Academic motherhood – what happens when you can't make it happen?

We need more openness about age‐related infertility as it is a particular risk for many female scientists in academia who feel that they have to delay having children. Subject Categories: S&S: Careers & Training, Genetics, Gene Therapy & Genetic Disease

Balancing motherhood and a career in academic research is a formidable challenge, and there is substantial literature available on the many difficulties that scientists and mothers face (Kamerlin, 2016). Unsurprisingly, these challenges are very off‐putting for many female scientists, causing us to keep delaying motherhood while pursuing our hypercompetitive academic careers with arguments “I’ll wait until I have a faculty position”, “I’ll wait until I have tenure”, and “I’ll wait until I’m a full professor”. The problem is that we frequently end up postponing getting children based on this logic until the choice is no longer ours: Fertility unfortunately does decline rapidly over the age of 35, notwithstanding other potential causes of infertility.This column is therefore not about the challenges of motherhood itself, but rather another situation frequently faced by women in academia, and one that is still not discussed openly: What if you want to have children and cannot, either because biology is not on your side, or because you waited too long, or both? My inspiration for writing this article is a combination of my own experiences battling infertility in my path to motherhood, and an excellent piece by Dr. Arghavan Salles for Time Magazine, outlining the difficulties she faced having spent her most fertile years training to be a surgeon, just to find out that it might be too late for motherhood when she came out the other side of her training (Salles, 2019). Unfortunately, as academic work models remain unsupportive of parenthood, despite significant improvements, this is not a problem faced only by physicians, but also one faced by both myself and many other women I have spoken to.I want to start by sharing my own story, because it is a bit more unusual. I have a very rare (~ 1 in 125,000 in women (Laitinen et al, 2011)) congenital endocrine disorder, Kallmann syndrome (KS) (Boehm et al, 2015); as a result, my body is unable to produce its own sex hormones and I don’t have a natural cycle. It doesn’t take much background in science to realize that this has a major negative impact on my fertility—individuals with KS can typically only conceive with the help of fertility treatment. It took me a long time to get a correct diagnosis, but even before that, in my twenties, I was being told that it is extremely unlikely I will ever have biological children. I didn’t realize back then that KS in women is a very treatable form of infertility, and that fertility treatments are progressing forward in leaps and bounds. As I was also adamant that I didn’t even want to be a mother but rather focus on my career, this was not something that caused me too much consternation at the time.In parallel, like Dr. Salles, I spent my most fertile years chasing the academic career path and kept finding—in my mind—good reasons to postpone even trying for a child. There is really never a good time to have a baby in academia (I tell any of my junior colleagues who ask to not plan their families around “if only X…” because there will always be a new X). Like many, I naïvely believed that in vitro fertilization (IVF) would be the magic bullet that can solve all my fertility problems. I accordingly thought it safe to pursue first a faculty position, then tenure, then a full professorship, as I will have to have fertility treatment anyhow. In my late twenties, my doctors suggested that I consider fertility preservation, for example, through egg freezing. At the time, however, the technology was both extravagantly expensive and unreliable and I brushed it off as unnecessary: when the time comes, I would just do IVF. In reality, the IVF success rates for women in their mid‐to‐late 30s are typically only ~ 40% per egg retrieval, and this only gets worse with age, something many women are not aware of when planning parenthood and careers. It is also an extremely strenuous process both physically and emotionally, as one is exposed to massive doses of hormones, multiple daily injections, tremendous financial cost, and general worries about whether it will work or not.Then reality hit. What I believed would be an easy journey turned out to be extremely challenging, and took almost three years, seven rounds of treatment, and two late pregnancy losses. While the driving factor for my infertility remained my endocrine disorder, my age played an increasing role in problems responding to treatment, and it was very nearly too late for me, despite being younger than 40. Despite these challenges, we are among the lucky ones and there are many others who are not.I am generally a very open person, and as I started the IVF process, I talked freely about this with female colleagues. Because I was open about my own predicament, colleagues from across the world, who had never mentioned it to me before, opened up and told me their own children were conceived through IVF. However, many colleagues also shared stories of trying, and how they are for various—not infrequently age‐related—reasons unable to have children, even after fertility treatment. These experiences are so common in academia, much more than you could ever imagine, but because of the societal taboos that still surround infertility and pregnancy and infant loss, they are not discussed openly. This means that many academic women are unprepared for the challenges surrounding infertility, particularly with advanced age. In addition, the silence surrounding this issue means that women lose out on what would have otherwise been a natural support network when facing a challenging situation, which can make you feel tremendously alone.There is no right or wrong in family planning decisions, and having children young, delaying having children or deciding to not have children at all are all equally valid choices. However, we do need more openness about the challenges of infertility, and we need to bring this discussion out of the shadows. My goal with this essay is to contribute to breaking the silence, so that academics of both genders can make informed choices, whether about the timing of when to build a family or about exploring fertility preservation—which in itself is not a guaranteed insurance policy—as relevant to their personal choices. Ultimately, we need an academic system that is supportive of all forms of family choices, and one that creates an environment compatible with parenthood so that so many academics do not feel pressured to delay parenthood until it might be too late.     

You are the most valuable reagent in the lab: mental health before and during the pandemic

No one maps out their tenure as a postdoc anticipating a life-altering tragedy. But mental health crises of all kinds affect academic trainees and staff at similar or higher levels than the general public. While the mental health resources available to trainees are often set by healthcare providers, all levels of university leadership can work to remove material and immaterial obstacles that render such resources out of reach. I describe how access to care via telemedicine helped me following a loss in my family.

Over the years, my siblings and close friends have sought mental health resources like therapy, psychoanalysis, or psychiatry, so I loosely understood their benefits. When I was a PhD student I went to therapy briefly, but my counselor and I decided I could do without it. Since I started my postdoc, stress manifested in some new ways but I managed it well with my usual coping strategies and support. That changed one bright December morning in 2019 while I was preparing for our weekly lab meeting. My phone rang indicating a call from my father, whom I had spoken to the night before to celebrate the news of my nephew’s birth. But the voice on the phone was that of a family friend, telling me that my father had died overnight of an undiagnosed heart condition. In the moment I couldn’t even understand what was happening, saying over and over, “but I talked to him last night.” Soon I was sitting at home, dazed, on a string of tearful calls with family and friends.I often read words like “lifted” or “buoyed” to describe the stabilizing support of a network of loved ones. In my case this network was tethering me to reality over the next few weeks, preventing me from spinning off the Earth’s surface in a storm of sorrow and anxiety. The trauma also took a strange physical form and convinced me that I was suffering from a cardiac condition of my own. I had a panic attack during which I went to urgent care convinced my own heart was about to give way. Night after night these physical symptoms prevented me from sleeping.Graced by many loving connections with my siblings, my boyfriend, and close friends, I was actually weathering the process as well as one can. My PI gave me a firm directive to take as much time off as I needed. These were two key elements early in my healing process: a supportive network and an understanding advisor. The third was getting professional help, which I soon realized I needed. Even if I felt OK one day, I didn’t trust that I’d be OK the next. My grief formed too thick and too broad a landscape for me to navigate without help.Deciding to seek mental health resources and realizing that one needs them are often the hardest parts. Connecting with those resources once the decision has been made should be as simple as possible. I called a mental health number, and a triage counselor noted my therapy needs and verified my insurance. She asked what times and locations I preferred and then searched for an open appointment with a therapist who accepted my insurance. She also informed me that my coverage allowed 12 sessions with no copay, which was a pleasant surprise. The therapist who agreed to see me had very few openings, in part because this all happened in December—the holidays are especially busy for therapists. I was aiming for a time after normal working hours, or in the morning before I would head to lab, but none of those times were available. I didn’t like interrupting my workday to trot off to therapy. Taking a long break once a week meant I couldn’t run experiments or mentor my student during that time. But I made the sacrifice because my highest priority was getting the help I needed. There was no shortcut. Prioritizing mental health over lab work is tough for researchers, and I would never have accepted that kind of weekly disruption before my dad’s passing. But as a wonderful mentor of mine used to say, “You are the most valuable reagent in the lab.” She wasn’t describing mental health at the time, but the phrase now provided a guiding principle for my recovery. My first few sessions were on Tuesdays at 2:00 pm.The afternoon break turned out to be less disruptive than I had feared, because I had recently come back to the lab and was working short days. Had she asked, I would have told my PI where I was on Tuesday afternoons, but she wasn’t normally abreast of my daily schedule, so I didn’t seek her approval beforehand. Coordinating experiments with lab members thankfully wasn’t an issue because my work was largely independent; I simply let lab members know that I’d would be out of the lab for a bit on those days.The weeks went by, and the benefits of therapy accrued, helping me in large and small ways as I grieved. In mid-March of 2020, my therapist followed public health guidelines and asked all her clients to transition to remote sessions. While this was easy and sensible, it was still a little disappointing. Therapists are professional empaths, among many other things, and doing away with the physical presence and exchange with her was a blow. Yet therapy via video felt less odd simply because most of my social interactions were now virtual. Thankfully I didn’t have to move out of state for the lockdown (as did many students living in campus housing), which meant I could stay with the same therapist without any insurance complications.A few weeks into lockdown, I asked my therapist whether we had reached the limit of my 12 sessions without a copay. She replied with the good news that my insurance provider had waived all copays for mental health costs due to the pandemic. By that time therapy had generated a platform and an outlet to explore areas of my grief beyond the trauma of my father’s passing. Without needing to weigh the costs and benefits of this resource, I saw my therapist for another 4 months. I slowly took stock of my upbringing in an unconventional family and the loss of my mother when I was 25 and waded through a series of difficult decisions regarding my father’s estate. My father’s death changed me at a depth that is untouched by any amount of therapy or treatment. I’m not “healed”: I feel aged, more brittle, and a little ground down compared with who I had been. But therapy guided me through the worst of my grief, past the acute trauma to help me grasp what I was going through.Since the pandemic began, the number of people reporting increased stress or mental health issues has steadily increased (information on the impact of COVID-19 measures on mental health: https://www.apa.org/workforce/publications/depression-anxiety-coronavirus.pdf) (also see Mental health resources for trainees). I am fortunate to have affordable health insurance and the support from my lab and my department. The ease of finding my institution’s phone number for mental health resources was itself an important benefit. I share these pieces of my story with humility and understanding that not everyone enjoys the privileges that I do and the knowledge that everyone weathers life’s tragedies in their own way. It is not lost on me that some benefits stemmed from a policy change made by a private insurance provider. The provider made the right decision to waive copays, freeing me from having to choose between cost and my mental health needs. Yet had I been a student who had to move out of state due to COVID-19, access to mental health resources might have been disrupted or cut off. The need for reduced out-of-pocket costs for healthcare is known and needs no repetition, but the benefits of telehealth should be a low-cost component of health plans offered to students and staff (information on telehealth recommendations: https://www.apaservices.org/advocacy/news/congress-patient-telehealth?_ga=2.231013471.1538013741.1619359426-1228006513.1619359425 and http://www.apaservices.org/practice/advocacy/state/leadership/telebehavioral-health-policies.pdf?_ga=2.3385904.1067518037.1620039082-1228006513.1619359425.I’m not a cloud of emotions attached to a pair of good pipetting hands, I’m a human who is choosing to spend my time doing research. This observation is easy to repeat, by trainees as much as by faculty and administrators, but much harder to act upon in the midst of conflicting priorities. Consider my story a success: Because I could access the resources I needed, I was able to prioritize my mental health in the midst of my ambitious research program even during the lockdown.MEET THE AUTHORI have been a postdoc in Stefani Spranger’s lab at MIT for 4 years. Supported by an Irvington Fellowship from the Cancer Research Institute, my work examines the behaviors of dendritic cells in tumors that contribute to productive or unproductive anti-tumor immune responses. My doctoral work examined modes of multicellular invasion controlled by the actin cytoskeleton with Margaret Gardel at the University of Chicago. Earlier I was a lab technician with Thea Tlsty at the University of California, San Francisco, which followed a bachelor’s degree in biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I serve on the Committee for Students and Postdocs at the American Society for Cell Biology, where I chair the Outreach Subcommittee.     

