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Hello and welcome to the Scientess Podcast, where we talk to women with successful scientific careers about the joys of science.
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I'm your host, Karen Levy, an environmental health scientist at the School of Public Health at University of Washington in Seattle.
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I'm excited to share with you the stories of some pretty incredible women on this podcast.
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My hope is that these interviews will show aspiring young scientists that a career in science is not only possible, but can also be extremely rewarding and a whole lot of fun.
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Let's jump in with today's featured Scientess.
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Dr.
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Sohini Ramachandran is the Herman C.
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Bumpus Professor of Biology and Data Science and Professor of Computer Science at Brown University.
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She was the founding director of Brown's Data Science Institute and also served as the director of the Brown University Center for Computational Molecular Biology.
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Sohini uses statistical and mathematical modeling techniques to study population genetics and evolutionary theory, generally using humans as study systems.
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In her work, she uses genetic data to infer human demographic history, and her early research examined the genetic relationships originating within people from Africa, where she showed that diversity decreases as distance from Africa increases.
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Among more scientific questions listed on her research website, she also lists a very basic underlying question.
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How does population genetics research highlight our shared humanity?
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For this research, Hini has received many highly prestigious fellowships and awards.
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She was elected to the Harvard Society of Fellows, has been an Alfred P.
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Sloan Research Fellow and FQ Biomedical Scholar, received an NSF Career Award for her research, and was awarded a coveted Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering.
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While on sabbatical in 2019, she was a Natural Sciences Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala, Sweden.
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She was also awarded the Samuel Carlin Prize in Mathematical Biology while a PhD student at Stanford.
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In addition to these research-based accomplishments, Sohini has also received multiple awards for her excellence in teaching at Brown University.
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While many of us wait for years for recognition of our scientific prowess, Sohini started early when, as a high school senior in 1998, she placed fourth in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, the youngest finalist in the group.
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This hopefully made up for her performance at the 1995 National Spelling B, where she was knocked out of the competition for misspelling the word succidanium.
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S-U-C-C-E-D-A-N-E-U-M.
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I have to admit that I had to look up the word, which means a substitute, especially for a medicine or drug.
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So Heaney, welcome to the Scientist Podcast.
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My first question is: how did you misspell sexodanium back in 1995?
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Thank you so much for having me.
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And I am okay revisiting that trauma.
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I spelled it S U C C E D A N I U M.
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And so the terrible.
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Were you in the finals, or how far did you get?
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Yeah, so I was in eighth grade, which is the last year of eligibility in the National Spelling Bee.
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It was my only time there.
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But I think there were over 200 kids, and I was in the last 35 or something like that.
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It was like the fourth or fifth round.
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I'd spelled a few words.
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The extra spiciness of that story is that my older sister won the National Spelling Bee.
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So it was like a little extra twist for me.
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But that was pretty amazing.
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And being there was so, so cool.
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Extra sting, the competition with your sister.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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Did she win that year or a different year?
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So I was in 95.
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She won in 1988, and she's seven years older than me, so got it.
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So it seems like you took that experience and you used it to propel you forward in your career and make really good things happen for yourself.
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And so I'm just going to start with some sort of pretty basic questions.
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Can you tell us kind of how you got to where you are today and what the the arc of your career?
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Where did you start and did effect to end up where you are now, or how did you end up getting here?
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Yeah, so you mentioned already that I was in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search.
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I was a finalist and the fourth place winner.
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So that was my senior year of high school.
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And that's a research-based competition.
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I was born into a family of academics.
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My parents were both professors.
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They largely taught, but also did some consulting and research and statistics at the California State University of Sacramento.
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So I grew up in a family that really prioritized education.
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My sister ended up getting an MD and a PhD, and because of the age gap, I watched her go through that.
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And so graduate school was highly emphasized in my family, really from the perspective just that an education helps you become kind of irreplaceable on the job market, slash gives you potential security.
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I don't know that my parents really wanted me to become a professor, but the life we had growing up as an immigrant family was one of incredible flexibility for them.
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They took a sabbatical when I was in junior high and I got to go to eighth grade in Germany, and that was a huge event in my life.
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So I think seeing them be able to be around for me and have summers, you know, be more flexible, and then getting to travel a bit made me interested in academia.
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I can certainly relate to that because that was similar to my experience.
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Yeah, exactly.
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And also I think and you might have had a similar experience, just meeting other professors when I was young.
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I think they were really interested in talking to me as a kid and talking to me about math problems or science problems.
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And I found that really fun and learned very early on about the idea that we don't know the answer to everything, everything can't be looked up in a book.
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And the idea that there are questions to continue working on and questions that are still open sort of fascinated me.
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And then my sister, who is someone who's always been the most important role model in my life, I would say, after or with my mom and dad, she actually, when I was thinking about entering the science talent search, she introduced me to Mark Feldman at Stanford.
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And he agreed to talk to me.
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I had taken like AP biology by then and calculus.
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And he said, if you want to come join the lab for a summer, I would like to have you.
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And that was a hugely formative moment for me.
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There were lots of great graduate students in the lab at the time who are all now professors.
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I have wonderful academic siblings.
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And when I look back on that experience, that really solidified my desire to become a professor because what happened in the Feldman lab for me that summer, and I was really just a kid, right?
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Is I showed up and all of these researchers, graduate students, postdocs, and Mark, they were really treating me very kindly and like a colleague.
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And they didn't find my questions annoying.
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I was learning how to program for the first time.
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You know, I was bothering them with a lot of questions, but everyone was really patient and interested in things I would show them.
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Like I'd show them results and they would sit down and say, oh, that looks really cool.
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Let's talk about it.
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And as a teenager, I think that was just really incredibly exciting to feel like I had something to contribute.
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And I think that kind of open scholarly community is something that I still strive to create in my own lab and in the administrative work that I've done.
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Well, the Feldman Lab certainly has been very productive and it seems like a lot of incredible scholars have come out of that lab.
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And so what you describe of the climate there doesn't surprise me that you would have such a collaborative, open sharing environment that fostered this inquisitiveness and productivity.
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Yeah, and I think it's really special when a lab can kind of treat everyone, no matter what their career stage is, as somebody who has something to offer and also somebody who has something to learn.
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And something Mark was really good at creating was a sense that there isn't seniority in the lab and that everyone is sort of an equal partner.
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And I think that, again, was really inspiring to me.
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And then the next formative intellectual experience for me, I went to Stanford and I spent some time in the lab, in the Feldman lab, but I mostly I wasn't applied, I was a mathematical and computational sciences major.
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It was a great degree.
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It's been renamed now to data science.
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The coursework was amazing.
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It was in computer science, math, operations, research, statistics, and it kept me pretty busy.
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But my junior year of college was when the draft sequence of the human genome was published.
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And so I had gotten a sense from that high school research of and watching the Feldman lab how mathematics could be used to think about biological complexity and genetics specifically.
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And then when the reference sequence was published, the fanfare was all about we're going to cure all the diseases, cancer will be a thing of the past.
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And of course, we're still working on all of that.
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But what I remember thinking was how is this single reference sequence going to really help us help everybody?
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And the idea of understanding human genetic variation, both what generates it in the past and also its implications for the future and for disease became really interesting to me.
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So when I was applying to graduate school, it was the beginning of bioinformatics and genome sciences as a discipline.
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Like those first programs were just being formed.
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And it was an exciting time, so exciting to me that all my friends from college who were going to the early dot com startups, like Google and Yahoo and stuff, were they telling me how cool their work was.
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And I was telling them, you should come to graduate school.
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Genome is really interesting.
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But yeah, those were the things I think set me on the intellectual path I'm on.
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Do you think that your identity as an immigrant had an impact on that perspective about the diversity of the human genome that you described?
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That's an interesting question.
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Uh maybe so.
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I mean, I guess I should clarify.
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I was born after my parents and sister came to this country, but I definitely grew up in that kind of first generation mentality.
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But yeah, this kind of sense of how movement influences people, how people can change their environments, but also that there's something in our genome we carry with us through migration and how does that influence who we become was very interesting to me.
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Also, I grew up bilingual, and so thinking about cultural transmission of environments as well as genetic transmission of traits was something interesting to me.
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But certainly thinking about how personalized medicine was actually going to get implemented from genomics was it seemed to me a very, very open question.
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And yeah, it still is interesting.
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And so you mentioned the publication of the first human genome.
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Is there something else that you can point to, or is that kind of a specific moment that solidified your interest in human genetics?
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I really think it was that.
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Yeah.
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Um, that combined with the happenstance of Marx mentorship.
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I think those were the things that really led me to this.
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So what excites you about your science and how has that changed over time?
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Well, I think one of the things that really excites me about population genetics is that the scale of the data we work with has changed so much.
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But our classic models are still really relevant and just over a hundred years old.
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So now thinking about how the data that we're generating today might help us find things the models aren't covering or predicting appropriately, or violations of the model that are more routine than we thought, is really exciting to me.
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So the thing that I'm getting most excited about now, which I never would have anticipated would be something I would work on, is very recent genetic history.
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So usually when we think about inferring human history from genomes, we think about thousands of years in the past, tens of thousands of years in the past, thinking about, as you mentioned in the intro, our origins in Africa, expansion out of Africa, maybe the transition to agriculture around 10,000 years ago.
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There's a lot of focus on that in ancient DNA.
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But now with medical biobanks that combine medical records and genetic and genomic data, we can actually start to think about the genome really as a historical document and think about like the last 10 generations, last 15 generations.
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And there it turns out a lot of classic models start to break down because they don't really account for how ancestral relationships like our family pedigrees can constrain evolution.
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And that's an area that even 10 years ago, I certainly didn't think we were going to have the data to do the kinds of studies we're starting to think about doing now.
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It's also maybe extra interesting to me because I married a historian.
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So thinking about the limitations of genetics, what it can tell us about the historical process and what it can't.
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I think that's another aspect of my science that has changed is I actually think the project of human genetics, and I would say my project in it for the next five years, 10 years, is to really talk about the limits of genetics for helping us achieve things like personalized medicine.
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You know, when should we be thinking about incorporating genetics into models of interventions?
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What types of traits do we really get traction on when we use genetics?
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And where are their confounds when we start to think about complex traits in genetics?
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Because that's something that the genomic era has really taught us is that traits are very complex, which in genetics means very polygenic, have mutations influencing them all along the genome.
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And then that means that the environment also plays a really important role in shaping traits.
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And so I think we need to shift as a community more into thinking about establishing the limits of what genetic variation can and can't help us do with diagnosing and treating different diseases and understanding the evolution of different traits.
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That's really interesting.
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And what you said about your husband being a historian and bringing that interdisciplinary lens to what you do is really interesting.
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And as an environmental health scientist, there's always that piece of thinking about the environmental conditions that are influencing us.
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And of course, it's an interplay between that nurture and nature.
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Right.
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I mean, any epidemiologist would say, you know, genetics isn't something that you can intervene with, so why not study the other stuff?
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And I totally am getting to that viewpoint now in a lot of ways.
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Well, the underlying genetics will tell you about whether an intervention's gonna work.
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Right.
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Right, right.
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And there is so much in our society around just the way we talk about things being in our DNA, the way we learn about genetics in school is something a lot of people are doing really good work on.
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Uh, notably, a kind of academic nephew of mine, Brian Donovan, has done some beautiful work on introducing concepts of heritability and how heritability can change over time into curricula and that it can really help people relax their genetic determinism.
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That's something that I've started to think about more and more is this the way we're taught genetics in high school, it's like pretty cartoonish considering what we know in the genomic era now.
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It's still pretty Mendelian.
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So that's something that's shifted for me.
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Next question Are there ways that you might be able to point to that being a woman has positively impacted your career?
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Yeah, I think that well I became a scientist because I love collaborating.
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I see science as a collaborative enterprise, and mentoring is an important part of that, but also collaborating with my own peers.
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And I don't know, maybe I'm stereotyping a little bit about what it means to be a woman.
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But to me, an important part of my identity is my social relationships and my professional social relationships are really, really special to me.
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And uh when it comes to collaborating, I have very much a friends-first model.
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I think ideas will come, but working with friends is exciting.
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We can have hard conversations when we need to.
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We can criticize each other's ideas and like be okay.
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And I think also my approach to science is pretty inclusive.
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It's very interdisciplinary, which also means being willing to learn, being open to critique, being open to realizing things I think are new and innovative are actually whole fields of study in another discipline.
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So those are maybe soft skills that I think I was socialized to have as a girl and a woman, and I see as important.
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I will just say that other interview subjects have pointed to something similar.
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And similarly have also questioned, oh, I don't know, maybe this is stereotyping.
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But I think there might be something there.
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Maybe not.
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Who knows?
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This is not exactly what you're asking, but another thing that is true about me and my career is um having a mother with a PhD and a father who was very, very supportive of my mother's career and they were in the same department, they made their career decisions together.
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That was hugely influential in my life, in that I never thought that an academic career was out of reach for me.
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And it was really persisting in academia.
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The longer I've persisted, the more of a radicalized feminist I've become.
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And I see, especially as I got tenure, I think I started, and when I became a professor and I saw how students saw me in the classroom and how seeing in in biology, right, we know that you know women don't persist in the faculty ranks or in the administrative ranks in biology in proportion to the degrees that we get, right?
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Women get the majority of all degrees from undergraduate through all forms of graduate degrees and in the life sciences, but that's not what the most senior faculty look like.
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And when I started teaching at Brown, it just didn't really even occur to me.
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I didn't really notice the sex or the gender of my professors in college.
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There were very few female professors I had.
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I was often, because I was in a lot of these math classes, you know, one of the only women in the class.
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And I actually remember kind of enjoying that.
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I didn't think anything of it.
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And when I started teaching at Brown, female students would come to me and say, I haven't had a female professor at Brown in biology, or you're the first woman of color who's taught me.
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And I saw how important that was to them.
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And then I started to, well, I started to realize first, of course, how important it is to see a representation of yourself in people who are ahead of you.
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And I was lucky I had that at home.
