancy, and welcome to the Courageous Scientist Podcast! I am a professor of biological anthropology at the University of Illinois and my work focuses on reproductive justice – in particular on environmental stressors that influence the menstrual cycle. I have another podcast that you can check out, Period Podcast, if you are curious about the biology and culture of the menstrual cycle. This podcast is a single-season sanity project that arose from the transition all of us who instruct students have had to make to online teaching during this global covid-19 pandemic. I happen to be teaching a new general education class this semester, Humanizing Science. For the final unit of the in-person course, I was going to do a series of Skype or Zoom interviews, as well as bring in local scientists, to discuss what it means to them to show courage as a scientist. If you are a teacher or a student right now, you know that synchronous learning or watching long videos is excruciating. I can’t make them, I can’t watch them, and what my students are telling me is that they are having a really hard time living in a global pandemic, with a variety of living conditions, and somehow being expected to find long, uninterrupted periods to do deep schoolwork. I have never heard so many students tell me how much they miss their libraries. So I thought, instead of long interviews or talks, what if I recorded short interviews with amazing, courageous scientists? And as the plans expanded, I thought, why would I keep these brilliant voices to myself and my students? With the consent of my guests, I’m releasing short interviews with these scientists every week, for who knows how long. I’m thinking I will stop at twelve, but I may go a bit longer. I just want to put something beautiful out there, something that reminds us of our connectedness. That reminds us of the good work that is being done right now, and all the good work we will pick back up when we are able. I ask each guest three questions: what brought you to science, how do you show courage in science, and what you want others to know about being a courageous scientist. My guests show me what it means to have clear values, to stand in them even when scared, and how to approach obstacles. That doesn’t mean all courageous scientists overcome all obstacles. It means that we know that how we come out the other side is not an indicator of our worth. To start us off, here are my answers to these questions. I was first interested in science as a high-achieving, over-competitive student who was under the impression that being a doctor or scientist was the hardest thing you could do. I found biological anthropology as a student who loved storytelling and was captivated by the story of human evolution. Feminist approaches to science, and the women and gender studies faculty who encouraged me to find and read this work, are why I am still in science. I love nerding out on hormones and biomarkers, I think the menstrual cycle is one of the coolest processes in the body, and these are things that brought me to my field of study. But what has kept me here is the belief that this work can change lives for the better, and that our intentions, actions, framing, and interpretation of our work matter at least as much as the science. As for how I show courage in science, I think I do this mostly through not giving a crap? Or really, I’m not sure that’s an honest answer. I’m afraid all the time, I can show you the pit stains. I think I act in spite of my fear because I carry my privilege very heavily. I’m aware of the fact that I am white and cisgender and middle class, that I’m in a heterosexual marriage. I’m aware that these privileges protect me, but that they also carry enormous responsibility. So I show courage in science by saying the thing other people are thinking but not saying, by doing the behind the scenes work to build coalitions in advance of certain meetings, by focusing on what I believe in over what I will gain… or lose. I also sometimes show courage by pausing and making sure to listen, gather all the information I need, or support privately. If I’m being totally honest, and I’m trying to be right now, I haven’t seen the consequences or retaliation be any different when I act quickly or slowly. If what I’m doing scares someone in power, it does often have some sort of consequence for me. But the consequences are never so great that I am willing to stop trying to live and act my values. And I recognize the ways that that is also a result of my privilege. Finally, I think I show courage by acknowledging mistakes. If you have ever met me in person, you know I am far from perfect. Humility and acknowledging one’s limitations and mistakes is a sign of courage because it is in direct contradiction to the incentive structure of science. Every truly humble scientist I’ve met is a hero to me. Ok, so the last question, what do I want other people to know about being a courageous scientist. I want you to know that it’s a decision you have to make every day, sometimes many times a day. You need to know what is important to you before you can live up to your values, so you have to do that work first. And it’s ok if you mess up, if you commit to starting over and doing better next time. If you understand true apologies and make them. And, if you balance courage with caring for yourself. This mini podcast is my form of self-care. It was both healing and encouraging to talk to these courageous scientists, many of whom I did not know before our conversation. I hope they lift you up, too. Please subscribe to Courageous Scientists, and make sure to check out the podcast page courageous-scientists.libsyn.com for show notes and to learn more about these inspiring guests. These are whole humans and amazing scholars, but these interviews only show you a slice of who they are. Make sure you learn more about them by clicking the links on the show notes. If you like this podcast, there are a few ways you can help. You can tell your friends, especially educators and students. I will not be fundraising or seeking sponsors or advertisers for this little guy. I just want you to learn what I learned about these courageous, kind, thoughtful people who belong in science, and to help you and others see yourselves in science, too.