Inclusion: an individual pursuit requiring organization-level investment to sustain it

If this was not happening in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, I imagine that I would be speaking these words instead of writing them on my laptop. Even so, I am so jazzed for this opportunity! No word or phrase describes what I am feeling in this moment in receiving the 2021 American Society for Cell Biology Prize for Excellence in Inclusivity. It is certainly an honor to be recognized in this way. I am grateful to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute for awarding me additional resources to keep on keeping on. My approach to finding the connection between people and their science certainly could use the monetary support. Resources open doors. At the same time that I am grateful for the attention, I am not exactly sure what to do with the spotlight. Importantly, there are a host of other folks out there also doing amazing things who have never been recognized. Let’s work to ensure that their contributions are supported, appreciated, and recognized. Instead of focusing the spotlight on me, I would rather redirect it to recognize my foundational influences. I also hope to encourage the need for institutional approaches beyond celebrating individual accomplishment.

O. A. Quintero‐CarmonaJo Rae Wright was my graduate advisor and the model for how I have tried to work with my students and colleagues to support their opportunities while also “doing science.” I wanted to start graduate school as soon as I could after graduating college, so after letting the Cell and Molecular Biology Program at Duke University know that I was accepting their offer, I started thumbing through their program booklet looking for labs with interesting research projects (a web presence wasn’t even really a thing for departments in 1996). I worked alphabetically and contacted a handful of labs one at a time to see whether anyone was willing to take on an early-rotation student. It was an unusual request for the way that the program had operated previously, and Jo Rae was the only person to agree to it. I don’t remember exactly, but she said something like, “We accepted you into the program, so I would be happy to host your first rotation.” The sense that I got was that, within the limits of her time and resources, she was willing to become my mentor because I needed one. She trusted the admissions process, so why not bring an eager student into the lab. I spent the summer settling in to the life of a graduate student—sort of.At first, I was bad at graduate school. I am curious about all sorts of things, which means I am also easily pulled in too many directions. In that first year of school I spent way too much time simply visiting other students in my cohort to see what it was that they were up to each day. I cannot imagine how distracting I must have been to them and probably extremely irritating to their PIs as well. If you were in Cell Biology at Duke in 1996–97, I am sincerely grateful that you tolerated my shenanigans. Where others might have taken me to task, Jo Rae looked for opportunities to redirect my energies more productively. She and another professor, Dan Kiehart, guided me toward participating in the Physiology Course at the Marine Biological Laboratory, where I learned what I needed to do to be a scientist in a way that would not have been possible otherwise. While there, I saw PIs working with students chasing the joy of discovery, and it felt like it was purely for the sake of a deeper understanding of biology and preparing the next generation of scientists to do the same. Resources gave us the liberty to focus on scientific discovery with minimal concern for where would be the highest profile place to publish. Although I acknowledge that the summer course environments may not be the most representative of the daily life of a scientist at a home institution, such an opportunity left a mark—I wanted to come as close as I could to emulating that environment when I got back to Duke and (eventually) when I had the chance to run a research group and teach students.Along the way, Jo Rae made sure to include me and my fellow lab mates in all aspects of the science. At national meetings she included us at every step, introducing us to her contemporaries and putting us in spaces where we would rub elbows with luminaries in the field. When we were in those environments, she made sure that I felt like a junior colleague. I cannot recall ever feeling like a “trainee.” Back home at Duke, I had opportunities to do everything that a scientist might do in addition to “sciencing.” Sure, I would write papers, contribute to grants, and be part of her review of papers. I was also encouraged to mentor undergraduates, teach, advocate for federal funding at the time of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) doubling, and plan events for Duke’s summer undergraduate research program, if I so chose. Similarly, when I expressed an interest in focusing on science with undergraduates, she was 100% on board with finding ways to combine my graduate school commitments with teaching and mentoring opportunities. Importantly, at a time when expressing interest in an “alternative career” was not always supported by faculty mentors, Jo Rae encouraged me to seek out only those potential postdoctoral mentors who would actively support my goals. Not only that, she went out of her way to find out what options I might have, which led to her learning about the NIH-funded Institutional Research and Academic Career Development Award postdoctoral programs in their first year of existence.In a sentence, because Jo Rae was 100% invested in including me in science by finding the framework that best suited my interests and potential, I grew into my success. This was a form of success that wasn’t decided by someone else; I had defined it for myself with Jo Rae serving as a true advisor in every sense of the word—she was in it for me. She helped to build the crucial foundations that helped me find the opportunities that matched my goals. As a result of her influence, I have also had the strength to make some critical, nontraditional choices along the way. Her mentorship style was tailored to each individual’s needs. She invested the time to figure out our strengths, and also learned which levers would motivate us to meet our potential. The members of her lab became successes because she helped all of us to both define success and achieve our own version of it. Such a personal approach is extremely powerful. Jo Rae passed away in 2012, and with her passing I lost the most important influence in my professional life. Duke University and the pulmonary physiology community lost an example for inclusive mentorship and a significant amount of capacity for such an approach. Since her passing, multiple awards have been established to honor Jo Rae’s legacy as an outstanding woman in science. I would argue that mentoring of junior colleagues may be a more significant legacy than her scientific output. Jo Rae is deserving of this award.Recognitions such as this one are an important way to amplify examples of what we often say we hope to achieve as a department, an institution, or a scientific society. However, if our focus is solely on the efforts of individuals, we are missing an opportunity. While I am humbled to be considered in the same league as the previous award recipients, we are each in our own way scrambling to do what we can while we can do it. When individuals have some positive outcomes, our institutions and organizations will celebrate what these folks have done as they have played some role in supporting these opportunities. Although what we do is worthwhile, it is really hard to do it successfully and sustainably without proper institutional support. We each face hinderances that can undermine the work that we want to take on. Burnout is a real outcome of doing the work that we care about and that our organizations publicly state is important. This is especially true in environments where that work is undervalued and underresourced. You do not have to do a very extensive internet search to identify where the institutions that have supported my work also have exclusionary legacies and current negative influences that continue to hinder their potential for broader, more meaningful progress. In many instances inclusion has yet to be baked into institutional culture in a way that impacts how organizations operate. Although I have had some institutional support to develop a career modeled on what I experienced under Jo Rae’s mentorship, the students and faculty at these institutions know that what gets headlines can often be an exceptional situation, rather than a typical everyday experience. Rather than showcasing the good work of individuals in their ranks, an organization should devote itself to furthering the idea that it is willing to make significant institutional investments in that good work. By building the internal infrastructure and capacity to support inclusion efforts, organizations would demonstrate that inclusion is an essential component of the institutional standard practice. The positive outcomes that this award is intended to highlight would then be a shared characteristic of the community. A shared vision paired with shared effort and resource-support might cut down on burnout of those currently carrying more than their share of the load.I imagine that the idea for these awards is to celebrate good work while also demonstrating to other individuals what is possible. With that in mind, if institutions worked at using the example of those in the vanguard as a way to build structures that value and support inclusive approaches, they would increase their own ability to serve their constituents. They may also influence other institutions to do the same. My graduate institution benefited from Jo Rae’s work while she was present and was beginning to institutionalize her view of inclusion in the last years of her life. As Dean of the Graduate School, the model for how she ran her lab informed her vision for graduate education campus-wide. She wanted to build a structure that would identify, recruit, and retain talent. She wanted to provide that talent with opportunities to become expert in how they wanted to contribute to the world. By ensuring that they had access to the relevant experiences and skills, she hoped to support them as they set themselves up for success as they defined it.I accept this award in honor of Jo Rae Wright, and on behalf of the students who have trusted me. All I have ever wanted was to be able to recreate for my undergraduates what Jo Rae had done for the people under her wing. I am building a career around that goal as part of a department keenly supportive of these efforts. My hope is that other individuals will develop their own approaches to inclusion because they find themselves in supportive institutional environments. More importantly, I would like to see organizations begin to truly prioritize inclusive approaches through funding and through policy. Institutions could make sufficient resources available to support inclusive efforts and allow creativity in how faculty mobilize those resources. Just as Jo Rae had the flexibility to adjust to our needs, institutional efforts will benefit when limited resource access is not a hindrance to inclusive excellence. Additionally, it will be critical to acknowledge the time and effort that such endeavors require in evaluating faculty contributions. It can no longer be the icing on the cake of a portfolio—developing inclusive capacity has to be recognized as an essential component of our work. Until these changes take root at the institutional level, this kind of work may shine brightly, but will continue to be stochastic and short-lived. All those efforts “will be lost in time, like tears in rain.” It is on all of us to prevent such a tragic ending.     