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But yeah, that has been a feature of my life.
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And I guess I do think being a woman has given me a lot of opportunities throughout my career, whether it's speaking in conferences or participating on study sections.
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I think that need for representation has given me opportunities that I've been able to take advantage of and also help open the door for other people.
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Are there any examples that you could point to where there was a challenge of being a woman in science that you had to overcome?
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And how did you overcome it?
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I can think of a couple, although I would say they were challenges that also kind of intersected with my personality, which again has to do with how I was raised and things like that, stereotypical expectations of girls and women.
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But one I can think of is that I um what's that French saying about the thought you have on the staircase?
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I'm not good with the comeback, right?
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So this idea that there's the thought you have when you're leaving of the thing you should have said.
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I'm I'm not quick in most.
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Exactly.
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Yeah.
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And so I do think there have been a lot of moments in committee meetings and just small interactions where somebody said something that landed pretty clunkily and probably not just for me.
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And I really wish I had called it out early.
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Again, not because I think there was a lot of bad intent on their part, but just even saying, like, why is that funny?
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Or I don't agree with that, right?
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Just saying that in the moment would have been useful for everyone in the room, but especially for me, right?
00:21:39.519 --> 00:21:40.880
Because I'm still thinking about it.
00:21:41.200 --> 00:21:41.519
Yeah.
00:21:41.519 --> 00:21:43.039
How do you overcome that?
00:21:43.039 --> 00:21:50.480
Do you have ways either just internally for accepting that you didn't say what you wanted to say or preparing yourself for the next time?
00:21:50.880 --> 00:21:54.480
Yeah, I think now I am better at just asking questions.
00:21:54.480 --> 00:21:59.839
That's kind of my approach, regardless of how I'm actually feeling about something that's happening in the moment, to try to approach it with curiosity.
00:21:59.839 --> 00:22:02.799
Or just ask a question like, what did you really mean by that?
00:22:02.799 --> 00:22:04.720
Or are you we really saying this?
00:22:04.720 --> 00:22:19.839
You know, often I tell students, if they're trying to advocate for themselves, I say something that works well for me is to ask, what would I need to do to achieve that thing, or what would I need to do so you would nominate me for that award, you know, after seeing someone else get it.
00:22:19.839 --> 00:22:22.799
So sometimes I just like to frame things as questions.
00:22:22.799 --> 00:22:35.839
But I also have three kids, and my middle daughter, especially, she's very good at when we are laughing with slash at her because she's said something particularly adorable, but she might not have meant it to be funny.
00:22:35.839 --> 00:22:39.759
She has this very steely look and she says, I don't find it funny, and I love it.
00:22:39.759 --> 00:22:41.440
I keep telling her, hold on to that.
00:22:41.440 --> 00:22:44.319
It's gonna be useful as you get older.
00:22:44.319 --> 00:22:54.880
The other thing I'll say that I think back on is so my husband and I met as postdocs, and we were at different institutions, we're in different fields.
00:22:54.880 --> 00:23:00.000
At Brown, we're actually across schools because biology is in the medical school here.
00:23:00.000 --> 00:23:09.519
We've been lucky to be physically in the same place since we got married, but we had to go on the job market a lot, negotiating, and it was always challenging.
00:23:09.519 --> 00:23:18.400
But initially, I had two offers, and Brown created a visiting position for him with an assistant professor-sized salary, which was really amazing.
00:23:18.400 --> 00:23:20.559
And so that's a reason we came here.
00:23:20.559 --> 00:23:22.079
And we've been very happy here.
00:23:22.079 --> 00:23:31.359
And he's now tenured, and so we navigated with lots of interviewing and thinking we were going to leave many times, ended up with him on the tenure track and then tenured here.
00:23:31.359 --> 00:23:37.839
But when we first got the two offers, I didn't ask for more money for myself.
00:23:37.839 --> 00:23:47.920
I didn't ask for a slightly higher salary because I thought, oh, we're so lucky they're giving us two positions, and his salary is actually like a real salary.
00:23:47.920 --> 00:23:50.319
I just don't want to complicate the negotiation.
00:23:50.319 --> 00:23:51.359
Like this is enough.
00:23:51.359 --> 00:23:55.119
And I just didn't think about the percentage-based raises.
00:23:55.119 --> 00:23:57.920
I didn't think about the fact that they could have just said no.
00:23:57.920 --> 00:24:02.640
The reality is if I had asked for $8,000 more, they would have given me three and a half.
00:24:02.640 --> 00:24:05.440
And I just didn't think about the consequences.
00:24:05.440 --> 00:24:10.640
And I think that was probably a pretty gendered way of viewing it.
00:24:10.640 --> 00:24:19.440
I just saw the package and his position as part of something I was being given, as opposed to like, that's a separate situation, a separate transaction.
00:24:19.440 --> 00:24:21.920
And I also need to advocate for myself.
00:24:21.920 --> 00:24:23.519
What happened later on?
00:24:23.519 --> 00:24:30.640
I was on a big multi-PI grant and I got to look at the budget and saw where I stood amongst all my colleagues that were on this grant.
00:24:30.640 --> 00:24:33.359
And then I thought, oh, I really need to figure out how to get a raise.
00:24:33.359 --> 00:24:37.680
Because we were yeah, because we were interviewing anyway, things happened.
00:24:37.680 --> 00:24:41.359
But that is something that I would have approached differently, I think, if I had been a man.
00:24:42.160 --> 00:24:53.039
I think that women tend to be good, at least what I've heard, and again, stereotypical, but that women tend to be good at negotiating when it comes for other people, but not as much for themselves.
00:24:53.039 --> 00:24:57.839
And so it's useful to think about I'm negotiating for my family.
00:24:57.839 --> 00:25:06.559
Instead of thinking about this is something that I need for me, it's something that I need for the people who I'm supporting and for the students who I'm supporting.
00:25:06.559 --> 00:25:09.680
I'm gonna negotiate for whatever I need to support them.
00:25:09.680 --> 00:25:12.400
So thinking about things like that can be helpful.
00:25:12.400 --> 00:25:16.880
And then the other thing is, as you mentioned, parity is an easy way to get your head around.
00:25:16.880 --> 00:25:18.319
Well, why should I get less?
00:25:18.319 --> 00:25:19.599
I should get where other people are getting.
00:25:19.599 --> 00:25:25.519
I don't know what I'm worth, but I should at least be worth what the person who's just as good as me is worth.
00:25:25.599 --> 00:25:34.160
So yeah, and I just had no idea that of course they're giving me a number and there's a range and it's probably on the lower end of the range.
00:25:34.160 --> 00:25:39.440
And I just had no idea about the psychology because it was more money than I had ever thought I would make, you know.
00:25:40.000 --> 00:25:44.799
Um yeah, it's like going to buy a car, you are doing it once every few years.
00:25:44.799 --> 00:25:45.039
Okay.
00:25:45.039 --> 00:25:46.880
They're dealing with it every day.
00:25:46.880 --> 00:25:48.559
They have the upper hand.
00:25:48.559 --> 00:26:02.240
So you mentioned your husband, and then also the example that you have of your dad supporting your mom.
00:26:02.240 --> 00:26:04.400
You also mentioned um Dr.
00:26:04.400 --> 00:26:05.200
Feldman.
00:26:05.200 --> 00:26:10.319
Are there men who you have seen as allies in the success of your career?
00:26:10.559 --> 00:26:14.240
Yeah, well, those are three, three really important ones.
00:26:14.240 --> 00:26:25.279
We already talked about also my postdoctoral advisor, John Wakeley, has been an incredible advocate for me, an incredible intellectual interlocutor.
00:26:25.279 --> 00:26:31.680
He's on a large grant, the subject of which I was drawn to because of my postdoc work with him.
00:26:31.680 --> 00:26:35.200
So we're going to start working together again, which I'm very excited about.
00:26:35.200 --> 00:26:47.039
Something that really helped me in my career was that as I transitioned to becoming a faculty member in 2010, when I left his lab and Harvard, he became chair of organismic and evolutionary biology.
00:26:47.039 --> 00:27:11.039
And that was incredibly helpful to me because when there were periods I was negotiating or just thinking about career moves I wanted to make, even just in my field, things I wanted to do, but also as Jeremy and I were working on the two-body problem, I had him as a sounding board and his view as a chair of a department of okay, here's when you tell your chair you were interviewing somewhere, or here's what the chair is thinking when they're going to the dean.
00:27:11.039 --> 00:27:13.680
And that was really, really helpful.
00:27:13.680 --> 00:27:19.759
And then another important male advocate and collaborator in my life is Noah Rosenberg.
00:27:19.759 --> 00:27:21.519
He's my academic sibling.
00:27:21.519 --> 00:27:25.759
He was in graduate school when I was in college in the Feldman lab.
00:27:25.759 --> 00:27:29.839
And then when he started as postdoc and I started graduate school, he went to USC.
00:27:29.839 --> 00:27:32.079
We started collaborating closely.
00:27:32.079 --> 00:27:41.279
And he's just an incredible scientist, but also I have been lucky to have mentors academically who were at very different career stages.
00:27:41.279 --> 00:27:44.960
And I think that was so helpful for me having Mark be so senior.
00:27:44.960 --> 00:27:51.920
John got tenure just a couple years, probably before I joined his lab, or he was mid-career for sure at that point.
00:27:51.920 --> 00:27:54.640
But he had just transitioned recently to tenure.
00:27:54.640 --> 00:28:13.680
And then Noah being kind of one PhD cycle ahead of me really helped me understand the job market in different ways, understand grant writing and advising and having these different perspectives on just the mechanics of being a scientist and growing a lab has been really influential.
00:28:13.680 --> 00:28:26.319
And Noah and I have also recently started collaborating on different special issues, reflecting on classic papers in our field and history of science projects about the genomic era and also some actual science.
00:28:26.319 --> 00:28:28.960
So yeah, that's been really amazing.
00:28:29.920 --> 00:28:37.039
Now you're in a position of either being an older sibling or having your children in academia.
00:28:37.039 --> 00:28:44.400
What's your favorite piece of advice to pass on to others who are trying to succeed in academia?
00:28:45.759 --> 00:29:18.799
Well, I think one thing I like people going into academia, specifically into science, to think about into maybe I'll say experimental science, is that in some sense being a scientist with a lab, you know, as a professor in university, you know that in some period, and the length of that period is going to vary depending on the discipline, but in some period, the techniques that you are well versed in become totally obsolete.
00:29:18.799 --> 00:29:37.920
And you sort of need to embrace that and believe that what you transition into having to offer is a lot of intuition and understanding of the history of the field, the ability to see the bird's eye view of the projects, to pivot, to recognize opportunities when they come.
00:29:37.920 --> 00:29:41.920
I think it is really hard when that transition happens.
00:29:41.920 --> 00:29:43.680
It can be very emotionally hard.
00:29:43.680 --> 00:29:50.000
Like a silly example, but a reality of my work is when I was in college, I learned how to program in C.
00:29:50.000 --> 00:29:51.839
I'm a very good C programmer.
00:29:51.839 --> 00:30:00.160
I did a lot of Perl, which now it's kind of silly to think back that we there was a period where we all thought Perl was the next language before Python was really popular.
00:30:00.160 --> 00:30:05.039
I'm like a B plus, maybe B minus, actually, Python programmer.
00:30:05.039 --> 00:30:08.640
Python 2B plus programmer, Python 3 B minus programmer.
00:30:08.640 --> 00:30:18.000
But while I might not be able to actively debug my students' code the way I would like, I still have a lot of intuition when I look at the output to say, okay, I think there's a bug here.
00:30:18.000 --> 00:30:19.759
Or okay, I think this makes sense.
00:30:20.160 --> 00:30:24.799
And some ways that might actually be better because you don't have to get mired in the details.
00:30:25.119 --> 00:30:26.319
Yeah, I think so.
00:30:26.319 --> 00:30:30.799
And yeah, I think just understanding that transition is coming is important.
00:30:30.799 --> 00:30:43.440
I also think a joy for me of being an academic is the multifaceted nature of the career and that you get to choose to lean into different parts of it at different times, especially post-tenure.
00:30:43.440 --> 00:31:02.400
And so I think the other piece of advice is in the beginning, it does feel like you have to kind of do it all, but you also can have seasons, you can have a few years where you really focus on service in your field and grant writing, or where you become more reflective, or where you totally pivot in a new direction, or where you decide to lean into teaching or something, right?
00:31:02.400 --> 00:31:04.240
So all these things can happen.
00:31:04.240 --> 00:31:08.000
And I think that's really special.
00:31:08.000 --> 00:31:11.440
I don't know another career, but I think we're very lucky.
00:31:12.000 --> 00:31:16.319
I often think that there's a lot of similarities between science and art.
00:31:16.319 --> 00:31:20.640
There's a lot of creativity, and in some ways, that is a characteristic of art.
00:31:20.640 --> 00:31:29.839
Like you're used to seeing artists say, okay, now I'm doing this project, and I have my installation, I have my exhibit, and then I'm gonna do a totally different project.
00:31:29.839 --> 00:31:32.160
And we're used to that from artists.
00:31:32.160 --> 00:31:40.319
But while that is happening, like you described for scientists, the perception is not of that for scientists, even though that's kind of what we do.
00:31:40.640 --> 00:31:46.960
Yeah, and I love that you say that because actually my husband's family has a lot of artists, painters and photographers and poets.
00:31:46.960 --> 00:31:52.640
And it's been really interesting to me to talk to them about similarities in the way we do our work.
00:31:52.640 --> 00:31:55.440
Because there is this mandate for creative innovation, right?
00:31:55.440 --> 00:31:59.599
And we're all trying to be creative and bring something new to the conversation in our field.
00:31:59.599 --> 00:32:06.160
But there's also a business side to it and a learning side to it, a craft piece to it.
00:32:06.160 --> 00:32:08.400
There's a networking piece to it.
00:32:08.400 --> 00:32:10.799
And I think there are a lot of similarities.
00:32:11.119 --> 00:32:12.640
There's a self-promotion piece.
00:32:12.799 --> 00:32:13.680
Yeah, exactly.
00:32:13.680 --> 00:32:14.079
Right.
00:32:14.079 --> 00:32:15.680
We all need to do it, right?
00:32:15.680 --> 00:32:16.079
Right.
00:32:16.079 --> 00:32:26.559
And, you know, with lots of disciplines, but I think with these two in particular, it's a mistake to think that being a scientist just means going to your desk and like doing science every day is so many other things.
00:32:26.559 --> 00:32:35.279
But trying to keep that at the center and accepting that it's going to change over time, I think is that's probably the biggest piece of advice.
00:32:35.279 --> 00:32:39.759
The other piece of ad I don't know, it's not advice, but it's an observation.
00:32:39.759 --> 00:32:54.799
I think one thing that really helped me in my career and my family, my parents, but I do see shifting a lot is academia does still have this reality that you need to go where the jobs are.
00:32:54.799 --> 00:32:58.799
And I was lucky that I was willing to live anywhere.
00:32:58.799 --> 00:33:01.200
Like any college town seemed great to me.
00:33:01.200 --> 00:33:03.759
I would have been very happy in lots and lots of places.
00:33:03.759 --> 00:33:10.640
Seeing my parents move to a new country and they had lived in Chapel Hill, in Athens, Georgia, then they settled in Sacramento.
00:33:10.640 --> 00:33:13.279
Seeing that, I felt like, oh, I could move anywhere.
00:33:13.279 --> 00:33:19.359
And that's one thing I see in students today, and I can understand it's socially more of a challenge in our country today.
00:33:19.359 --> 00:33:21.519
Everybody doesn't necessarily want to live everywhere.
00:33:21.519 --> 00:33:28.000
So that is something that I think makes an academic career a little challenging if you're not willing to move wherever the work could take you.
00:33:28.240 --> 00:33:28.400
Yeah.
00:33:28.640 --> 00:33:31.839
But I think universities can be great places wherever they're situated.
00:33:32.319 --> 00:33:36.240
Yeah, and there are also opportunities that are not academic.
00:33:36.240 --> 00:33:36.720
Yes.
00:33:36.720 --> 00:33:45.920
Classic university academic that can be very great careers as well for people of science backgrounds who want to stay where they are.
00:33:45.920 --> 00:33:47.519
Need to stay where they are.
00:33:47.519 --> 00:33:52.160
So you talked about your husband and you both being academics.
00:33:52.160 --> 00:33:53.680
How do you balance that?
00:33:53.680 --> 00:33:55.359
And you also have three children.
00:33:55.359 --> 00:33:57.519
How do you balance that?
00:33:57.519 --> 00:34:04.960
What are your life hacks for getting through the day, even?
00:34:05.680 --> 00:34:06.000
Yeah.
00:34:06.000 --> 00:34:10.559
Well, first, we are just so, so lucky that we're in the same institution.
00:34:10.559 --> 00:34:14.079
We can walk to work, our kids can walk to school.
00:34:14.079 --> 00:34:20.800
Our youngest is still in daycare, but it our life has a very small geographic radius, which is incredible for us.
00:34:20.800 --> 00:34:27.360
Jeremy and I, we can't really do this by design because we're in different departments, but we've been here for 15 years.
00:34:27.360 --> 00:34:30.880
And I think only one semester, maybe two, we taught at the same time.
00:34:30.880 --> 00:34:38.480
So when push comes to shove, if children are sick, we can still show up and teach our classes, which is incredible for us.
00:34:38.480 --> 00:34:49.280
And I think we benefit so much from the fact that we have been able to end up tenured at the same institution because we talk about a lot of things.
00:34:49.280 --> 00:34:53.760
We both influence each other a lot in terms of our research and the way we see the world.
00:34:53.760 --> 00:35:00.239
But it's also fun to be able to talk about each other's departments and ask for advice and say, oh, I'm experiencing this in this class.
00:35:00.239 --> 00:35:01.039
What would you do?
00:35:01.039 --> 00:35:03.760
And it's really fun and really helpful for us.
00:35:03.760 --> 00:35:05.360
So we're very lucky.
00:35:05.360 --> 00:35:10.239
And it really makes life more vibrant that we share this journey together.
00:35:10.239 --> 00:35:16.239
I also just find his work really inspiring because I could not be in a book field.
00:35:16.239 --> 00:35:17.760
I like I hate papers.
00:35:17.760 --> 00:35:21.119
By the time I submit them, I need to let go of them, let them go out in the world.
00:35:21.119 --> 00:35:30.000
And I sort of love the idea of scientific publishing to me, is again, it's like contributing to a conversation, doing the best work you can in that moment.
00:35:30.000 --> 00:35:40.639
But as I often say to my lab, in some sense, my hope is like our work becomes obsolete in five to ten years because it means that the field has moved on and we learned something new, right?
00:35:40.639 --> 00:35:43.440
It's like we did our best, but now we know something new.
00:35:43.440 --> 00:35:45.840
Um, whereas I don't, I could not write a book.
00:35:45.840 --> 00:35:47.039
I would not be able to do it.
00:35:47.039 --> 00:35:50.159
I would not be able to let go of it and feel like it was done.
00:35:50.159 --> 00:35:53.840
So he really influences my writing a lot, which is wonderful.
00:35:53.840 --> 00:35:58.480
In terms of life hacks, well, you know, they say spending is a reflection of values.
00:35:58.480 --> 00:36:00.159
We value childcare a lot.
00:36:00.159 --> 00:36:06.239
Uh we have always had wonderful babysitters from when our oldest, who's now almost 13, was three months old.
00:36:06.239 --> 00:36:07.599
We started getting babysitters.
00:36:07.599 --> 00:36:09.119
We did infant daycare.
00:36:09.119 --> 00:36:10.559
We love our daycare.
00:36:10.559 --> 00:36:13.599
This is our last year at our daycare after almost 13 years there.
00:36:13.599 --> 00:36:15.119
It's gonna be a big transition.
00:36:15.119 --> 00:36:19.039
Yeah, before care, aftercare sitters who pick up and drop off.
00:36:19.039 --> 00:36:27.199
We've been very lucky to have really wonderful people in our life and wonderful daycare institutions and schools that our kids have thrived at.
00:36:27.599 --> 00:36:38.639
I like the way you frame that is that it reflects your values because you do when you invest in childcare, you're watching the money come in and then watching it go back out the door.
00:36:38.639 --> 00:36:50.159
But it, as you said, sort of reflects your value of it's really important for you to be getting to do this work and you get to go to work every day, and that's what it enables you to do, right?
00:36:50.559 --> 00:37:00.960
Yeah, and I think that there was a moment, I don't know how old my oldest was, but let's say she was eight or nine, and I was going to work for a dinner or something.
00:37:00.960 --> 00:37:04.559
We were home and then I was heading back out, and she said, You're always working.
00:37:04.559 --> 00:37:09.280
And I said, you know, I love my job and I'm so lucky.
00:37:09.280 --> 00:37:11.119
I'm so lucky that I get to do it.
00:37:11.119 --> 00:37:15.199
In that moment, I was able to not give in to guilt or something.
00:37:15.199 --> 00:37:18.800
And and I I remember her thinking, like, oh, that's kind of cool.
00:37:18.800 --> 00:37:27.039
And I think it is such a privilege to have a job that feels exciting and rejuvenating, and I just want my kids to see that.
00:37:27.039 --> 00:37:31.199
And sometimes that means having them see that I have to be somewhere else, right?
00:37:31.199 --> 00:37:36.480
And to know that there are other people who love them and can help care for them as well.
00:37:36.480 --> 00:37:40.400
But now it's also really fun to be able to sometimes take them with me.
00:37:40.400 --> 00:37:45.519
We're lucky at Brown, we have a really incredible dependent care travel fund benefit.
00:37:45.519 --> 00:37:59.679
So um, yeah, I've taken my kids to amazing conferences with me or taken them when I've given seminars, and then maybe I'll add on a couple days if we're in a fun city like Nashville or LA or something, and we'll get to do something together.
00:37:59.679 --> 00:38:03.840
But they'll come to my talks or come to my sessions, and I really love that.
00:38:04.159 --> 00:38:08.320
One thing that I tell my kids sometimes is, yeah, I'm going to work.
00:38:08.320 --> 00:38:24.079
And one of the things I want to share with you is that I am because I also have two girls, and that I'm doing this so that I can set an example for you, that you also can do what it is you want to do, and that you don't feel like you have barriers.
00:38:24.719 --> 00:38:32.239
I'm always telling my kids my hope for them is that they get the privilege to have a job they love spending time at.
00:38:32.239 --> 00:38:39.039
And that it's a joy to feel good on Monday morning and feel good going home Friday evening.
00:38:39.039 --> 00:38:42.239
Sometimes my husband and I joke because of the three kids.
00:38:42.239 --> 00:38:43.440
Our kids are pretty spread out.
00:38:43.440 --> 00:38:46.559
So we have 12 and a half, nine, and four and a half.
00:38:46.559 --> 00:38:53.119
And when we get to work in the morning, you know, it's three kids, three different schools, everyone's fed, everyone's dressed.
00:38:53.119 --> 00:38:55.760
I feel like we ran a military campaign.
00:38:55.760 --> 00:39:03.199
And it means when I come to work and sit down at my desk, it's like, oh, this wonderful, like we accomplished something and now I get to work.
00:39:03.199 --> 00:39:07.519
And I do think that has been a very positive feedback loop in my life.
00:39:07.519 --> 00:39:12.880
The joy of the quiet of work, which is different from the wonderful chaos that we love at home.
00:39:12.880 --> 00:39:21.119
One of my favorite life hacks, which I never thought about, is that I love to cook, but getting food on the table every day.
00:39:21.119 --> 00:39:22.079
We eat pretty early.
00:39:22.079 --> 00:39:23.280
We eat at 5 30.
00:39:23.280 --> 00:39:26.239
So when everyone's home, a dinner has to be on the table right away.
00:39:26.239 --> 00:39:28.639
I often cook dinner first thing in the morning.
00:39:28.639 --> 00:39:36.559
So I'll get up at like 5:45 or 6, so I'll get ready, and then I'll make um Indian food or pasta pasta sauce.
00:39:36.559 --> 00:39:42.320
The house will smell like garlic and onions and stuff, but it'll all be ready so that in the evening we're ready to eat.
00:39:42.320 --> 00:39:48.239
And that's something I never thought I would have to do, but it turns out to be great and make things a lot easier.
00:39:48.239 --> 00:39:54.480
And sometimes I can also get some of the food in for lunch that day, so it can it can help.
00:39:54.800 --> 00:40:00.639
So how do you draw boundaries on what you will and won't say yes to?
00:40:02.800 --> 00:40:04.960
That's changed a lot over time.
00:40:04.960 --> 00:40:11.440
I used to say yes to everything, everything, everything, everything, which was great early in my career.
00:40:11.440 --> 00:40:19.920
Like I said, you know, earlier, I think I got a lot of opportunities and saying yes to them helped me a lot in my career.
00:40:19.920 --> 00:40:23.440
It took me a long time to feel like I could say no to things.
00:40:23.440 --> 00:40:25.039
I have a few approaches.
00:40:25.039 --> 00:40:28.159
I did for a while when I became a center director.
00:40:28.159 --> 00:40:33.199
I started working with an executive coach, which helped me think a lot about saying no to stuff.
00:40:33.199 --> 00:40:39.679
Um, so she was sort of a sounding board, and I could say, should I like even granularly in the moment, should I say yes to this?
00:40:39.679 --> 00:40:45.599
When I was a pre-tenure, I used to just use the phrase, I have to ask my chair, even if I didn't ask.
00:40:45.599 --> 00:40:48.960
And then that just creating that pause was helpful.
00:40:48.960 --> 00:40:51.119
What if it was your chair asking you to do something?
00:40:51.119 --> 00:40:51.840
I know, right?
00:40:51.840 --> 00:40:52.239
Yeah.
00:40:52.239 --> 00:40:55.440
No, then I would say yes, probably.
00:40:55.440 --> 00:41:04.719
But now I think I have a lot more of a sense of the opportunity cost that saying yes now means.
00:41:04.719 --> 00:41:07.679
And also, I guess the flip side of that, right?
00:41:07.679 --> 00:41:10.719
So when I was younger, I was worried about this.
00:41:10.719 --> 00:41:12.800
If I say no, I'm never gonna get asked again.
00:41:12.800 --> 00:41:14.800
And now I know I will get asked again.
00:41:14.800 --> 00:41:17.519
In fact, I will definitely get asked again.
00:41:17.519 --> 00:41:23.519
And so it feels like less of this trade-off of it's either yes now or no forever.
00:41:23.519 --> 00:41:24.400
It's not.
00:41:24.400 --> 00:41:31.519
And I wish I had learned that earlier, that these opportunities weren't just gonna manifest once and then disappear forever.
00:41:31.519 --> 00:41:33.599
But that helps me a lot.
00:41:33.599 --> 00:41:43.119
And I don't have any hard and fast rules around, you know, I'll only travel this number of days or I'll only do this many evening things.
00:41:43.119 --> 00:41:45.840
We kind of just take it season by season.
00:41:45.840 --> 00:41:51.679
But now I'm also in a place where my health, the family comes first.
00:41:51.679 --> 00:41:54.960
If I have to cancel something or reschedule, I'll do it.
00:41:54.960 --> 00:41:57.360
And again, realizing that that's okay, right?
00:41:57.360 --> 00:42:12.960
That you can have a seminar scheduled somewhere and then something comes up, like a medical procedure, and maybe it's routine, but you still want to be there to support a family member, and you can push it out six months and it's fine, and no one's gonna be upset, or you can cancel the sky's not gonna fall.
00:42:12.960 --> 00:42:14.239
The sky's not gonna fall.
00:42:14.239 --> 00:42:24.000
Being there for your kids' play is really important, but also trusting that there isn't gonna be a single decision that's gonna like irreparably harm my career.