Gaia Pigino: Inside the cell

Gaia Pigino studies the molecular mechanisms and principles of self-organization in cilia using 3D cryo-EM.

Gaia Pigino was only 3 yr old when she became fascinated with nature in the beautiful countryside of Siena, Italy, where she grew up. The neighbor’s daughter showed her a hen in the chicken coop, and they caught it in the act of laying an egg. Gaia remembers, “This was for me almost a shock, as my experience about eggs was that they come directly out of paper boxes!” Her father was also an important part of awakening Gaia’s curiosity for the amazing things in nature. He used to bring home the award-winning magazine Airone, the Italian equivalent of National Geographic. Gaia never missed an issue; even before learning to read, she could spend hours looking at the captivating photos of the wildlife. She wanted to understand what she was seeing, and maybe because of that, she was determined to do science.Gaia Pigino. Photo courtesy of Human Technopole.Gaia took her first “scientific” steps with Professor Fabio Bernini and Professor Claudio Leonzio at the University of Siena, where she studied bioindicators of soil contamination and detoxification strategies of soil arthropods as part of her PhD project. But it was later, when she joined the laboratory of Professor Pietro Lupetti and met Professor Joel Rosenbaum, a pioneer of cilia research, that Gaia discovered the world of 3D EM and felt her place was “inside a single cell.” She solidified her interest in the structure of protein complexes of cilia and flagella and boosted her passion for cryo-electron tomography (ET) in the laboratory of Professor Takashi Ishikawa, first at the ETH Zurich and then at the Paul Scherrer Institut in Switzerland. In 2012, Gaia started her own laboratory at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany, with the vision of creating a truly interdisciplinary laboratory. Her team combines techniques from different fields such as biophysics, cell biology, and structural biology to answer open questions in the cilia field. Gaia recently moved countries again—this time to take over the position of Associate Head of the Structural Biology Research Centre, at the Human Technopole, Milan, Italy.We reached out to Gaia to learn more about her scientific journey and future research directions.What interested you about cilia?The first thing that attracted me toward cilia and flagella were some EM micrographs, by Professor Romano Dallai in Siena, that showed the beautiful geometrical microtubular structures of sperm flagella. I was intrigued by the apparent perfection of these organelles that clearly showed me that a cell is a coordinated system of complex molecular machines, the mechanism of many of which we do not understand. Soon after, Professor Joel Rosenbaum introduced me to the bidirectional transport of components inside cilia, which, he explained to me, is required for both assembly and function of virtually all cilia and flagella, from the motile cilia in our lungs to the primary cilium in our kidneys. He called it intraflagellar transport (IFT) and compared it to a Paternoster elevator, where the individual cabins were what we now call IFT trains. I was completely fascinated by the IFT system, the structure, the function, the dynamics, and the mechanism of which were still largely unknown. Quickly, I realized that in addition to IFT, cilia represent a virtually infinite source of open biological questions waiting to be solved, from the mechanics and regulation of the beating to the sensory function of primary cilia, and their importance for human health.What are some of the scientific questions currently of interest in your laboratory?In the past few years, we have made substantial contributions to the current understanding of the structure and the mechanism of the IFT (1, 2, 3). Currently, we are investigating how the structure of IFT trains relates to their functions by looking, in cryo-electron tomography, at how anterograde trains transform into retrograde trains and at how different ciliary cargoes are loaded on the trains. Beside this more classical line of research, we are exploring other approaches to study IFT, for instance we have developed a method to reactivate IFT trains in vitro on reconstituted microtubules. We want to use this approach to investigate the behavior of IFT trains, and their motors, in experimentally controllable conditions, e.g., in the presence of only certain tubulin posttranslational modifications. We have also made interesting discoveries about the distribution of tubulin posttranslational modifications on the microtubule doublets of the axoneme and how this spatially defined tubulin code affects the function of different ciliary components. We hope we will be able to share these new “stories” with the structural and cell biology community very soon!What kind of approach do you bring to your work?I believe that the main reason for why science became an integral, and dominant, part of my life is because it provides infinite riddles and continuous challenges. I have always been curious about how things work in nature, but I quickly realized that learning from books didn’t satisfy me. My desire was to be at the frontline, to be among the ones that see things happening in front of their eyes, at the microscope, for the first time. I wanted to be among the ones that make the discoveries that students read about in textbooks. Thus, what I bring to my work is an endless desire of solving biological riddles, curiosity, creativity, determination, and energy, with which I hope to inspire the members of my team. My laboratory uses an interdisciplinary approach; we use whatever method, technique or technology is needed to reach our goal, from the most basic tool to the most sophisticated cryo-electron microscope. And if the method we need does not yet exist, we try to invent it.A young Gaia Pigino (3 yr old) the day she discovered how eggs are made. Photo courtesy of Giancarlo Pigino.Could you tell us a bit about the Structural Biology Research Centre at the Human Technopole (HT)?At the HT Structural Biology Centre, we are working to create a vibrant and interdisciplinary scientific environment that will attract molecular, structural, cell, and computational biologists from all over the world. We are creating fantastic facilities, including one of the most well equipped and advanced electron microscopy facilities in Europe—and likely the world—headed by Paolo Swuec. My team, together with the teams of my colleague Alessandro Vannini and the research group leaders Ana Casañal, Francesca Coscia, and Philipp Erdmann, already cover a vast range of competences and know-how from classical molecular and structural biology approaches, such as crystallography and protein biophysics, to cryo-CLEM, cryo-FIB SEM and cryo-ET, all of which allow us to address questions in cell biology. Our goal is to create a scientific infrastructure and culture that will enable biologists to obtain a continuum of structural and functional information across scales.What did you learn during your PhD and postdoc that helped prepare you for being a group leader? What were you unprepared for?I learned that everyday research is mostly made of failures, but that with the right amount of obsession, persistence, curiosity, and creativity, it is always possible to succeed and discover new things. Being given the freedom to develop your own ideas and your own project very early in your career is a treat; science is not only about having good ideas! One needs to follow up on these ideas with intense work and troubleshooting to make them reality. In addition, I realized that being fearless and attempting what is considered too difficult by others, despite challenges, can turn into a worthy learning experience. Also, how you present your work to the scientific community matters for swinging the odds of success in your favor. Different places might work in very different ways, and conducting good science does not only depend on you, but also on the possibilities given to you by your environment.What was I unprepared for?—I guess several things, but one comes immediately to mind: I underestimated how much being responsible not only for my own life and career, but also the career of students, postdocs, and others in the laboratory, would affect me personally.Structure of the 96-nm axonemal repeat reconstructed by cryo-ET and subtomogram averaging. Image courtesy of Gonzalo Alvarez Viar, Pigino Lab.What has been the biggest accomplishment in your career so far?This is a tricky question for me... I tend to look into the future more than celebrating the past. I fight to succeed in something, but as soon as I conquer it, I find it less of an achievement than the thing I could conquer next. Nevertheless, I am happy about the discoveries and the papers published together with my students and postdocs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). I am extremely excited about the fact that after many years of work I am now leading an interdisciplinary laboratory, where we combine techniques from different fields. I am also happy that three times my husband and I were able to move from one world class academic institution to the another to start exciting and fitting jobs and could still live together in the same place. We worked hard for this, but we also got lucky.What has been the biggest challenge in your career so far?I studied French in school; I had almost no exposure to spoken English until the end of my PhD. To avoid having to show my English insufficiencies, I did hide beside the board of my poster at the first international conference I attended in 2004! It took me a while to overcome this barrier and feel confident to express my thoughts and ideas in English.What do you think you would be if you were not a scientist?I had been a good fencer during my youth. I was a member of the Italian National Team between ages 14 and 19 and saw quite a bit of the world, which was cool! When my sporting career failed, due to diabetes, I was torn between art and science. I guess that in a parallel universe, I am a wildlife photographer and a potter specialized in wood kiln firing. [Gaia confesses that she misses “the amazing and addictive adrenaline rush of a good fencing match!”]Any tips for a successful research career?Do not compare your performances to the ones of the people at your career stage; compare yourself with people that are already successful one level higher than you currently are at. For example, if you are a PhD student, ask yourself what in your current performance separates you from being a good postdoc—once a postdoc, what is missing to be a good PI.     