00:42:24.000 --> 00:42:28.639
I definitely worried about that somehow early in my career, and I don't as much now.
00:42:28.800 --> 00:42:33.119
Um probably was more important earlier in your career than it is now.
00:42:33.119 --> 00:42:34.159
Maybe so.
00:42:34.159 --> 00:42:34.960
Maybe so.
00:42:34.960 --> 00:42:40.960
I know that you're an avid knitter, so you can talk about that, but also what do you do for fun?
00:42:40.960 --> 00:42:43.199
What do you do to treat yourself?
00:42:43.519 --> 00:42:44.480
Yeah, a lot.
00:42:44.480 --> 00:42:45.840
But knitting is a big one.
00:42:45.840 --> 00:42:47.199
I do love to knit.
00:42:47.199 --> 00:42:52.000
I go to definitely one, maybe two knitting circles a week.
00:42:52.000 --> 00:42:57.920
I have friends, actually, three, um, three sort of knitting blocks on my calendar.
00:42:57.920 --> 00:42:59.920
I also work out a lot.
00:42:59.920 --> 00:43:05.599
I started working out with a personal trainer just over a year ago, which has been an amazing addition to my life.
00:43:05.599 --> 00:43:07.920
I take a Pilates class each week.
00:43:07.920 --> 00:43:09.519
I do personal training twice a week.
00:43:09.519 --> 00:43:10.880
I run twice a week.
00:43:10.880 --> 00:43:12.400
I run with a colleague.
00:43:12.400 --> 00:43:17.119
I have two colleagues I run with, and that's really fun because we talk about work while we're running.
00:43:17.119 --> 00:43:18.480
We ask each other for advice.
00:43:18.480 --> 00:43:22.000
We co-advise some people too, so we'll talk about them while we're running.
00:43:22.000 --> 00:43:23.840
But that's really enjoyable.
00:43:23.840 --> 00:43:27.440
I love to cook and bake as well.
00:43:27.440 --> 00:43:32.639
And yeah, otherwise, I would say mostly hang out with the family.
00:43:32.639 --> 00:43:35.119
We have a dog, spending time walking the dog.
00:43:35.119 --> 00:43:37.280
Yeah, that's a lot of extracurricular activities.
00:43:37.519 --> 00:43:43.840
By my count, you're exercising quite a bit most days and going to a lot of knitting circles.
00:43:43.840 --> 00:43:45.599
How do you find time for all that?
00:43:45.599 --> 00:43:48.559
Well, I stepped down from administration.
00:43:48.960 --> 00:43:50.239
That helps a little bit.
00:43:50.239 --> 00:43:56.880
But yeah, I think on the one hand, time is the only zero sum game, right?
00:43:56.880 --> 00:43:58.719
In some existential sense.
00:43:58.719 --> 00:44:12.639
I think in a Last few years thinking about that and just thinking about what I really value, I try to touch on everything I value as much as I can over the course of a few days.
00:44:12.639 --> 00:44:18.320
And so what that means is the biggest priority in my calendar at work is my time with my trainees.
00:44:18.320 --> 00:44:21.760
They come first and I want to make sure I'm spending a lot of time with them.
00:44:21.760 --> 00:44:24.559
I have multiple meetings with all of them.
00:44:24.559 --> 00:44:29.199
Usually there's like a collaboration or a project-based meeting and then a shorter, like one-on-one meeting.
00:44:29.199 --> 00:44:31.280
We have lab meeting as well.
00:44:31.280 --> 00:44:35.679
Now more administrative meetings are shorter, maybe less frequent.
00:44:35.679 --> 00:44:44.079
I used to, if I was meeting with an undergraduate concentration, what we call majors at Brown Advisee, I used to set aside an hour and now it's like 20 minutes.
00:44:44.079 --> 00:44:45.920
I know we can do this quickly.
00:44:45.920 --> 00:44:55.199
So yeah, feeling okay pushing out meetings that are less key to the research is important and constraining some of the more urgent things.
00:44:55.199 --> 00:44:58.239
Like now I've been lucky, my teaching is pretty stable.
00:44:58.239 --> 00:45:00.320
I've taught the same courses for a while.
00:45:00.320 --> 00:45:02.639
So my prep is pretty low.
00:45:02.639 --> 00:45:05.440
So just not worrying about taking up too much time with that.
00:45:05.440 --> 00:45:07.360
And babysitters are a part of this.
00:45:07.360 --> 00:45:21.519
Both Jeremy and I kind of agree that okay, there are going to be certain mornings or certain evenings where one of us is at home, the other one's doing this other thing that's really important for them personally, and that makes us better partners, better people, and better parents.
00:45:21.519 --> 00:45:28.079
So we've just really transitioned into helping each other take time for what we value and then keeping time for ourselves too.
00:45:28.480 --> 00:45:40.480
I think implicit in what you're talking about is it's a really key lesson that not everybody implements, which is really taking your calendar and dividing it up and doing it by the things that you find most important.
00:45:40.480 --> 00:45:47.840
And that is a skill that is something that may or may not come naturally to people, but it's certainly a learnable skill.
00:45:48.320 --> 00:45:55.119
Yeah, I mean, I think the thing I still struggle with a lot with that is it's a very learnable skill.
00:45:55.119 --> 00:46:01.119
What I struggle with is keeping some time free for just me to think, me to read.
00:46:01.119 --> 00:46:10.400
So that tends to come less frequently than I would like, or maybe sometimes more in the evening after the kids are in bed, which is not my best thinking time.
00:46:10.400 --> 00:46:13.199
But that also, again, it's a season, right?
00:46:13.199 --> 00:46:16.400
So maybe during this semester it's a little more that way.
00:46:16.400 --> 00:46:18.880
And then next semester I'll reprioritize.
00:46:18.880 --> 00:46:31.440
But yeah, time blocking is really, really important and something I came to only in the last couple of years, but it's definitely, definitely made my days feel more fulfilling.
00:46:31.760 --> 00:46:32.079
Yeah.
00:46:32.079 --> 00:46:35.519
And then the things you didn't get done, you decided that you weren't prioritizing them.
00:46:35.519 --> 00:46:36.639
Yeah.
00:46:36.639 --> 00:46:37.360
Yeah.
00:46:37.360 --> 00:46:38.000
Okay.
00:46:38.000 --> 00:46:45.760
So our last question, which we ask everybody, is if you were not a scientist, what would you do with your time?
00:46:47.679 --> 00:46:55.360
This is a hard one for me because there is a part of me that would love to like run a pie bakery.
00:46:55.360 --> 00:47:08.480
So I just really love baking and cooking and sometimes yearn for, I mean, I guess I do do a fair amount of crafting, but working with my hands or working on my feet is something I sometimes yearn for.
00:47:08.480 --> 00:47:16.079
But I honestly, the truth is if I weren't a scientist, I think I would be an academic in a different discipline.
00:47:16.079 --> 00:47:20.960
I used to think I wanted to be an economist when I was younger or a legal scholar.
00:47:20.960 --> 00:47:35.760
I think that the chance to just continue to get to be a student in many ways and to learn and also to teach, to mentor, and to be in a long game.
00:47:35.760 --> 00:47:49.440
That's what I love about academia, because I think one of the things that drew me to it is basically from the moment I started grad school, partly because of how population genetics is as a field, but partly a big part because of the way Mark structured the lab.
00:47:49.440 --> 00:47:53.840
I felt like I worked mostly for myself and was really independent.
00:47:53.840 --> 00:47:56.880
And I could push on projects as hard as I wanted.
00:47:56.880 --> 00:48:03.039
I could push past what probably a supervisor in for sure in industry would be like, no, stop.
00:48:03.039 --> 00:48:04.400
This is not going anywhere.
00:48:04.400 --> 00:48:07.519
And I think we really need that in society.
00:48:07.519 --> 00:48:13.519
We need the kind of long game of academia for innovation, just like we need industry for innovation.
00:48:13.519 --> 00:48:17.280
There are just different time horizons that make innovation possible.
00:48:17.280 --> 00:48:28.719
And I think I like that the freedom that you get when you're not trying to meet a quarterly bottom line or something like that of really trying to approach problems in different ways and try a lot of things that might fail.
00:48:28.719 --> 00:48:32.159
So, yeah, that's my an interesting answer.
00:48:32.960 --> 00:48:37.199
That's a pretty awesome answer because it means that you love what you do.
00:48:37.199 --> 00:48:38.480
I do.
00:48:38.480 --> 00:48:40.000
Yeah, that's pretty great.
00:48:40.000 --> 00:48:41.599
All right.
00:48:41.599 --> 00:48:43.280
Well, thank you so much, Sohini.
00:48:43.280 --> 00:48:47.119
This has been really a great conversation, and thanks so much for taking the time.
00:48:47.599 --> 00:48:48.159
Oh thank you.
00:48:48.159 --> 00:48:50.239
It's been really fun.
00:48:50.239 --> 00:48:53.760
Thanks for tuning in to the Scientess Podcast.
00:48:53.760 --> 00:48:57.679
If you enjoyed this episode, please follow on your favorite podcast app.
00:48:57.679 --> 00:49:01.039
It helps more curious minds like yours discover the show.
00:49:01.039 --> 00:49:09.119
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00:49:09.119 --> 00:49:12.079
That's S-C-I-E-N-T-E-S-S.
00:49:12.079 --> 00:49:15.039
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00:49:16.639 --> 00:49:22.000
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00:49:22.000 --> 00:49:24.159
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00:49:25.679 --> 00:49:36.480
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00:49:36.480 --> 00:49:44.960
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00:49:44.960 --> 00:49:46.719
We'll catch you in the next episode.
00:00:02.399 --> 00:00:10.160
Hello and welcome to the Scientess Podcast, where we talk to women with successful scientific careers about the joys of science.
00:00:10.160 --> 00:00:16.960
I'm your host, Karen Levy, an environmental health scientist at the School of Public Health at University of Washington in Seattle.
00:00:16.960 --> 00:00:22.160
I'm excited to share with you the stories of some pretty incredible women on this podcast.
00:00:22.160 --> 00:00:31.839
My hope is that these interviews will show aspiring young scientists that a career in science is not only possible, but can also be extremely rewarding and a whole lot of fun.
00:00:31.839 --> 00:00:34.240
Let's jump in with today's featured Scientess.
00:00:37.039 --> 00:00:37.439
Dr.
00:00:37.439 --> 00:00:40.320
Sohini Ramachandran is the Herman C.
00:00:40.320 --> 00:00:46.000
Bumpus Professor of Biology and Data Science and Professor of Computer Science at Brown University.
00:00:46.000 --> 00:00:54.240
She was the founding director of Brown's Data Science Institute and also served as the director of the Brown University Center for Computational Molecular Biology.
00:00:54.240 --> 00:01:02.960
Sohini uses statistical and mathematical modeling techniques to study population genetics and evolutionary theory, generally using humans as study systems.
00:01:02.960 --> 00:01:17.359
In her work, she uses genetic data to infer human demographic history, and her early research examined the genetic relationships originating within people from Africa, where she showed that diversity decreases as distance from Africa increases.
00:01:17.359 --> 00:01:24.159
Among more scientific questions listed on her research website, she also lists a very basic underlying question.
00:01:24.159 --> 00:01:29.200
How does population genetics research highlight our shared humanity?
00:01:29.200 --> 00:01:34.879
For this research, Hini has received many highly prestigious fellowships and awards.
00:01:34.879 --> 00:01:38.159
She was elected to the Harvard Society of Fellows, has been an Alfred P.
00:01:38.159 --> 00:01:48.879
Sloan Research Fellow and FQ Biomedical Scholar, received an NSF Career Award for her research, and was awarded a coveted Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering.
00:01:48.879 --> 00:01:56.400
While on sabbatical in 2019, she was a Natural Sciences Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala, Sweden.
00:01:56.400 --> 00:02:02.480
She was also awarded the Samuel Carlin Prize in Mathematical Biology while a PhD student at Stanford.
00:02:02.480 --> 00:02:09.599
In addition to these research-based accomplishments, Sohini has also received multiple awards for her excellence in teaching at Brown University.
00:02:09.599 --> 00:02:24.800
While many of us wait for years for recognition of our scientific prowess, Sohini started early when, as a high school senior in 1998, she placed fourth in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, the youngest finalist in the group.
00:02:24.800 --> 00:02:35.360
This hopefully made up for her performance at the 1995 National Spelling B, where she was knocked out of the competition for misspelling the word succidanium.
00:02:35.360 --> 00:02:40.240
S-U-C-C-E-D-A-N-E-U-M.
00:02:40.240 --> 00:02:46.400
I have to admit that I had to look up the word, which means a substitute, especially for a medicine or drug.
00:02:46.400 --> 00:02:50.080
So Heaney, welcome to the Scientist Podcast.
00:02:50.080 --> 00:02:57.759
My first question is: how did you misspell sexodanium back in 1995?
00:02:58.639 --> 00:03:01.199
Thank you so much for having me.
00:03:01.199 --> 00:03:05.759
And I am okay revisiting that trauma.
00:03:05.759 --> 00:03:12.159
I spelled it S U C C E D A N I U M.
00:03:12.159 --> 00:03:15.439
And so the terrible.
00:03:39.599 --> 00:03:42.479
Were you in the finals, or how far did you get?
00:03:42.800 --> 00:03:47.680
Yeah, so I was in eighth grade, which is the last year of eligibility in the National Spelling Bee.
00:03:47.680 --> 00:03:49.199
It was my only time there.
00:03:49.199 --> 00:03:55.439
But I think there were over 200 kids, and I was in the last 35 or something like that.
00:03:55.439 --> 00:03:57.120
It was like the fourth or fifth round.
00:03:57.120 --> 00:03:58.479
I'd spelled a few words.
00:03:58.479 --> 00:04:03.039
The extra spiciness of that story is that my older sister won the National Spelling Bee.
00:04:03.039 --> 00:04:06.240
So it was like a little extra twist for me.