Training matters! Narrative from a Black scientist

As STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) professionals, we are tasked with increasing our understanding of the universe and generating discoveries that advance our society. An essential aspect is the training of the next generation of scientists, including concerted efforts to increase diversity within the scientific field. Despite these efforts, there remains disproportional underrepresentation of Black scientists in STEM. Further, efforts to recruit and hire Black faculty and researchers have been largely unsuccessful, in part due to a lack of minority candidates. Several factors contribute to this including access to opportunities, negative training experiences, lack of effective mentoring, and other more lucrative career options. This is a narrative of a Black male scientist to illustrate some of the issues in retaining Black students in STEM and to highlight the impact of toxic training environments that exists at many institutions. To increase Black participation in STEM careers, we must first acknowledge, then address, the problems that exist within our STEM training environments in hopes to inspire and retain Black students at every level of training.

I write this today as the curtain of systemic racism and oppression has lifted on our nation. I write this today knowing that difficult conversations about race are happening all across America. As a result of tremendous sacrifices and lives lost, there have been demonstrations and rallies internationally demanding change, prompting governments, organizations, and companies to issue statements claiming that Black Lives Matter (Asmelash, 2020). While the rage has sparked the demand for equity in our society, what does this mean for science?My heart is heavy with these discussions as I have reflected on my own journey in science and revisit the toxic environment that often makes up our science culture. The journey has been long and brutal. It has taken me from first realizing that I wanted to become a scientist, to having this dream deferred by racism, to adopting a persona of persistence and resilience, and finally becoming a professor and cell biologist. This trek through science is one that is not traversed by many Black people (Graf et al., 2018).When confronted by the pervasiveness of racism in science, I remember surviving the assault by learning about the resilience story of Carl Brashear (Robbins, 2000). In 1970, Master Chief Petty Officer Brashear became the first African American master diver in the Navy, and he showed unwavering strength and persistence in the face of racism. Brashear faced an onslaught of racism during his training that endangered his life countless times, but he persisted and eventually won the admiration of his fellow divers. Upon reflection, his story has many signs of an abusive hazing relationship. However, at the time, I thought emulating his behaviors of persistence was the answer to success in science. I thought, “All you have to do is not give up.” I focused on what I thought I could control and kept the Japanese proverb, “Fall down seven, stand up eight” above my bench. I worked long hours, made many mistakes, but always got right back up to the bench to try again. I never saw myself as the brightest or smartest, but I would tell myself “I will be the one who does not give up.” When I recall these stories and talk to students about my journey, I would always say I wanted to be like the cockroach. Because, as is commonly known, you can never get rid of the cockroach. What I never realized with this persistence or “grit” mentality was that it never addressed the problems of systemic racism within the culture of science (Das, 2020). This message of persistence is akin to blaming the victim and not dealing with the root problems in science, including the lack of mentoring, implicit bias, and hostile teaching and training environments (Barber et al., 2020; Team, 2020).In her book, We Want to Do More Than Survive, Bettina Love talks about the idea of teaching persistence or “grit” to African American students as the educational equivalent to the Hunger Games, a fictional competition where participants battle to the death until there is only one victor (Love, 2019). Instead of addressing institutional barriers to success for African Americans in science (i.e., dismantling the Hunger Games arena), we prepare them to survive in a toxic environment. We tell African American students at a young age that the system is structured against them and that they have to be twice as good and work twice as hard as white students (Thomas and Wetlaufer, 1997; Cavounidis and Lang, 2015; Danielle, 2015). We heap a tremendous amount of pressure and responsibility on their shoulders without ever addressing the question, why is it like this? We are in effect training them for the Hunger Games. As they enter college as science majors, they are pitted against each other, and the few victors move into science careers.This Hunger Games analogy (Love, 2019) is reflective of my thinking early on in my science career. As a freshman marine biology major, I imagined myself, like Brashear, a soldier during basic training. I was a member of the “people of color” (POC) squad that was given the least amount of resources and the most dangerous duties. As part of the POC squad, we moved forward through our college years. I saw many fellow soldiers drop from science, and there were only a handful of us left when I reached my junior year (Koenig, 2009).Recently, Michael Eisen, Editor-in-Chief of eLife, authored an opinion article entitled “Racism in Science: We need to act now” (Eisen, 2020). In this article, he reflected on the current racial climate in science and examined his role as both a principle investigator (PI) of a research laboratory and an editor of a prestigious journal. Of note, he highlighted the dire lack of African Americans he had worked with over his career, including the number of researchers he trained in his laboratory, senior editors, and even reviewers for the articles sent for publication to eLife. I appreciated his honesty in shedding light on the issue that so many people whisper about in department hallways or during coffee breaks at national conferences. Based on my journey, I truly understand this lack of diversity, as so few of us are victors in the scientific Hunger Games.As we struggle as a nation with the role of policing within our society, I find similarities between aggressive policing in the Black community and training of Black and Brown students (North, 2020). There are strong implicit biases that we hold within our training environment, and Black students usually find themselves very quickly judged (or prejudged) for a perceived lack of commitment, motivation, or focus (Park et al., 2020). They are also stereotyped as lacking in quantitative abilities (especially the ability to do math) (McClain, 2014). Taken together, these biased judgements result in a lack of trust regarding their data (Steele, 1997). In other words, research supervisors may implicitly expect Black students to be untrustworthy. This is extremely problematic because educational research shows that one of the greatest determinants of students’ success is their teachers’ expectations (Boser et al., 2014). Consequently, it is predictable that if research supervisors expect Black students to be untrustworthy, they will fail.As PIs, we must trust our research students because they are extensions of ourselves in the laboratory. Due to our inability to spend significant amounts of time at the bench, we must trust our students to figure it out and get the work done. Inevitably, experimental approaches will fail; however, based on my experiences in science, Black students are often not given the benefit of the doubt. Instead, I have seen mis/distrust of their commitment, values, and abilities that creates the narrative that they are not motivated, do not care about science, and/or are unable to get the work done, resulting in a broken trainer/trainee relationship. I have witnessed too many Black students fall victim to a “one strike” policy. This was true of me in my early training in marine biology, where I was asked to leave after only 6 months of working in a laboratory. The professor suggested that I had a lack of commitment to my project and was told by other lab members that they collected “my” data, thus providing justification to ask me not to continue. However, what the professor did not know (or care to ask about) was that the other lab members deemed me as someone who did not belong. Consequently, without my knowledge, they collected data on my project and sent it to the PI, thereby working to reinforce the narrative of my lack of commitment. This experience significantly hindered my access to research opportunities and blacklisted me from any other marine biology labs at my university because I was labeled as uncommitted to science. This ended my career in marine biology. I lost the Hunger Games.As a graduate student, I found another opportunity in a cell biology laboratory, and I tried to apply lessons learned from my earlier participation in the Games. I overcommitted to lab work, blocking out any activities related to my culture or personal life. Instead, I dedicated myself completely to the lab. Working 12-h days, I found that my research was progressing, but I was burning out and losing any desire toward a research career. In particular, my burnout was connected to the perception that any interest in my culture and community would not be allowed or accepted or would signal a lack of adequate commitment to science. In effect, I was learning that being a scientist meant that I could not be Black. This, coupled with the constant microaggressions that I faced from professors in classes, among my graduate cohort, and my laboratory colleagues, broadcasted the message that I was an intruder in science. Luckily, I received good mentoring and advice on how to succeed in my graduate program, learning that it was not a sprint, but a marathon. I learned how to balance my personal and professional life, and I always kept them separate. Additionally, the mental image of the resilient cockroach helped me repeatedly during my graduate training, from failing my qualifying exams and failed experiments at the bench to rejections of papers and fellowship applications. While all scientists know that being a scientist means accepting significant amounts of failure, I could not help but feel that the failures I experienced were more frequent, more recognized by others, and even expected by some. This culture of expected failure for people of color (i.e., presumed incompetence), combined with implicit biases and microaggressions, can establish significant barriers for entering and staying in STEM training environments (Smith et al., 2007).To overcome barriers to success in STEM, I worked hard to become a professor in cell biology. I believed that as a professor, I could make a difference, change the environment, and contribute to the change that is so desperately needed. However, I have discovered that the current science culture is just as toxic as when I was a student. Yes, there are programs targeting the inclusion of historically underrepresented groups. There are also a growing number of institutions that are adopting inclusive teaching strategies. Further, we are seeing hiring committees require diversity statements from their applicants as well as receiving implicit bias trainings (Wood, 2019). However, there remains nearly a complete lack of Black faculty members at universities and colleges (Jayakumar et al., 2009; Garrison, 2013; Li and Koedel, 2017). This is, in part, because we have not changed the systemic racism that exists within our training environments. In fact, this racism comes from our noninclusive faculty bodies (Hardy, 2020). In essence, we have nearly a complete absence of Black faculty in STEM because so few Black trainees survive the Hunger Games. More troubling, if they survive, they may be found otherwise unacceptable.Changing the system starts with the belief that Black students can be scientists, followed by acting to proactively encourage and support Black students in STEM. As Eisen states, “This is a solvable problem, we have chosen not to solve it” (Eisen, 2020). Recruiting Black students and scientists at every level is a good start, but without changing the scientific environment to be more welcoming and affirming, those recruited to science will continue to be traumatized. In other words, while increasing access to science is required, it is not sufficient. The dominant majority in science also needs to identify and address their own biases to create antiracist environments. This will only happen when scientists from all groups recognize our convergent interests to advance our universal missions, which is to increase our understanding of the world around us and to solve research questions that will benefit our communities. This is best achieved by a diverse and inclusive scientific workforce for greater knowledge, discovery, and innovation.     