00:04:06.240 --> 00:04:08.719
But that was pretty amazing.
00:04:08.719 --> 00:04:10.879
And being there was so, so cool.
00:04:11.439 --> 00:04:14.800
Extra sting, the competition with your sister.
00:04:15.039 --> 00:04:15.439
Yeah.
00:04:15.439 --> 00:04:16.000
Yeah.
00:04:16.000 --> 00:04:18.160
Did she win that year or a different year?
00:04:18.160 --> 00:04:19.600
So I was in 95.
00:04:19.680 --> 00:04:23.920
She won in 1988, and she's seven years older than me, so got it.
00:04:23.920 --> 00:04:35.519
So it seems like you took that experience and you used it to propel you forward in your career and make really good things happen for yourself.
00:04:35.519 --> 00:04:39.199
And so I'm just going to start with some sort of pretty basic questions.
00:04:39.199 --> 00:04:43.920
Can you tell us kind of how you got to where you are today and what the the arc of your career?
00:04:43.920 --> 00:04:49.439
Where did you start and did effect to end up where you are now, or how did you end up getting here?
00:04:49.839 --> 00:04:55.439
Yeah, so you mentioned already that I was in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search.
00:04:55.439 --> 00:04:57.519
I was a finalist and the fourth place winner.
00:04:57.519 --> 00:04:59.759
So that was my senior year of high school.
00:04:59.759 --> 00:05:01.759
And that's a research-based competition.
00:05:01.759 --> 00:05:04.319
I was born into a family of academics.
00:05:04.319 --> 00:05:06.079
My parents were both professors.
00:05:06.079 --> 00:05:13.199
They largely taught, but also did some consulting and research and statistics at the California State University of Sacramento.
00:05:13.199 --> 00:05:16.800
So I grew up in a family that really prioritized education.
00:05:16.800 --> 00:05:21.680
My sister ended up getting an MD and a PhD, and because of the age gap, I watched her go through that.
00:05:21.680 --> 00:05:36.160
And so graduate school was highly emphasized in my family, really from the perspective just that an education helps you become kind of irreplaceable on the job market, slash gives you potential security.
00:05:36.160 --> 00:05:47.360
I don't know that my parents really wanted me to become a professor, but the life we had growing up as an immigrant family was one of incredible flexibility for them.
00:05:47.360 --> 00:05:54.800
They took a sabbatical when I was in junior high and I got to go to eighth grade in Germany, and that was a huge event in my life.
00:05:54.800 --> 00:06:07.279
So I think seeing them be able to be around for me and have summers, you know, be more flexible, and then getting to travel a bit made me interested in academia.
00:06:07.600 --> 00:06:11.040
I can certainly relate to that because that was similar to my experience.
00:06:11.360 --> 00:06:12.480
Yeah, exactly.
00:06:12.480 --> 00:06:18.879
And also I think and you might have had a similar experience, just meeting other professors when I was young.
00:06:18.879 --> 00:06:25.120
I think they were really interested in talking to me as a kid and talking to me about math problems or science problems.
00:06:25.120 --> 00:06:34.480
And I found that really fun and learned very early on about the idea that we don't know the answer to everything, everything can't be looked up in a book.
00:06:34.480 --> 00:06:41.279
And the idea that there are questions to continue working on and questions that are still open sort of fascinated me.
00:06:41.279 --> 00:06:57.600
And then my sister, who is someone who's always been the most important role model in my life, I would say, after or with my mom and dad, she actually, when I was thinking about entering the science talent search, she introduced me to Mark Feldman at Stanford.
00:06:57.600 --> 00:07:00.720
And he agreed to talk to me.
00:07:00.720 --> 00:07:04.319
I had taken like AP biology by then and calculus.
00:07:04.319 --> 00:07:09.120
And he said, if you want to come join the lab for a summer, I would like to have you.
00:07:09.120 --> 00:07:12.560
And that was a hugely formative moment for me.
00:07:12.560 --> 00:07:17.759
There were lots of great graduate students in the lab at the time who are all now professors.
00:07:17.759 --> 00:07:20.000
I have wonderful academic siblings.
00:07:20.000 --> 00:07:32.560
And when I look back on that experience, that really solidified my desire to become a professor because what happened in the Feldman lab for me that summer, and I was really just a kid, right?
00:07:32.560 --> 00:07:41.360
Is I showed up and all of these researchers, graduate students, postdocs, and Mark, they were really treating me very kindly and like a colleague.
00:07:41.360 --> 00:07:43.920
And they didn't find my questions annoying.
00:07:43.920 --> 00:07:46.560
I was learning how to program for the first time.
00:07:46.560 --> 00:07:52.319
You know, I was bothering them with a lot of questions, but everyone was really patient and interested in things I would show them.
00:07:52.319 --> 00:07:55.759
Like I'd show them results and they would sit down and say, oh, that looks really cool.
00:07:55.759 --> 00:07:56.800
Let's talk about it.
00:07:56.800 --> 00:08:03.600
And as a teenager, I think that was just really incredibly exciting to feel like I had something to contribute.
00:08:03.600 --> 00:08:13.199
And I think that kind of open scholarly community is something that I still strive to create in my own lab and in the administrative work that I've done.
00:08:13.519 --> 00:08:22.399
Well, the Feldman Lab certainly has been very productive and it seems like a lot of incredible scholars have come out of that lab.
00:08:22.399 --> 00:08:34.399
And so what you describe of the climate there doesn't surprise me that you would have such a collaborative, open sharing environment that fostered this inquisitiveness and productivity.
00:08:34.720 --> 00:08:46.720
Yeah, and I think it's really special when a lab can kind of treat everyone, no matter what their career stage is, as somebody who has something to offer and also somebody who has something to learn.
00:08:46.720 --> 00:08:55.679
And something Mark was really good at creating was a sense that there isn't seniority in the lab and that everyone is sort of an equal partner.
00:08:55.679 --> 00:08:59.279
And I think that, again, was really inspiring to me.
00:08:59.279 --> 00:09:13.919
And then the next formative intellectual experience for me, I went to Stanford and I spent some time in the lab, in the Feldman lab, but I mostly I wasn't applied, I was a mathematical and computational sciences major.
00:09:13.919 --> 00:09:14.879
It was a great degree.
00:09:14.879 --> 00:09:17.039
It's been renamed now to data science.
00:09:17.039 --> 00:09:18.480
The coursework was amazing.
00:09:18.480 --> 00:09:24.879
It was in computer science, math, operations, research, statistics, and it kept me pretty busy.
00:09:24.879 --> 00:09:30.720
But my junior year of college was when the draft sequence of the human genome was published.
00:09:30.720 --> 00:09:42.879
And so I had gotten a sense from that high school research of and watching the Feldman lab how mathematics could be used to think about biological complexity and genetics specifically.
00:09:42.879 --> 00:09:51.120
And then when the reference sequence was published, the fanfare was all about we're going to cure all the diseases, cancer will be a thing of the past.
00:09:51.120 --> 00:09:53.600
And of course, we're still working on all of that.
00:09:53.600 --> 00:10:01.519
But what I remember thinking was how is this single reference sequence going to really help us help everybody?
00:10:01.519 --> 00:10:13.279
And the idea of understanding human genetic variation, both what generates it in the past and also its implications for the future and for disease became really interesting to me.
00:10:13.279 --> 00:10:21.120
So when I was applying to graduate school, it was the beginning of bioinformatics and genome sciences as a discipline.
00:10:21.120 --> 00:10:24.159
Like those first programs were just being formed.
00:10:24.159 --> 00:10:35.919
And it was an exciting time, so exciting to me that all my friends from college who were going to the early dot com startups, like Google and Yahoo and stuff, were they telling me how cool their work was.
00:10:35.919 --> 00:10:37.759
And I was telling them, you should come to graduate school.
00:10:37.759 --> 00:10:39.600
Genome is really interesting.
00:10:39.600 --> 00:10:44.159
But yeah, those were the things I think set me on the intellectual path I'm on.
00:10:44.559 --> 00:10:55.200
Do you think that your identity as an immigrant had an impact on that perspective about the diversity of the human genome that you described?
00:10:56.000 --> 00:10:58.080
That's an interesting question.
00:10:58.080 --> 00:11:02.480
Uh maybe so.
00:11:02.480 --> 00:11:04.000
I mean, I guess I should clarify.
00:11:04.000 --> 00:11:10.879
I was born after my parents and sister came to this country, but I definitely grew up in that kind of first generation mentality.
00:11:10.879 --> 00:11:27.679
But yeah, this kind of sense of how movement influences people, how people can change their environments, but also that there's something in our genome we carry with us through migration and how does that influence who we become was very interesting to me.
00:11:27.679 --> 00:11:36.960
Also, I grew up bilingual, and so thinking about cultural transmission of environments as well as genetic transmission of traits was something interesting to me.
00:11:36.960 --> 00:11:49.039
But certainly thinking about how personalized medicine was actually going to get implemented from genomics was it seemed to me a very, very open question.
00:11:49.039 --> 00:11:51.519
And yeah, it still is interesting.
00:11:51.840 --> 00:11:55.759
And so you mentioned the publication of the first human genome.
00:11:55.759 --> 00:12:04.080
Is there something else that you can point to, or is that kind of a specific moment that solidified your interest in human genetics?
00:12:04.480 --> 00:12:06.639
I really think it was that.
00:12:06.639 --> 00:12:07.440
Yeah.
00:12:07.440 --> 00:12:12.159
Um, that combined with the happenstance of Marx mentorship.
00:12:12.159 --> 00:12:15.759
I think those were the things that really led me to this.
00:12:16.559 --> 00:12:21.919
So what excites you about your science and how has that changed over time?
00:12:23.440 --> 00:12:33.600
Well, I think one of the things that really excites me about population genetics is that the scale of the data we work with has changed so much.
00:12:33.600 --> 00:12:41.120
But our classic models are still really relevant and just over a hundred years old.
00:12:41.120 --> 00:12:55.279
So now thinking about how the data that we're generating today might help us find things the models aren't covering or predicting appropriately, or violations of the model that are more routine than we thought, is really exciting to me.
00:12:55.279 --> 00:13:05.279
So the thing that I'm getting most excited about now, which I never would have anticipated would be something I would work on, is very recent genetic history.
00:13:05.279 --> 00:13:21.039
So usually when we think about inferring human history from genomes, we think about thousands of years in the past, tens of thousands of years in the past, thinking about, as you mentioned in the intro, our origins in Africa, expansion out of Africa, maybe the transition to agriculture around 10,000 years ago.
00:13:21.039 --> 00:13:23.919
There's a lot of focus on that in ancient DNA.
00:13:23.919 --> 00:13:37.360
But now with medical biobanks that combine medical records and genetic and genomic data, we can actually start to think about the genome really as a historical document and think about like the last 10 generations, last 15 generations.
00:13:37.360 --> 00:13:48.799
And there it turns out a lot of classic models start to break down because they don't really account for how ancestral relationships like our family pedigrees can constrain evolution.
00:13:48.799 --> 00:13:56.720
And that's an area that even 10 years ago, I certainly didn't think we were going to have the data to do the kinds of studies we're starting to think about doing now.
00:13:56.720 --> 00:14:00.320
It's also maybe extra interesting to me because I married a historian.
00:14:00.320 --> 00:14:06.639
So thinking about the limitations of genetics, what it can tell us about the historical process and what it can't.
00:14:06.639 --> 00:14:23.759
I think that's another aspect of my science that has changed is I actually think the project of human genetics, and I would say my project in it for the next five years, 10 years, is to really talk about the limits of genetics for helping us achieve things like personalized medicine.
00:14:23.759 --> 00:14:29.519
You know, when should we be thinking about incorporating genetics into models of interventions?
00:14:29.519 --> 00:14:33.360
What types of traits do we really get traction on when we use genetics?
00:14:33.360 --> 00:14:38.320
And where are their confounds when we start to think about complex traits in genetics?
00:14:38.320 --> 00:14:49.039
Because that's something that the genomic era has really taught us is that traits are very complex, which in genetics means very polygenic, have mutations influencing them all along the genome.
00:14:49.039 --> 00:14:54.159
And then that means that the environment also plays a really important role in shaping traits.
00:14:54.159 --> 00:15:10.000
And so I think we need to shift as a community more into thinking about establishing the limits of what genetic variation can and can't help us do with diagnosing and treating different diseases and understanding the evolution of different traits.
00:15:10.559 --> 00:15:11.440
That's really interesting.
00:15:11.440 --> 00:15:18.639
And what you said about your husband being a historian and bringing that interdisciplinary lens to what you do is really interesting.
00:15:18.639 --> 00:15:26.639
And as an environmental health scientist, there's always that piece of thinking about the environmental conditions that are influencing us.
00:15:26.639 --> 00:15:29.919
And of course, it's an interplay between that nurture and nature.
00:15:30.480 --> 00:15:30.720
Right.
00:15:30.720 --> 00:15:36.879
I mean, any epidemiologist would say, you know, genetics isn't something that you can intervene with, so why not study the other stuff?
00:15:36.879 --> 00:15:40.639
And I totally am getting to that viewpoint now in a lot of ways.
00:15:40.960 --> 00:15:45.200
Well, the underlying genetics will tell you about whether an intervention's gonna work.
00:15:45.519 --> 00:15:46.159
Right.
00:15:46.159 --> 00:15:47.600
Right, right.
00:15:47.600 --> 00:16:01.600
And there is so much in our society around just the way we talk about things being in our DNA, the way we learn about genetics in school is something a lot of people are doing really good work on.
00:16:01.600 --> 00:16:18.159
Uh, notably, a kind of academic nephew of mine, Brian Donovan, has done some beautiful work on introducing concepts of heritability and how heritability can change over time into curricula and that it can really help people relax their genetic determinism.
00:16:18.159 --> 00:16:26.559
That's something that I've started to think about more and more is this the way we're taught genetics in high school, it's like pretty cartoonish considering what we know in the genomic era now.