A 20-year encounter with the imposter syndrome

Both in their formative years and later careers, some scientists suffer from something more than occasional self-doubts. There is a more severe affliction that strikes many more than was once realized. Here I reflect on my encounter, in the hope that sharing it can be of some value.

A landmark study 42 years ago presented the results of a survey of 150 highly successful women professionals as regards their self-assessment of confidence. The results were stunning. Many subjects gave responses revealing moderate to intense emotional stress and anxiety as to their qualifications. To characterize this revealed broad experience, the authors coined the term “the imposter syndrome” (Clance and Imes, 1978). It was apt indeed, the first word conveying the haunting sense of being an intruder in the guild, unqualified, and in the game only by some fluke; the second term meaning that the condition was encountered as a constellation of effects, from heart to mind to gut, with fear the signal transduction onto all those centers. This study was a turning point, inter alia, in the broadening field of scholarship examining the barriers to women in the workplace.At the time of the Clance and Imes publication it was not known if this same affliction occurs in men and, if so, with what prevalence, or whether it occurs in some professions more than others. In at least the sciences, it now appears that both females and males encounter it, both as students and as young trainees, although the prevalence is less well known for males. I have no expertise in this field beyond my one experience, which I share here in the hope that it may have some nugget of value for all those who doubt their talent.Science was not my first love academically. I had no butterfly collection, nor did I conduct explosion-seeking chemistry experiments in the cellar. My favorite subject in high school was Latin, my least favorite was biology. I remember a lecture on vitamins in the latter course, where we had to memorize what happens when each one is missing or limiting in the diet. We asked the teacher for an explanation for pellagra, scurvy, and so forth (meaning: what do these vitamins do?). He replied, “They are essential.” QED. (But in fairness, this teacher could be better sometimes—for example, he told us why the mouthwash “Listerine” was so named.)After studying English and Latin in college, I came to biology for a second try and it felt better. I applied to medical school but declined my acceptances and went for a Ph.D. During this time, I do not recall feeling particularly anxious about my abilities, although I had not yet really done anything to reveal their presence or absence. I do recall a few times when I was nervous, but that is not uncommon for graduate students. But one day, I got the first sensation of perhaps something more. It was my Ph.D. qualifying exam in the Department of Zoology at Syracuse University, in 1961. One part was a four-hour written exam in one’s field, the other was a free-for-all with the whole faculty asking about anything under the sun in biology. At one point I was asked to derive the Nernst equation (describing a cell’s membrane resting potential). I replied “OK, but from what?” The faculty member thought I was being evasive, but I was just looking for a little guidance (as when the Scripps–Howard Spelling Bee contestant asks the moderator: “Can you please use that in a sentence?”) I knew one cannot get the Nernst equation from f = ma, there is an electrical component (duly named for Michael Faraday). I managed to get through this question and all the others, but it was then I began to wonder if I was playing some charade. Maybe I had been clever but not really grounded. That I had gotten through the oral exam didn’t quiet my sense that I might have “pulled something off” and maybe hadn’t deserved to have passed. That was the moment when a visitor first arrived in my consciousness. It whispered, “You know, Thoru, it’s just possible that you might be a phony.”During my postdoc this nagging feeling got stronger. I had moved from a very good zoology program at Syracuse to an elite department of cell biology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. My work was going well, but all the people around me seemed so much smarter and their research seemed more significant. On one side of the lab I was in, Phillip Coffino, an M.D./Ph.D. student, was measuring the somatic mutation rate of immunoglobulin genes with Matthew Scharff, and on the other side, Ellie Ehrenfeld was isolating the poliovirus RNA replicase in the laboratory of Donald Summers. These were pioneering projects and I was in awe of both them and their science. By the time I left Einstein my case of the imposter syndrome had reached the point where I felt lucky to get an independent position.Today, I reflect on all this. First, and as conveyed in the original study, was the certitude in my assessment of myself. At the time this affliction had me in its maw, no one could have convinced me otherwise. As other victims of this condition have attested, the sense that it is totally true is overwhelming. The second feature of the imposter syndrome, as was also revealed in the study, was that the day was just around the corner when I would be found out. This evokes a pattern of paranoia where, on each and every day, one is just waiting for “the truth” to come out.But then, when I was 40, I got over this thing. It was quite sudden. I was on my way to Caltech to give a seminar and looked out the window over Kansas at the puffed popcorn of white clouds and got a simple idea, a question that should always be asked by any scientist. What if I were wrong? What if I were misinterpreting the data? For the first time, looking out that airplane window, it came to me that the obsession that I was totally incompetent was not supported by the facts, and that a hypothesis that I was at least competent in a “guild-average” sense seemed to be at hand.How the imposter syndrome affects females vs. males is still being studied. I do think that when it hits males, we compensate in ways that are different from females. One of the most compelling books in this field describes an intrepid group of women who provided powerful anchors for each other (Daniell, 2008). They were not all suffering from the imposter syndrome, but rather receiving the totality of slings and arrows that professional women face on many fronts. This landscape of inquiry and scholarship is worthy of further investigation as we seek to understand the degrees to which gender differentially influences the aspirations of all those coming up, and to which the imposter syndrome is an infection that may have no host restriction as to gender or ethnicity. The key question now, more than four decades after the landmark study, is whether the imposter syndrome has afflicted all genders and ethnicities to similar or differing degrees, and not only in America and not just in the sciences. This is the total perspective in which this career-inhibitory/destructive phenomenon must be understood, to elevate our ability to mentor, and if possible “vaccinate,” all students and emerging young professionals who suffer from it. Only when we all understand the roots of the phenomenon’s existence in the first place can we do our best to stamp it out.     

Pedagogy of the Black academic

I am just starting my career as a cancer biologist, but I have always been a Black man in America. This means that I have always inhabited a world that generally disregarded my existence in some form or another. It is June 17th, 2020 and protests have been happening for weeks since the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The current state of America may be uneasy for some, but for many Americans, the looming threat of exclusion and violence has been an unwelcome companion since birth. This letter is not about a single person, but the Black academic’s experience of race inside and outside of the academy during a time of social upheaval. I have trained in a variety of institutions, big and small, and all the while acutely aware of the impact of my Blackness on my science. The intent of the following is to provoke the reader to reflect on how we as a nation can move toward radically positive change and not incremental adjustments to the status quo. The views expressed are my own and are the result of years of personal experience observing the anti-Black standard in America.