00:16:26.559 --> 00:16:28.000
It's still pretty Mendelian.
00:16:28.000 --> 00:16:30.000
So that's something that's shifted for me.
00:16:30.720 --> 00:16:38.799
Next question Are there ways that you might be able to point to that being a woman has positively impacted your career?
00:16:40.480 --> 00:16:50.720
Yeah, I think that well I became a scientist because I love collaborating.
00:16:50.720 --> 00:17:00.399
I see science as a collaborative enterprise, and mentoring is an important part of that, but also collaborating with my own peers.
00:17:00.399 --> 00:17:04.799
And I don't know, maybe I'm stereotyping a little bit about what it means to be a woman.
00:17:04.799 --> 00:17:14.720
But to me, an important part of my identity is my social relationships and my professional social relationships are really, really special to me.
00:17:14.720 --> 00:17:20.480
And uh when it comes to collaborating, I have very much a friends-first model.
00:17:20.480 --> 00:17:25.759
I think ideas will come, but working with friends is exciting.
00:17:25.759 --> 00:17:28.400
We can have hard conversations when we need to.
00:17:28.400 --> 00:17:32.240
We can criticize each other's ideas and like be okay.
00:17:32.240 --> 00:17:38.480
And I think also my approach to science is pretty inclusive.
00:17:38.480 --> 00:17:50.319
It's very interdisciplinary, which also means being willing to learn, being open to critique, being open to realizing things I think are new and innovative are actually whole fields of study in another discipline.
00:17:50.319 --> 00:17:57.680
So those are maybe soft skills that I think I was socialized to have as a girl and a woman, and I see as important.
00:17:58.640 --> 00:18:03.440
I will just say that other interview subjects have pointed to something similar.
00:18:03.440 --> 00:18:08.960
And similarly have also questioned, oh, I don't know, maybe this is stereotyping.
00:18:08.960 --> 00:18:11.440
But I think there might be something there.
00:18:11.440 --> 00:18:12.240
Maybe not.
00:18:12.240 --> 00:18:13.039
Who knows?
00:18:13.440 --> 00:18:32.880
This is not exactly what you're asking, but another thing that is true about me and my career is um having a mother with a PhD and a father who was very, very supportive of my mother's career and they were in the same department, they made their career decisions together.
00:18:32.880 --> 00:18:40.079
That was hugely influential in my life, in that I never thought that an academic career was out of reach for me.
00:18:40.079 --> 00:18:43.119
And it was really persisting in academia.
00:18:43.119 --> 00:18:47.920
The longer I've persisted, the more of a radicalized feminist I've become.
00:18:47.920 --> 00:19:08.079
And I see, especially as I got tenure, I think I started, and when I became a professor and I saw how students saw me in the classroom and how seeing in in biology, right, we know that you know women don't persist in the faculty ranks or in the administrative ranks in biology in proportion to the degrees that we get, right?
00:19:08.079 --> 00:19:16.400
Women get the majority of all degrees from undergraduate through all forms of graduate degrees and in the life sciences, but that's not what the most senior faculty look like.
00:19:16.400 --> 00:19:20.240
And when I started teaching at Brown, it just didn't really even occur to me.
00:19:20.240 --> 00:19:23.599
I didn't really notice the sex or the gender of my professors in college.
00:19:23.599 --> 00:19:26.160
There were very few female professors I had.
00:19:26.160 --> 00:19:31.759
I was often, because I was in a lot of these math classes, you know, one of the only women in the class.
00:19:31.759 --> 00:19:34.000
And I actually remember kind of enjoying that.
00:19:34.000 --> 00:19:36.160
I didn't think anything of it.
00:19:36.160 --> 00:19:45.759
And when I started teaching at Brown, female students would come to me and say, I haven't had a female professor at Brown in biology, or you're the first woman of color who's taught me.
00:19:45.759 --> 00:19:48.400
And I saw how important that was to them.
00:19:48.400 --> 00:19:57.599
And then I started to, well, I started to realize first, of course, how important it is to see a representation of yourself in people who are ahead of you.
00:19:57.599 --> 00:19:59.759
And I was lucky I had that at home.
00:19:59.759 --> 00:20:03.119
But yeah, that has been a feature of my life.
00:20:03.119 --> 00:20:16.640
And I guess I do think being a woman has given me a lot of opportunities throughout my career, whether it's speaking in conferences or participating on study sections.
00:20:16.640 --> 00:20:24.400
I think that need for representation has given me opportunities that I've been able to take advantage of and also help open the door for other people.
00:20:24.640 --> 00:20:31.920
Are there any examples that you could point to where there was a challenge of being a woman in science that you had to overcome?
00:20:31.920 --> 00:20:34.400
And how did you overcome it?
00:20:35.599 --> 00:20:50.240
I can think of a couple, although I would say they were challenges that also kind of intersected with my personality, which again has to do with how I was raised and things like that, stereotypical expectations of girls and women.
00:20:50.240 --> 00:20:57.680
But one I can think of is that I um what's that French saying about the thought you have on the staircase?
00:20:57.680 --> 00:20:59.920
I'm not good with the comeback, right?
00:20:59.920 --> 00:21:04.079
So this idea that there's the thought you have when you're leaving of the thing you should have said.
00:21:04.079 --> 00:21:06.160
I'm I'm not quick in most.
00:21:06.160 --> 00:21:07.759
Exactly.
00:21:07.759 --> 00:21:08.160
Yeah.
00:21:08.160 --> 00:21:20.640
And so I do think there have been a lot of moments in committee meetings and just small interactions where somebody said something that landed pretty clunkily and probably not just for me.
00:21:20.640 --> 00:21:23.359
And I really wish I had called it out early.
00:21:23.359 --> 00:21:30.319
Again, not because I think there was a lot of bad intent on their part, but just even saying, like, why is that funny?
00:21:30.319 --> 00:21:32.240
Or I don't agree with that, right?
00:21:32.240 --> 00:21:39.519
Just saying that in the moment would have been useful for everyone in the room, but especially for me, right?
00:21:39.519 --> 00:21:40.880
Because I'm still thinking about it.
00:21:41.200 --> 00:21:41.519
Yeah.
00:21:41.519 --> 00:21:43.039
How do you overcome that?
00:21:43.039 --> 00:21:50.480
Do you have ways either just internally for accepting that you didn't say what you wanted to say or preparing yourself for the next time?
00:21:50.880 --> 00:21:54.480
Yeah, I think now I am better at just asking questions.
00:21:54.480 --> 00:21:59.839
That's kind of my approach, regardless of how I'm actually feeling about something that's happening in the moment, to try to approach it with curiosity.
00:21:59.839 --> 00:22:02.799
Or just ask a question like, what did you really mean by that?
00:22:02.799 --> 00:22:04.720
Or are you we really saying this?
00:22:04.720 --> 00:22:19.839
You know, often I tell students, if they're trying to advocate for themselves, I say something that works well for me is to ask, what would I need to do to achieve that thing, or what would I need to do so you would nominate me for that award, you know, after seeing someone else get it.
00:22:19.839 --> 00:22:22.799
So sometimes I just like to frame things as questions.
00:22:22.799 --> 00:22:35.839
But I also have three kids, and my middle daughter, especially, she's very good at when we are laughing with slash at her because she's said something particularly adorable, but she might not have meant it to be funny.
00:22:35.839 --> 00:22:39.759
She has this very steely look and she says, I don't find it funny, and I love it.
00:22:39.759 --> 00:22:41.440
I keep telling her, hold on to that.
00:22:41.440 --> 00:22:44.319
It's gonna be useful as you get older.
00:22:44.319 --> 00:22:54.880
The other thing I'll say that I think back on is so my husband and I met as postdocs, and we were at different institutions, we're in different fields.
00:22:54.880 --> 00:23:00.000
At Brown, we're actually across schools because biology is in the medical school here.
00:23:00.000 --> 00:23:09.519
We've been lucky to be physically in the same place since we got married, but we had to go on the job market a lot, negotiating, and it was always challenging.
00:23:09.519 --> 00:23:18.400
But initially, I had two offers, and Brown created a visiting position for him with an assistant professor-sized salary, which was really amazing.
00:23:18.400 --> 00:23:20.559
And so that's a reason we came here.
00:23:20.559 --> 00:23:22.079
And we've been very happy here.
00:23:22.079 --> 00:23:31.359
And he's now tenured, and so we navigated with lots of interviewing and thinking we were going to leave many times, ended up with him on the tenure track and then tenured here.
00:23:31.359 --> 00:23:37.839
But when we first got the two offers, I didn't ask for more money for myself.
00:23:37.839 --> 00:23:47.920
I didn't ask for a slightly higher salary because I thought, oh, we're so lucky they're giving us two positions, and his salary is actually like a real salary.
00:23:47.920 --> 00:23:50.319
I just don't want to complicate the negotiation.
00:23:50.319 --> 00:23:51.359
Like this is enough.
00:23:51.359 --> 00:23:55.119
And I just didn't think about the percentage-based raises.
00:23:55.119 --> 00:23:57.920
I didn't think about the fact that they could have just said no.
00:23:57.920 --> 00:24:02.640
The reality is if I had asked for $8,000 more, they would have given me three and a half.
00:24:02.640 --> 00:24:05.440
And I just didn't think about the consequences.
00:24:05.440 --> 00:24:10.640
And I think that was probably a pretty gendered way of viewing it.
00:24:10.640 --> 00:24:19.440
I just saw the package and his position as part of something I was being given, as opposed to like, that's a separate situation, a separate transaction.
00:24:19.440 --> 00:24:21.920
And I also need to advocate for myself.
00:24:21.920 --> 00:24:23.519
What happened later on?
00:24:23.519 --> 00:24:30.640
I was on a big multi-PI grant and I got to look at the budget and saw where I stood amongst all my colleagues that were on this grant.
00:24:30.640 --> 00:24:33.359
And then I thought, oh, I really need to figure out how to get a raise.
00:24:33.359 --> 00:24:37.680
Because we were yeah, because we were interviewing anyway, things happened.
00:24:37.680 --> 00:24:41.359
But that is something that I would have approached differently, I think, if I had been a man.
00:24:42.160 --> 00:24:53.039
I think that women tend to be good, at least what I've heard, and again, stereotypical, but that women tend to be good at negotiating when it comes for other people, but not as much for themselves.
00:24:53.039 --> 00:24:57.839
And so it's useful to think about I'm negotiating for my family.
00:24:57.839 --> 00:25:06.559
Instead of thinking about this is something that I need for me, it's something that I need for the people who I'm supporting and for the students who I'm supporting.
00:25:06.559 --> 00:25:09.680
I'm gonna negotiate for whatever I need to support them.
00:25:09.680 --> 00:25:12.400
So thinking about things like that can be helpful.
00:25:12.400 --> 00:25:16.880
And then the other thing is, as you mentioned, parity is an easy way to get your head around.
00:25:16.880 --> 00:25:18.319
Well, why should I get less?
00:25:18.319 --> 00:25:19.599
I should get where other people are getting.
00:25:19.599 --> 00:25:25.519
I don't know what I'm worth, but I should at least be worth what the person who's just as good as me is worth.
00:25:25.599 --> 00:25:34.160
So yeah, and I just had no idea that of course they're giving me a number and there's a range and it's probably on the lower end of the range.
00:25:34.160 --> 00:25:39.440
And I just had no idea about the psychology because it was more money than I had ever thought I would make, you know.
00:25:40.000 --> 00:25:44.799
Um yeah, it's like going to buy a car, you are doing it once every few years.
00:25:44.799 --> 00:25:45.039
Okay.
00:25:45.039 --> 00:25:46.880
They're dealing with it every day.
00:25:46.880 --> 00:25:48.559
They have the upper hand.
00:25:48.559 --> 00:26:02.240
So you mentioned your husband, and then also the example that you have of your dad supporting your mom.
00:26:02.240 --> 00:26:04.400
You also mentioned um Dr.
00:26:04.400 --> 00:26:05.200
Feldman.
00:26:05.200 --> 00:26:10.319
Are there men who you have seen as allies in the success of your career?
00:26:10.559 --> 00:26:14.240
Yeah, well, those are three, three really important ones.
00:26:14.240 --> 00:26:25.279
We already talked about also my postdoctoral advisor, John Wakeley, has been an incredible advocate for me, an incredible intellectual interlocutor.
00:26:25.279 --> 00:26:31.680
He's on a large grant, the subject of which I was drawn to because of my postdoc work with him.
00:26:31.680 --> 00:26:35.200
So we're going to start working together again, which I'm very excited about.
00:26:35.200 --> 00:26:47.039
Something that really helped me in my career was that as I transitioned to becoming a faculty member in 2010, when I left his lab and Harvard, he became chair of organismic and evolutionary biology.
00:26:47.039 --> 00:27:11.039
And that was incredibly helpful to me because when there were periods I was negotiating or just thinking about career moves I wanted to make, even just in my field, things I wanted to do, but also as Jeremy and I were working on the two-body problem, I had him as a sounding board and his view as a chair of a department of okay, here's when you tell your chair you were interviewing somewhere, or here's what the chair is thinking when they're going to the dean.
00:27:11.039 --> 00:27:13.680
And that was really, really helpful.
00:27:13.680 --> 00:27:19.759
And then another important male advocate and collaborator in my life is Noah Rosenberg.
00:27:19.759 --> 00:27:21.519
He's my academic sibling.
00:27:21.519 --> 00:27:25.759
He was in graduate school when I was in college in the Feldman lab.
00:27:25.759 --> 00:27:29.839
And then when he started as postdoc and I started graduate school, he went to USC.
00:27:29.839 --> 00:27:32.079
We started collaborating closely.
00:27:32.079 --> 00:27:41.279
And he's just an incredible scientist, but also I have been lucky to have mentors academically who were at very different career stages.
00:27:41.279 --> 00:27:44.960
And I think that was so helpful for me having Mark be so senior.
00:27:44.960 --> 00:27:51.920
John got tenure just a couple years, probably before I joined his lab, or he was mid-career for sure at that point.
00:27:51.920 --> 00:27:54.640
But he had just transitioned recently to tenure.
00:27:54.640 --> 00:28:13.680
And then Noah being kind of one PhD cycle ahead of me really helped me understand the job market in different ways, understand grant writing and advising and having these different perspectives on just the mechanics of being a scientist and growing a lab has been really influential.
00:28:13.680 --> 00:28:26.319
And Noah and I have also recently started collaborating on different special issues, reflecting on classic papers in our field and history of science projects about the genomic era and also some actual science.
00:28:26.319 --> 00:28:28.960
So yeah, that's been really amazing.
00:28:29.920 --> 00:28:37.039
Now you're in a position of either being an older sibling or having your children in academia.
00:28:37.039 --> 00:28:44.400
What's your favorite piece of advice to pass on to others who are trying to succeed in academia?
00:28:45.759 --> 00:29:18.799
Well, I think one thing I like people going into academia, specifically into science, to think about into maybe I'll say experimental science, is that in some sense being a scientist with a lab, you know, as a professor in university, you know that in some period, and the length of that period is going to vary depending on the discipline, but in some period, the techniques that you are well versed in become totally obsolete.
00:29:18.799 --> 00:29:37.920
And you sort of need to embrace that and believe that what you transition into having to offer is a lot of intuition and understanding of the history of the field, the ability to see the bird's eye view of the projects, to pivot, to recognize opportunities when they come.
00:29:37.920 --> 00:29:41.920
I think it is really hard when that transition happens.
00:29:41.920 --> 00:29:43.680
It can be very emotionally hard.
00:29:43.680 --> 00:29:50.000
Like a silly example, but a reality of my work is when I was in college, I learned how to program in C.
00:29:50.000 --> 00:29:51.839
I'm a very good C programmer.
00:29:51.839 --> 00:30:00.160
I did a lot of Perl, which now it's kind of silly to think back that we there was a period where we all thought Perl was the next language before Python was really popular.
00:30:00.160 --> 00:30:05.039
I'm like a B plus, maybe B minus, actually, Python programmer.
00:30:05.039 --> 00:30:08.640
Python 2B plus programmer, Python 3 B minus programmer.
00:30:08.640 --> 00:30:18.000
But while I might not be able to actively debug my students' code the way I would like, I still have a lot of intuition when I look at the output to say, okay, I think there's a bug here.
00:30:18.000 --> 00:30:19.759
Or okay, I think this makes sense.
00:30:20.160 --> 00:30:24.799
And some ways that might actually be better because you don't have to get mired in the details.
00:30:25.119 --> 00:30:26.319
Yeah, I think so.
00:30:26.319 --> 00:30:30.799
And yeah, I think just understanding that transition is coming is important.
00:30:30.799 --> 00:30:43.440
I also think a joy for me of being an academic is the multifaceted nature of the career and that you get to choose to lean into different parts of it at different times, especially post-tenure.
00:30:43.440 --> 00:31:02.400
And so I think the other piece of advice is in the beginning, it does feel like you have to kind of do it all, but you also can have seasons, you can have a few years where you really focus on service in your field and grant writing, or where you become more reflective, or where you totally pivot in a new direction, or where you decide to lean into teaching or something, right?
00:31:02.400 --> 00:31:04.240
So all these things can happen.
00:31:04.240 --> 00:31:08.000
And I think that's really special.
00:31:08.000 --> 00:31:11.440
I don't know another career, but I think we're very lucky.
00:31:12.000 --> 00:31:16.319
I often think that there's a lot of similarities between science and art.
00:31:16.319 --> 00:31:20.640
There's a lot of creativity, and in some ways, that is a characteristic of art.
00:31:20.640 --> 00:31:29.839
Like you're used to seeing artists say, okay, now I'm doing this project, and I have my installation, I have my exhibit, and then I'm gonna do a totally different project.
00:31:29.839 --> 00:31:32.160
And we're used to that from artists.
00:31:32.160 --> 00:31:40.319
But while that is happening, like you described for scientists, the perception is not of that for scientists, even though that's kind of what we do.
00:31:40.640 --> 00:31:46.960
Yeah, and I love that you say that because actually my husband's family has a lot of artists, painters and photographers and poets.
00:31:46.960 --> 00:31:52.640
And it's been really interesting to me to talk to them about similarities in the way we do our work.
00:31:52.640 --> 00:31:55.440
Because there is this mandate for creative innovation, right?
00:31:55.440 --> 00:31:59.599
And we're all trying to be creative and bring something new to the conversation in our field.
00:31:59.599 --> 00:32:06.160
But there's also a business side to it and a learning side to it, a craft piece to it.
00:32:06.160 --> 00:32:08.400
There's a networking piece to it.
00:32:08.400 --> 00:32:10.799
And I think there are a lot of similarities.
00:32:11.119 --> 00:32:12.640
There's a self-promotion piece.
00:32:12.799 --> 00:32:13.680
Yeah, exactly.
00:32:13.680 --> 00:32:14.079
Right.
00:32:14.079 --> 00:32:15.680
We all need to do it, right?
00:32:15.680 --> 00:32:16.079
Right.
00:32:16.079 --> 00:32:26.559
And, you know, with lots of disciplines, but I think with these two in particular, it's a mistake to think that being a scientist just means going to your desk and like doing science every day is so many other things.
00:32:26.559 --> 00:32:35.279
But trying to keep that at the center and accepting that it's going to change over time, I think is that's probably the biggest piece of advice.
00:32:35.279 --> 00:32:39.759
The other piece of ad I don't know, it's not advice, but it's an observation.
00:32:39.759 --> 00:32:54.799
I think one thing that really helped me in my career and my family, my parents, but I do see shifting a lot is academia does still have this reality that you need to go where the jobs are.
00:32:54.799 --> 00:32:58.799
And I was lucky that I was willing to live anywhere.
00:32:58.799 --> 00:33:01.200
Like any college town seemed great to me.
00:33:01.200 --> 00:33:03.759
I would have been very happy in lots and lots of places.
00:33:03.759 --> 00:33:10.640
Seeing my parents move to a new country and they had lived in Chapel Hill, in Athens, Georgia, then they settled in Sacramento.
00:33:10.640 --> 00:33:13.279
Seeing that, I felt like, oh, I could move anywhere.
00:33:13.279 --> 00:33:19.359
And that's one thing I see in students today, and I can understand it's socially more of a challenge in our country today.
00:33:19.359 --> 00:33:21.519
Everybody doesn't necessarily want to live everywhere.
00:33:21.519 --> 00:33:28.000
So that is something that I think makes an academic career a little challenging if you're not willing to move wherever the work could take you.
00:33:28.240 --> 00:33:28.400
Yeah.
00:33:28.640 --> 00:33:31.839
But I think universities can be great places wherever they're situated.
00:33:32.319 --> 00:33:36.240
Yeah, and there are also opportunities that are not academic.
00:33:36.240 --> 00:33:36.720
Yes.
00:33:36.720 --> 00:33:45.920
Classic university academic that can be very great careers as well for people of science backgrounds who want to stay where they are.
00:33:45.920 --> 00:33:47.519
Need to stay where they are.
00:33:47.519 --> 00:33:52.160
So you talked about your husband and you both being academics.
00:33:52.160 --> 00:33:53.680
How do you balance that?
00:33:53.680 --> 00:33:55.359
And you also have three children.
00:33:55.359 --> 00:33:57.519
How do you balance that?
00:33:57.519 --> 00:34:04.960
What are your life hacks for getting through the day, even?
00:34:05.680 --> 00:34:06.000
Yeah.
00:34:06.000 --> 00:34:10.559
Well, first, we are just so, so lucky that we're in the same institution.
00:34:10.559 --> 00:34:14.079
We can walk to work, our kids can walk to school.
00:34:14.079 --> 00:34:20.800
Our youngest is still in daycare, but it our life has a very small geographic radius, which is incredible for us.
00:34:20.800 --> 00:34:27.360
Jeremy and I, we can't really do this by design because we're in different departments, but we've been here for 15 years.
00:34:27.360 --> 00:34:30.880
And I think only one semester, maybe two, we taught at the same time.
00:34:30.880 --> 00:34:38.480
So when push comes to shove, if children are sick, we can still show up and teach our classes, which is incredible for us.
00:34:38.480 --> 00:34:49.280
And I think we benefit so much from the fact that we have been able to end up tenured at the same institution because we talk about a lot of things.
00:34:49.280 --> 00:34:53.760
We both influence each other a lot in terms of our research and the way we see the world.
00:34:53.760 --> 00:35:00.239
But it's also fun to be able to talk about each other's departments and ask for advice and say, oh, I'm experiencing this in this class.
00:35:00.239 --> 00:35:01.039
What would you do?
00:35:01.039 --> 00:35:03.760
And it's really fun and really helpful for us.
00:35:03.760 --> 00:35:05.360
So we're very lucky.
00:35:05.360 --> 00:35:10.239
And it really makes life more vibrant that we share this journey together.
00:35:10.239 --> 00:35:16.239
I also just find his work really inspiring because I could not be in a book field.
00:35:16.239 --> 00:35:17.760
I like I hate papers.
00:35:17.760 --> 00:35:21.119
By the time I submit them, I need to let go of them, let them go out in the world.
00:35:21.119 --> 00:35:30.000
And I sort of love the idea of scientific publishing to me, is again, it's like contributing to a conversation, doing the best work you can in that moment.
00:35:30.000 --> 00:35:40.639
But as I often say to my lab, in some sense, my hope is like our work becomes obsolete in five to ten years because it means that the field has moved on and we learned something new, right?
00:35:40.639 --> 00:35:43.440
It's like we did our best, but now we know something new.
00:35:43.440 --> 00:35:45.840
Um, whereas I don't, I could not write a book.
00:35:45.840 --> 00:35:47.039
I would not be able to do it.
00:35:47.039 --> 00:35:50.159
I would not be able to let go of it and feel like it was done.
00:35:50.159 --> 00:35:53.840
So he really influences my writing a lot, which is wonderful.
00:35:53.840 --> 00:35:58.480
In terms of life hacks, well, you know, they say spending is a reflection of values.
00:35:58.480 --> 00:36:00.159
We value childcare a lot.
00:36:00.159 --> 00:36:06.239
Uh we have always had wonderful babysitters from when our oldest, who's now almost 13, was three months old.
00:36:06.239 --> 00:36:07.599
We started getting babysitters.
00:36:07.599 --> 00:36:09.119
We did infant daycare.
00:36:09.119 --> 00:36:10.559
We love our daycare.
00:36:10.559 --> 00:36:13.599
This is our last year at our daycare after almost 13 years there.
00:36:13.599 --> 00:36:15.119
It's gonna be a big transition.
00:36:15.119 --> 00:36:19.039
Yeah, before care, aftercare sitters who pick up and drop off.
00:36:19.039 --> 00:36:27.199
We've been very lucky to have really wonderful people in our life and wonderful daycare institutions and schools that our kids have thrived at.
00:36:27.599 --> 00:36:38.639
I like the way you frame that is that it reflects your values because you do when you invest in childcare, you're watching the money come in and then watching it go back out the door.
00:36:38.639 --> 00:36:50.159
But it, as you said, sort of reflects your value of it's really important for you to be getting to do this work and you get to go to work every day, and that's what it enables you to do, right?
00:36:50.559 --> 00:37:00.960
Yeah, and I think that there was a moment, I don't know how old my oldest was, but let's say she was eight or nine, and I was going to work for a dinner or something.
00:37:00.960 --> 00:37:04.559
We were home and then I was heading back out, and she said, You're always working.
00:37:04.559 --> 00:37:09.280
And I said, you know, I love my job and I'm so lucky.
00:37:09.280 --> 00:37:11.119
I'm so lucky that I get to do it.
00:37:11.119 --> 00:37:15.199
In that moment, I was able to not give in to guilt or something.
00:37:15.199 --> 00:37:18.800
And and I I remember her thinking, like, oh, that's kind of cool.
00:37:18.800 --> 00:37:27.039
And I think it is such a privilege to have a job that feels exciting and rejuvenating, and I just want my kids to see that.
00:37:27.039 --> 00:37:31.199
And sometimes that means having them see that I have to be somewhere else, right?
00:37:31.199 --> 00:37:36.480
And to know that there are other people who love them and can help care for them as well.
00:37:36.480 --> 00:37:40.400
But now it's also really fun to be able to sometimes take them with me.
00:37:40.400 --> 00:37:45.519
We're lucky at Brown, we have a really incredible dependent care travel fund benefit.
00:37:45.519 --> 00:37:59.679
So um, yeah, I've taken my kids to amazing conferences with me or taken them when I've given seminars, and then maybe I'll add on a couple days if we're in a fun city like Nashville or LA or something, and we'll get to do something together.
00:37:59.679 --> 00:38:03.840
But they'll come to my talks or come to my sessions, and I really love that.
00:38:04.159 --> 00:38:08.320
One thing that I tell my kids sometimes is, yeah, I'm going to work.
00:38:08.320 --> 00:38:24.079
And one of the things I want to share with you is that I am because I also have two girls, and that I'm doing this so that I can set an example for you, that you also can do what it is you want to do, and that you don't feel like you have barriers.
00:38:24.719 --> 00:38:32.239
I'm always telling my kids my hope for them is that they get the privilege to have a job they love spending time at.
00:38:32.239 --> 00:38:39.039
And that it's a joy to feel good on Monday morning and feel good going home Friday evening.
00:38:39.039 --> 00:38:42.239
Sometimes my husband and I joke because of the three kids.
00:38:42.239 --> 00:38:43.440
Our kids are pretty spread out.
00:38:43.440 --> 00:38:46.559
So we have 12 and a half, nine, and four and a half.
00:38:46.559 --> 00:38:53.119
And when we get to work in the morning, you know, it's three kids, three different schools, everyone's fed, everyone's dressed.
00:38:53.119 --> 00:38:55.760
I feel like we ran a military campaign.