About the AuthorI am currently a cancer biologist at the University of Minnesota Medical School. My lab works to eliminate cancer health disparities in African Heritage communities and investigates the roles of lipids in modifying the immune response in tumors. This is what I do, but not all of who I am. I am also the eldest child of a mother, who managed to convince me that she had eyes in the back of her head (thank you, Mom; it kept me honest). I am a big brother, a husband, and a father. I also consider myself a fortunate Black man in America. I grew up in places where many of my friends did not live to adulthood. If they managed to survive past adolescence, it was usually their dreams that died prematurely. I was lucky to have survived and to continue chasing my dream of becoming a scientist. I never considered myself the fastest, strongest, or even smartest kid growing up, but I was the most determined. Determined, despite the lack of access to role models in science that looked like me or shared my life experience. Now my mission is to increase the number of dreams achieved and impact as many young minds as my time on this planet permits.As a Black scientist, I sometimes have to remind myself that I have never been immune to racism. Because as you spend thousands of hours delving into the microscopic world, the macroworld starts to fade into the background like white noise. And if you get good at it, you almost forget about the strange looks, the excessive questioning, or even the obligatory “tailing” in stores, on campus, or at home. But it is strange to realize how much you have grown accustomed to discrimination and the fact that you unconsciously prepare for it daily, before it ever shows its ugly head, like a prize fighter training months before a fight.This past month, amid the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, the rest of the world has decided to say police are bad, and oh, by the way, Black lives matter too—as if the oppression of Black bodies was new, or as though the recent string of names added to the ever-growing list of innocent Black Americans killed by authorities is an atypical occurrence. Well sadly it is not, and it never has been in this country or any other place with colonial origins. That is the truth, and there is no other way to state it. America is a country built on and driven by racist ideology.So, as a Black American in an “essential” worker role (I am now working on COVID–19-related research), I have physically been at work daily during the pandemic, as the spirit of solidarity sweeps the globe. As much as I want to say this is progress, I find myself asking “why now, and not then?” Why didn’t this happen when Trayvon Martin was murdered; why didn’t this happen when Rodney King was beaten (Alvarez and Buckley, 2013; Mullen and Skitka, 2006)? Is it a sign of the end times, or is it just that racism/White supremacy has finally run its course?I have a theory about why we are now seeing a mass movement against discrimination and police brutality (a.k.a. state-sanctioned murder). My theory states that had it not been for COVID-19 and the nationwide shutdown of normal life, none of this protesting would even be feasible. Why do you ask? The simple answer is that some people with the financial means can normally find ways to distract themselves with various activities, some noble and some … not so much, whereas other folks are less able to disconnect from the drudgery of hand-to-mouth living. Leave it to a global health crisis to reprioritize everyone’s entire life in one fell swoop. Suddenly, people who had vacation plans are stuck at home, whereas people who were just making ends meet are now unable to make those ends meet anymore. The haves and the have-nots are now both in an altered reality. Does this make them equal now? No, but it does allow people to see who their real friends, allies, and enemies are. I suspect that it’s the pulling back of the curtain that has made many people ready to fight, not to mention it is also very likely that many folks, after experiencing weeks of cabin fever, just needed some way to let off all that pent-up energy.Before COVID-19 became a full-time concern, tensions in the United States were already high as the recent killings of unarmed Black Americans (Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery) had gone viral and cries for justice echoed from coast to coast (Lovan, 2020). Once the reality of the pandemic set in and shelter-in-place orders were issued nationally, the situation became a powder keg waiting for just the right moment. That moment happened in North Minneapolis on May 25, 2020. With the release of the video showing the killing of George Floyd, the entire country and much of the world had a reason to go on a “righteous rampage” that has seemed to get the results some thought impossible to achieve. It cannot be overstated how critical social media has been in displaying the oppression of Black Americans at the hands of authorities to the entire world.Now, several months into the protests, the possibility of a “new’’ new normal has people dreaming of singing Kumbaya in technicolor. Yet, as one of the few Black faculty on my campus, I still feel like people are watching me, but for a different reason now. As various reforms are broadcast across the university, the random wellness “check-ins” start creeping in, and the requests for feedback on “new initiatives’’ seem to be like a new flavor of spam in my inbox.Now, I do appreciate the fact that people are starting to notice the oppressive nature of not being White in today’s world (in particular being Black in America), but I have been doing this for a while now, and I am not sure if hashtagged initiatives are healthy for anyone. Plus, it’s kind of creepy watching all of these people jump on the social justice bandwagon, when they weren’t here 4 mo ago or 4 years ago. For many Black academics, it is not about being involved with something when it’s trending; it’s about being “about that life” when it is inconvenient as hell. Again, I do appreciate the fact that more people are willing to fight oppression, racism, and White supremacy (even if only digitally), but you will have to forgive me if I do not trust you just yet. I mean, you are just checking in during what could be the last leg of a marathon, and we’ve been running this whole damn time!Here is a short answer to every wellness check-in email that many of the Black academics I know have received in the last 2 mo: “we were never okay in the first place, but thanks for FINALLY asking!” We don’t need any more bias training, hashtags, or email check-ins. It was a nice start, but it too has become a part of the status quo. The work now and always has been the eradication of underrepresentation, hurtful socialization, and ridiculously skewed power dynamics, not just the awareness of the fact. I don’t have all the answers, but if real change is desired, I think we can first start by teaching history accurately to EVERYONE, no more whitewashing the reality of America’s story and ignoring the contributions of Black academics (and Black Americans in general). Second, stop being silent when you see or hear racism at work or home. If you do nothing when racism shows up, you ARE a racist! Third, the privileged class must relinquish their “privilege” once and for all. That means the powers that were inherited based on historical (and present day) theft and oppression have to dissipate, with the ultimate goal of power sharing. The country club atmosphere of academia and the “fit culture” must erode in favor of true meritocracy. The best person for the job and not “the person who won’t make me uncomfortable by making me see my own deeply held prejudices and fears.”Honestly, Black academics SHOULD not be charged with the task of fixing broken systems, along with protecting themselves and mentees, while working toward tenure. But if we (Black academics) are not driving the car, progress will likely go the wrong way again (getting rid of Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima does not correct the underlying pathology). Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed speaks to this in saying, “the violence of the oppressors prevents the oppressed from being fully human, the response of the latter to this violence is grounded in the desire to pursue the right to be human … the oppressed, fighting to be human, take away the oppressors’ power to dominate and suppress, they restore to the oppressors the humanity they had lost in the exercise of oppression.” (Friere, 1972, p. 56). This means that if we (Black academics) want to be treated as humans and as scholars, we must show you what that humanity looks like FIRST. Now the question is, are you willing to learn or are you going to co-opt this moment, this movement to make it into something that fits your preconceived notion of the acceptable levels of Blackness in the academy?     

Ye Tian: Surveilling stress to live longer

Ye Tian investigates how mitochondrial stress signaling pathways regulate longevity using C. elegans as a model system.

An avid reader, Ye Tian used to save up her child allowance with the sole purpose of buying science fiction books. Reading and solving mathematical problems were her favorite hobbies; indeed, she liked mathematics so much that she was about to enroll herself as an architecture major but finally chose biotechnology. Ye moved from her hometown in the Northwest of China, Baoji—famous for housing the Zhou dynasty’s bronzeware and being close to the Terracotta Army—to Beijing for her college and graduate studies.Ye is proud of being among the earliest researchers working on Caenorhabditis elegans in her country; for her PhD studies, she joined the lab of Hong Zhang, who at that time has just established the first C. elegans lab in China at the National Institute of Biological Sciences in Beijing. Ye identified epg-2 as an adaptor for cargo recognition during autophagy. In 2010, she crossed the Pacific toward the U.S. West Coast for her postdoctoral training in the aging field with Andrew Dillin, first at the Salk Institute in San Diego and then at the University of California, Berkeley. There, she discovered that mild mitochondrial stress during development in worms rewires their chromatin landscape to establish specific gene expression patterns throughout the lifespan and promote longevity.Ye Tian. Photo courtesy of Ye Tian.Ye came back to China at the end of 2016 to start her own lab at the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Her research team studies mitochondrial stress signaling pathways and their interplay with aging. We chatted with her to learn more about her next scientific plans.What interested you about the interplay between mitochondria and aging?I became interested in mitochondrial biology during my postdoc in Andrew Dillin’s lab. Since the origin of eukaryotic cells, mitochondria have been a driving force of evolution. During reproduction, mitochondria are passed from the mother to the offspring through egg cells and they exhibit a unique inheritance pattern. As essential hubs that dictate cellular metabolism, it is clear now that mitochondria and the nucleus maintain a bidirectional communication. Early life “stressed” mitochondria communicate with the nucleus to induce gene expression changes that are beneficial on longevity and persist throughout the lifespan. The fact that mitochondrial function is crucial to aging fascinated me; I wanted to continue exploring that topic further, and that’s why I established my lab around the question of how mitochondrial surveillance mechanisms regulate the aging process.What are you currently working on? What is up next for you?My research team focuses on the interplay between mitochondrial stress signaling pathways and aging. The first work that my lab published was a project that I started during my postdoc. The Dillin lab reported a phenomenon in which perturbations of mitochondria in neurons induced a mitochondrial stress response in the peripheral tissues and hypothesized that a secreted signal molecule, named after mitokine, is required for the cell non-autonomous regulation (1). The identity of this molecular signal remained elusive for almost ten years until we found that a secreted Wnt ligand, EGL-20, functions as the mitokine to coordinate mitochondrial stress signaling across tissues and promote longevity of the organism (2). We are also interested in how the crosstalk between mitochondria and the nucleus influences lifespan. We found that mitochondrial perturbations alter the nuclear epigenome to induce longevity via the histone deacetylation complex NuRD in response to cellular acetyl-CoA levels, the key metabolite at the entry point of the Krebs cycle (3).Lab group picture; current lab members (2021). Photo courtesy of Ye Tian.Our latest work stemmed from a serendipitous observation that neuronal mitochondrial stress is sensed by and transmitted through the mitochondria in the germline. Intergenerational, maternal inheritance of elevated levels of mitochondrial DNA via the mitokine Wnt/EGL-20, which causes the activation of the mitochondrial unfolded protein response (UPR^mt), provides descendants with a greater tolerance to environmental stress. This makes the offspring live longer (4).Among our short-term scientific plans, we’re determining how mitochondria functions during the aging process at both the genetic and biochemical levels and searching for ways to apply our findings from C. elegans to neurodegenerative disease models in mammals.What kind of approach do you bring to your work?The curiosity about how things work drives me; what I enjoy the most is when I see things happening in front of my eyes and when I figure out why they occur that way. That enthusiasm is what I try to spread to my team every day. In the lab, we rely on C. elegans as our model system and on genetics to dissect complex biological processes like aging. We have also adapted modern biochemical and imaging techniques as well as bioinformatics to complement our genetic studies. I’m a geneticist at heart, and I like to initiate a project with a well-designed genetic screen. The best part is that the screen often leads me to answers I was not expecting, and that’s genuinely inspiring!What did you learn during your PhD and postdoc that helped prepare you for being a group leader? What were you unprepared for?Like most scientists, my research career has gone through ups and downs. I had to change my research project in the last year of my graduate school; that was nerve-racking, but I eventually managed to redirect my thesis and get exciting results under time pressure, thanks in large to the support of my parents, mentors, and lab mates. That helped me prepare to become a principal investigator; I gained confidence in problem solving, and since I’ve experienced the stress of dealing with last-minute scope changes firsthand, I connect better with my students.I guess, as many other non-native English speakers, I wasn’t prepared for writing grants and papers fluently in English. This issue wasn’t obvious during my graduate and postdoctoral studies, as my mentors were always there for me and proofread and edited my writing. Now I have to stand up for myself. I spend most of my time writing; I’ve improved my writing skills but it’s still an ongoing process.Reconstruction of the nerve system of C. elegans by confocal microscopy. Green corresponds to YFP-labeled neuronal specific marker Q40, and red labels germline specific mitochondrial outer membrane protein TOMM-20::mkate2. Image courtesy of Ye Tian’s lab.What has been the biggest accomplishment in your career so far?My very first PhD student, Qian Zhang, graduated with two first-author papers and decided to pursue a research career in academia. Being responsible for someone else’s career is challenging but also rewarding.What has been the biggest challenge in your career so far?I use the model organism C. elegans for my research in aging, so from time to time, peers criticize the relevance of my work to human health. I’m used to justifying my scientific approach to funding agencies and peers in other fields, but sometimes it’s exhausting or not pleasant.Who were your key influences early in your career?My PhD mentor, Hong Zhang. He is very passionate about the science he does, and he is courageous to shift his research directions to answer new biological questions.What is the best advice you have been given?I think the best advice I’ve gotten is that “tomorrow is another day.” It reminds me to keep going and be optimistic.What hobbies do you have?I love art and music. When I was in San Diego, I used to play in the Chinese Music Band; I miss my musician friends over there. In my teens, I used to hike mountainside trails along the river with my parents. Now, running has become my new favorite hobby. I enjoy the tranquility and peace of mind while running; it’s soothing.     

The story of science: successes,failures, luck,privilege, and bias

I am incredibly honored to receive the 2021 WICB Junior Award for Excellence in Research in WICB’s golden jubilee year. In this essay, I traverse my scientific journey starting with my PhD, highlighting the highs and the lows and how these intersect with luck, privilege, and bias.

V. AnanthanarayananMy pursuit for a PhD started with a hiccup—I had applied to several places in the United States, but barely got any offers due to the economic upheaval that happened that year (2008). I had to forgo any dreams of a PhD in the United States and remained in Bangalore, India to complete a project I had started with William (Bill) Thies at Microsoft Research India on a programming language for expressing biology protocols. Applying to U.S. schools was an expensive task, one which I was unwilling to put my family through again. So, a year later, when I recommenced my search for a PhD position, I set my sights on Europe. I had heard about the PhD program at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG ) at Dresden from a friend who had just joined the institute for her PhD. Fortunately, I received an interview call from MPI-CBG. At the end of a crucial interview week at Dresden, I “matched” with Iva Tolic´’s (now Institut Ruđer Boškovic´, Croatia) lab for my PhD. At the start of my PhD, I knew next to nothing about the cytoskeleton, motor proteins, or microscopy, but I found Iva and my lab members to be some of the warmest and most welcoming people. I made friends for life and graduated with a PhD in Biophysics, with a thesis focused on understanding the regulation of the motor protein cytoplasmic dynein. I was lucky to have been able to get a position at MPI-CBG and join Iva’s lab—of the other three places in Europe I had applied to for a PhD, only one other institute invited me for an interview, which also proved to be unsuccessful.On completing my PhD in 2014, I didn’t quite know what I wanted to do. Due to personal reasons, I had to return to India and was open to options in both industry and academia. But with my training in motor protein and cytoskeleton research, I had some ideas for exploring scientific questions related to dynein activation. However, most labs I approached for a postdoctoral position were not open to a project that was outside the realm of their research focus. Nonetheless, Iva, Nenad Pavin (University of Zagreb), and Jonathon (Joe) Howard (Yale University), who were members of my thesis advisory committee, gave me the courage to continue in academia. In my naïveté, I went ahead and applied for the INSPIRE Faculty Fellowship, which is targeted at fresh PhDs and junior postdoctoral fellows to establish their own independent group at an Indian institute. To my surprise, I ended up getting the fellowship. The next issue was finding a host institute that was preferably in Bangalore, where my partner was based. I applied at a few different places, but only after I attended IndiaBioscience’s Young Investigator Meeting in 2014 did I get the chance to meet representatives of potential host institutes, including the Indian Institute of Science (IISc). After a couple of research seminars at IISc, my application was assessed and I was offered the position of INSPIRE Faculty Fellow at the newly formed Centre for BioSystems Science and Engineering, IISc.While I did not have any additional start-up funding, I was given the infrastructure and the independence to pursue my research program. It was slow and frustrating at the start, not unlike most starting labs. I always wondered if it might have been easier if I had had a regular postdoctoral stint. During this time, I also started recognizing how hard it was to be a woman in Indian academia. As a woman principal investigator, one’s authority, expertise, and ability are constantly called into question. Justifying your presence in academia on a daily basis is an exhausting task. I had a great mentor in Sandhya Visweswariah (IISc) who helped me navigate the system. I also had an extremely supportive partner, who kept me going through some of the worst times. Eventually, my lab and I landed on our feet (more about this in “My INSPIRE’d Journey”). Our research has been recognized with grants and awards, but one of the most rewarding parts of the job is seeing other lab members discovering the joy of science (I wrote about my approach to mentorship recently [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41580-020-0256-6]).Three years into the faculty fellowship, I was able to transition to an Assistant Professor position in the same institute. However, this did not change my experience as a young woman in Indian science, and the implicit and explicit biases continued. In 2020, I accepted a fantastic opportunity to further my lab’s science as an EMBL Australia Group Leader at the Single Molecule Science Node at UNSW Sydney and made the move during a pandemic. My lab’s research focus is in understanding how stochastic and rare events pertaining to cytoskeleton and motor proteins give rise to complexity in intracellular organization. With this theme as the essence of our research, we ask specific questions about motor protein regulation to effect differential cellular trafficking, mitochondria-microtubule interactions, and their role in mitochondrial dynamics, and we aim to determine barcodes of global organelle positioning in health and disease.I have the privilege of being able-bodied, born in an upper middle-class family to college-educated parents who were extremely supportive of my choices. I have also inordinately benefitted from the fact that I was born to an Indian ‘upper caste’ family. I therefore had an undue head start in life. These were circumstances beyond my control and yet played a huge role in how my story turned out. I was embarrassingly ignorant of the rampant misogyny in academia until I had to contend with explicit and implicit gender-based biases myself when I started my independent research group in India. Women make up ∼40% of science PhDs awarded in India but represent only ∼13% of Indian academia (biaswatchindia.com), highlighting the stark gender biases at play in creating a leaky pipeline. While I tried my best to voice my discontent and affect changes to create an equitable environment within my department and institute, it was slow work. In 2020, when the pandemic hit and all conferences and meetings went virtual, conference posters advertised on social media made it immediately apparent just how much women were underrepresented in Indian STEM conferences. So, I teamed up with Shruti Muralidhar (now a scientist at Deep Genomics, Canada) to found BiasWatchIndia, an initiative to document women representation and combat gender-biased panels in Indian STEM conferences.BiasWatchIndia has been in existence for a little over a year now—we have achieved several milestones, but there’s still so much to do. “Manels” (conferences that feature only men) are still as rampant as they were when we first started—40% of all Indian STEM conferences are manels. And while we have just about started to tackle the underrepresentation of women in Indian STEM, we are conscious of the intersectionality of bias with gender, caste, ableism, and socioeconomic background and aim to understand how best we can advocate for all minorities.People who are in power in academia and who oppose equity, diversity, and inclusion initiatives and instead preach merit and equality as the gold standard need to introspect, because when options and opportunities are offered without consideration to the millennia of oppression based on gender, race, and background, it is not promoting equality but upholding values that will continue to oppress underrepresented groups. Still, I am optimistic and hope to see real changes that will result in equity in academia in my lifetime.     