00:38:55.760 --> 00:39:03.199
And it means when I come to work and sit down at my desk, it's like, oh, this wonderful, like we accomplished something and now I get to work.
00:39:03.199 --> 00:39:07.519
And I do think that has been a very positive feedback loop in my life.
00:39:07.519 --> 00:39:12.880
The joy of the quiet of work, which is different from the wonderful chaos that we love at home.
00:39:12.880 --> 00:39:21.119
One of my favorite life hacks, which I never thought about, is that I love to cook, but getting food on the table every day.
00:39:21.119 --> 00:39:22.079
We eat pretty early.
00:39:22.079 --> 00:39:23.280
We eat at 5 30.
00:39:23.280 --> 00:39:26.239
So when everyone's home, a dinner has to be on the table right away.
00:39:26.239 --> 00:39:28.639
I often cook dinner first thing in the morning.
00:39:28.639 --> 00:39:36.559
So I'll get up at like 5:45 or 6, so I'll get ready, and then I'll make um Indian food or pasta pasta sauce.
00:39:36.559 --> 00:39:42.320
The house will smell like garlic and onions and stuff, but it'll all be ready so that in the evening we're ready to eat.
00:39:42.320 --> 00:39:48.239
And that's something I never thought I would have to do, but it turns out to be great and make things a lot easier.
00:39:48.239 --> 00:39:54.480
And sometimes I can also get some of the food in for lunch that day, so it can it can help.
00:39:54.800 --> 00:40:00.639
So how do you draw boundaries on what you will and won't say yes to?
00:40:02.800 --> 00:40:04.960
That's changed a lot over time.
00:40:04.960 --> 00:40:11.440
I used to say yes to everything, everything, everything, everything, which was great early in my career.
00:40:11.440 --> 00:40:19.920
Like I said, you know, earlier, I think I got a lot of opportunities and saying yes to them helped me a lot in my career.
00:40:19.920 --> 00:40:23.440
It took me a long time to feel like I could say no to things.
00:40:23.440 --> 00:40:25.039
I have a few approaches.
00:40:25.039 --> 00:40:28.159
I did for a while when I became a center director.
00:40:28.159 --> 00:40:33.199
I started working with an executive coach, which helped me think a lot about saying no to stuff.
00:40:33.199 --> 00:40:39.679
Um, so she was sort of a sounding board, and I could say, should I like even granularly in the moment, should I say yes to this?
00:40:39.679 --> 00:40:45.599
When I was a pre-tenure, I used to just use the phrase, I have to ask my chair, even if I didn't ask.
00:40:45.599 --> 00:40:48.960
And then that just creating that pause was helpful.
00:40:48.960 --> 00:40:51.119
What if it was your chair asking you to do something?
00:40:51.119 --> 00:40:51.840
I know, right?
00:40:51.840 --> 00:40:52.239
Yeah.
00:40:52.239 --> 00:40:55.440
No, then I would say yes, probably.
00:40:55.440 --> 00:41:04.719
But now I think I have a lot more of a sense of the opportunity cost that saying yes now means.
00:41:04.719 --> 00:41:07.679
And also, I guess the flip side of that, right?
00:41:07.679 --> 00:41:10.719
So when I was younger, I was worried about this.
00:41:10.719 --> 00:41:12.800
If I say no, I'm never gonna get asked again.
00:41:12.800 --> 00:41:14.800
And now I know I will get asked again.
00:41:14.800 --> 00:41:17.519
In fact, I will definitely get asked again.
00:41:17.519 --> 00:41:23.519
And so it feels like less of this trade-off of it's either yes now or no forever.
00:41:23.519 --> 00:41:24.400
It's not.
00:41:24.400 --> 00:41:31.519
And I wish I had learned that earlier, that these opportunities weren't just gonna manifest once and then disappear forever.
00:41:31.519 --> 00:41:33.599
But that helps me a lot.
00:41:33.599 --> 00:41:43.119
And I don't have any hard and fast rules around, you know, I'll only travel this number of days or I'll only do this many evening things.
00:41:43.119 --> 00:41:45.840
We kind of just take it season by season.
00:41:45.840 --> 00:41:51.679
But now I'm also in a place where my health, the family comes first.
00:41:51.679 --> 00:41:54.960
If I have to cancel something or reschedule, I'll do it.
00:41:54.960 --> 00:41:57.360
And again, realizing that that's okay, right?
00:41:57.360 --> 00:42:12.960
That you can have a seminar scheduled somewhere and then something comes up, like a medical procedure, and maybe it's routine, but you still want to be there to support a family member, and you can push it out six months and it's fine, and no one's gonna be upset, or you can cancel the sky's not gonna fall.
00:42:12.960 --> 00:42:14.239
The sky's not gonna fall.
00:42:14.239 --> 00:42:24.000
Being there for your kids' play is really important, but also trusting that there isn't gonna be a single decision that's gonna like irreparably harm my career.
00:42:24.000 --> 00:42:28.639
I definitely worried about that somehow early in my career, and I don't as much now.
00:42:28.800 --> 00:42:33.119
Um probably was more important earlier in your career than it is now.
00:42:33.119 --> 00:42:34.159
Maybe so.
00:42:34.159 --> 00:42:34.960
Maybe so.
00:42:34.960 --> 00:42:40.960
I know that you're an avid knitter, so you can talk about that, but also what do you do for fun?
00:42:40.960 --> 00:42:43.199
What do you do to treat yourself?
00:42:43.519 --> 00:42:44.480
Yeah, a lot.
00:42:44.480 --> 00:42:45.840
But knitting is a big one.
00:42:45.840 --> 00:42:47.199
I do love to knit.
00:42:47.199 --> 00:42:52.000
I go to definitely one, maybe two knitting circles a week.
00:42:52.000 --> 00:42:57.920
I have friends, actually, three, um, three sort of knitting blocks on my calendar.
00:42:57.920 --> 00:42:59.920
I also work out a lot.
00:42:59.920 --> 00:43:05.599
I started working out with a personal trainer just over a year ago, which has been an amazing addition to my life.
00:43:05.599 --> 00:43:07.920
I take a Pilates class each week.
00:43:07.920 --> 00:43:09.519
I do personal training twice a week.
00:43:09.519 --> 00:43:10.880
I run twice a week.
00:43:10.880 --> 00:43:12.400
I run with a colleague.
00:43:12.400 --> 00:43:17.119
I have two colleagues I run with, and that's really fun because we talk about work while we're running.
00:43:17.119 --> 00:43:18.480
We ask each other for advice.
00:43:18.480 --> 00:43:22.000
We co-advise some people too, so we'll talk about them while we're running.
00:43:22.000 --> 00:43:23.840
But that's really enjoyable.
00:43:23.840 --> 00:43:27.440
I love to cook and bake as well.
00:43:27.440 --> 00:43:32.639
And yeah, otherwise, I would say mostly hang out with the family.
00:43:32.639 --> 00:43:35.119
We have a dog, spending time walking the dog.
00:43:35.119 --> 00:43:37.280
Yeah, that's a lot of extracurricular activities.
00:43:37.519 --> 00:43:43.840
By my count, you're exercising quite a bit most days and going to a lot of knitting circles.
00:43:43.840 --> 00:43:45.599
How do you find time for all that?
00:43:45.599 --> 00:43:48.559
Well, I stepped down from administration.
00:43:48.960 --> 00:43:50.239
That helps a little bit.
00:43:50.239 --> 00:43:56.880
But yeah, I think on the one hand, time is the only zero sum game, right?
00:43:56.880 --> 00:43:58.719
In some existential sense.
00:43:58.719 --> 00:44:12.639
I think in a Last few years thinking about that and just thinking about what I really value, I try to touch on everything I value as much as I can over the course of a few days.
00:44:12.639 --> 00:44:18.320
And so what that means is the biggest priority in my calendar at work is my time with my trainees.
00:44:18.320 --> 00:44:21.760
They come first and I want to make sure I'm spending a lot of time with them.
00:44:21.760 --> 00:44:24.559
I have multiple meetings with all of them.
00:44:24.559 --> 00:44:29.199
Usually there's like a collaboration or a project-based meeting and then a shorter, like one-on-one meeting.
00:44:29.199 --> 00:44:31.280
We have lab meeting as well.
00:44:31.280 --> 00:44:35.679
Now more administrative meetings are shorter, maybe less frequent.
00:44:35.679 --> 00:44:44.079
I used to, if I was meeting with an undergraduate concentration, what we call majors at Brown Advisee, I used to set aside an hour and now it's like 20 minutes.
00:44:44.079 --> 00:44:45.920
I know we can do this quickly.
00:44:45.920 --> 00:44:55.199
So yeah, feeling okay pushing out meetings that are less key to the research is important and constraining some of the more urgent things.
00:44:55.199 --> 00:44:58.239
Like now I've been lucky, my teaching is pretty stable.
00:44:58.239 --> 00:45:00.320
I've taught the same courses for a while.
00:45:00.320 --> 00:45:02.639
So my prep is pretty low.
00:45:02.639 --> 00:45:05.440
So just not worrying about taking up too much time with that.
00:45:05.440 --> 00:45:07.360
And babysitters are a part of this.
00:45:07.360 --> 00:45:21.519
Both Jeremy and I kind of agree that okay, there are going to be certain mornings or certain evenings where one of us is at home, the other one's doing this other thing that's really important for them personally, and that makes us better partners, better people, and better parents.
00:45:21.519 --> 00:45:28.079
So we've just really transitioned into helping each other take time for what we value and then keeping time for ourselves too.
00:45:28.480 --> 00:45:40.480
I think implicit in what you're talking about is it's a really key lesson that not everybody implements, which is really taking your calendar and dividing it up and doing it by the things that you find most important.
00:45:40.480 --> 00:45:47.840
And that is a skill that is something that may or may not come naturally to people, but it's certainly a learnable skill.
00:45:48.320 --> 00:45:55.119
Yeah, I mean, I think the thing I still struggle with a lot with that is it's a very learnable skill.
00:45:55.119 --> 00:46:01.119
What I struggle with is keeping some time free for just me to think, me to read.
00:46:01.119 --> 00:46:10.400
So that tends to come less frequently than I would like, or maybe sometimes more in the evening after the kids are in bed, which is not my best thinking time.
00:46:10.400 --> 00:46:13.199
But that also, again, it's a season, right?
00:46:13.199 --> 00:46:16.400
So maybe during this semester it's a little more that way.
00:46:16.400 --> 00:46:18.880
And then next semester I'll reprioritize.
00:46:18.880 --> 00:46:31.440
But yeah, time blocking is really, really important and something I came to only in the last couple of years, but it's definitely, definitely made my days feel more fulfilling.
00:46:31.760 --> 00:46:32.079
Yeah.
00:46:32.079 --> 00:46:35.519
And then the things you didn't get done, you decided that you weren't prioritizing them.
00:46:35.519 --> 00:46:36.639
Yeah.
00:46:36.639 --> 00:46:37.360
Yeah.
00:46:37.360 --> 00:46:38.000
Okay.
00:46:38.000 --> 00:46:45.760
So our last question, which we ask everybody, is if you were not a scientist, what would you do with your time?
00:46:47.679 --> 00:46:55.360
This is a hard one for me because there is a part of me that would love to like run a pie bakery.
00:46:55.360 --> 00:47:08.480
So I just really love baking and cooking and sometimes yearn for, I mean, I guess I do do a fair amount of crafting, but working with my hands or working on my feet is something I sometimes yearn for.
00:47:08.480 --> 00:47:16.079
But I honestly, the truth is if I weren't a scientist, I think I would be an academic in a different discipline.
00:47:16.079 --> 00:47:20.960
I used to think I wanted to be an economist when I was younger or a legal scholar.
00:47:20.960 --> 00:47:35.760
I think that the chance to just continue to get to be a student in many ways and to learn and also to teach, to mentor, and to be in a long game.
00:47:35.760 --> 00:47:49.440
That's what I love about academia, because I think one of the things that drew me to it is basically from the moment I started grad school, partly because of how population genetics is as a field, but partly a big part because of the way Mark structured the lab.
00:47:49.440 --> 00:47:53.840
I felt like I worked mostly for myself and was really independent.
00:47:53.840 --> 00:47:56.880
And I could push on projects as hard as I wanted.
00:47:56.880 --> 00:48:03.039
I could push past what probably a supervisor in for sure in industry would be like, no, stop.
00:48:03.039 --> 00:48:04.400
This is not going anywhere.
00:48:04.400 --> 00:48:07.519
And I think we really need that in society.
00:48:07.519 --> 00:48:13.519
We need the kind of long game of academia for innovation, just like we need industry for innovation.
00:48:13.519 --> 00:48:17.280
There are just different time horizons that make innovation possible.
00:48:17.280 --> 00:48:28.719
And I think I like that the freedom that you get when you're not trying to meet a quarterly bottom line or something like that of really trying to approach problems in different ways and try a lot of things that might fail.
00:48:28.719 --> 00:48:32.159
So, yeah, that's my an interesting answer.
00:48:32.960 --> 00:48:37.199
That's a pretty awesome answer because it means that you love what you do.
00:48:37.199 --> 00:48:38.480
I do.
00:48:38.480 --> 00:48:40.000
Yeah, that's pretty great.
00:48:40.000 --> 00:48:41.599
All right.
00:48:41.599 --> 00:48:43.280
Well, thank you so much, Sohini.
00:48:43.280 --> 00:48:47.119
This has been really a great conversation, and thanks so much for taking the time.
00:48:47.599 --> 00:48:48.159
Oh thank you.
00:48:48.159 --> 00:48:50.239
It's been really fun.
00:48:50.239 --> 00:48:53.760
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00:48:53.760 --> 00:48:57.679
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00:48:57.679 --> 00:49:01.039
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00:49:12.079 --> 00:49:15.039
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00:49:16.639 --> 00:49:22.000
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00:49:25.679 --> 00:49:36.480
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00:49:36.480 --> 00:49:44.960
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00:49:44.960 --> 00:49:46.719
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