Hongyuan Yang: Tracking lipids,one droplet at a time

Hongyuan Yang investigates lipid trafficking and lipid droplet biogenesis.

Hongyuan Yang grew up in a small city east of Beijing, China. From his childhood, Hongyuan recalls that “food was not abundant, so I was hungry at times, but education was free and good.” Driven by his curiosity for science, after completing his undergraduate studies at Peking University Health Science Center, China, he enrolled at Columbia University, NY, for his doctoral training. Under the guidance of his advisor, Dr. Stephen Sturley, Hongyuan studied lipids in budding yeast. The laboratory’s research department fostered a strong interest in lipids and atherosclerosis, and after earning his PhD, Hongyuan obtained a faculty position at the National University of Singapore (NUS) in 1999. In 2007, he moved to the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia, to continue his scientific journey exploring lipids. We contacted Hongyuan to learn more about his career and interests.Hongyuan Robert Yang. Photo courtesy of UNSW.What interested you about lipids?My five-year doctoral study focused entirely on the enzymes Sterol O-Acyltransferases (SOAT, also known as ACAT, Acyl-CoA Cholesterol Acyltransferases), which catalyze the formation of sterol esters from sterols/cholesterol and fatty acyl CoAs (1). SOATs, integral membrane proteins of the ER, are potential therapeutic targets for heart disease and Alzheimer’s disease. Since then, I have been fascinated by two things related to SOAT: first, what happens upstream of SOAT, i.e., how exogenous cholesterol reaches SOAT/ER; and second, what happens downstream of SOAT, i.e., how its product—cholesterol esters—is stored in cells in the form of lipid droplets (LDs).These are fundamental questions in cell biology. While reading on how cholesterol arrives at the ER for esterification by SOAT/ACAT in the late 1990s, I realized that the trafficking of most lipids was poorly characterized with little molecular insight. Significant progress has been made in the last 20 years, but the lack of tools that track the movement of lipids has hampered our understanding of the selectivity, efficacy, and kinetics of lipid trafficking. Few cell biologists cared about LDs ∼20 years ago, even though LDs are prominent cellular structures in many disease conditions. Each LD comprises a hydrophobic core of storage lipids (triglycerides and sterol esters) wrapped by a monolayer of phospholipids. Largely considered inert lipid granules, LDs originate from the ER and are relatively simple cellular structures as compared with other organelles (see image). Now, we know that LDs are not that simple: their biogenesis is tightly regulated, they actively interact with other organelles, and they regulate many aspects of cellular function as well as disease progression. Astonishingly, we still have little understanding of how LDs originate from the ER. I am very much intrigued by the complexity of these two seemingly simple cellular processes, i.e., lipid trafficking and LD biogenesis.What are some of the scientific questions currently of interest in your laboratory?We are currently focusing on how LDs originate from the ER. The first significant paper from my own laboratory was the discovery of seipin as a key regulator of LD formation (2). Results from many groups have demonstrated that seipin can organize the formation of LDs; however, the exact molecular function of seipin remains mysterious. Our data suggest that seipin may directly impact the level and/or distribution of lipids such as phosphatidic acid near sites of LD biogenesis, and the effect of seipin deficiency on LD formation is secondary to changes in local lipids. We are now working hard to test this hypothesis. Moreover, data from my laboratory and others indicated that nonbilayer lipids may have a greater impact on the biogenesis of LDs than that of other ER-derived structures, such as COPII vesicles. This may result from the monolayer nature of the LD surface. We hope to dissect the dynamic changes of lipids at ER domains where LDs are born. More broadly, the ER is a fascinating organelle to me. The simple division of ER into sheets and tubules does not reflect the dynamic nature of this organelle. Dissecting the composition and organization of lipids and proteins of the ER would help answer key questions relating to LD biogenesis, and it is therefore one of our future directions.Another major focus is to understand how cholesterol and phosphatidylserine are moved between organelles. We have been working on how low-density lipoprotein (LDL)–derived cholesterol (LDL-C) reaches the ER for two decades. The release of LDL-C from lysosomes requires the Niemann Pick C1&2 proteins, whose malfunction causes lysosomal cholesterol accumulation and a lethal genetic disorder affecting young children. The Ara Parseghian Medical Research Foundation has led the way in supporting research into cholesterol trafficking, and I take this opportunity to thank their generous support. Once released from lysosomes, LDL-C is believed to reach the plasma membrane first and then the ER. We identified ORP2 as a possible carrier of LDL-C to the plasma membrane using a PI(4,5)P₂ gradient (3). There must be other carriers and/or pathways because ORP2 deficiency only causes a minor accumulation of cholesterol in lysosomes. Another interesting question is what prevents LDL-C from reaching the ER directly from lysosomes, given the close contact between lysosomes and the ER. We reported that ORP5 may bring LDL-C directly to the ER (4). However, it was later found that ORP5 binds and transfers phosphatidylserine, not cholesterol. Thus, our observed link between ORP5 and cholesterol is through some indirect yet unknown mechanism. We have been perplexed by these observations for many years, but a recent study demonstrated that phosphatidylserine is required for the trafficking of LDL-C, establishing a close link between cholesterol and phosphatidylserine (5). We are now trying to understand how the trafficking and distribution of cholesterol, phosphatidylserine, and PI(4,5)P₂ are interconnected. For a long time, I felt that it was impossible to figure out the molecular details governing the cellular trafficking of lipids due to redundant pathways and a lack of tools to track lipids. Recent progress in this field has given me hope.Lipid droplets in a HeLa cell are shown in red (BODIPY), with their surface in green. DAPI (blue) labels DNA. Image courtesy of Hongyuan Yang.What kind of approach do you bring to your work?Besides honesty and open-mindedness, we emphasize rigor and comprehensiveness. We often make our initial discoveries in cell-based screens. This approach has many advantages, but it also gives rise to artifacts and cell-line specific observations. We aim to complement our initial findings with biochemical and structural analyses in vitro as well as animal studies in vivo. To further establish the reproducibility of our data, I often ask my close friends and collaborators to independently repeat the key findings of a study before submission. It generally takes a long time for us to complete a study, but I believe the effort will pay off in the long run.What did you learn during your training that helped prepare you for being a group leader? What were you unprepared for?During my PhD at Columbia, I was most impressed with the general attitude of my mentors toward research. No matter how much they have achieved, they take every new experiment and every poster presentation seriously.As I did not have postdoctoral training, I was somewhat unprepared at the beginning of my independent career. One difficult challenge was knowing when to finish a paper and project. We often kept working and working. I have now gotten a lot better.You’ve done research on three continents throughout your career. Can you tell us about some of these transitions?During the last year of my doctoral studies at Columbia, I was offered a lecturer position by the Department of Biochemistry at NUS. It was a very hard decision to leave the United States, but I was excited by the prospect of starting my own laboratory at a top institution. Life at NUS was very good overall, despite some struggles. I had to make ∼700 slides for teaching during the first year and my start-up fund was 10,000 Singapore dollars (~6,000 USD). But the graduate students were fully supported by the university, and most of them are hard working and talented. The crucial screen that led to the discovery of seipin as a key regulator of LD formation was performed at NUS (2). I enjoyed my time at NUS, where I was promoted and tenured. However, my family and I could not get used to the heat and humidity. We looked for a place with better climate, and it happened that my current employer, UNSW, had an opening in 2006. Moving continents with two kids was very disruptive, and I had zero publications in 2007. Our work on seipin was delayed and almost got scooped. I was also very worried about funding in Australia since I hardly knew anyone and the funding system. It turned out that the Australian community was very supportive of our research from day one. I have also been very fortunate to receive generous support from the Ara Parseghian Medical Research Foundation, based in the United States, after my move to Sydney.Hongyuan’s “metabolism team” after a basketball game. Photo courtesy of Hongyuan Yang.What has been the biggest accomplishment in your career so far?While I am mostly recognized for discovering seipin’s role in lipid droplet formation, I am prouder of the work we have done on lipid trafficking and the oxysterol binding proteins. We struggled mightily for the first 15 years. At one point in 2015, I seriously considered abandoning this line of research. But we persisted and discovered their roles in regulating plasma membrane PI(4,5)P₂ and cholesterol, as well as in lipid droplet formation (3, 6).What has been the biggest challenge in your career so far?The biggest challenge has to do with the subject of my research topic: the fundamental cell biology of lipids. The sorting, distribution, and storage of cellular lipids are clearly very important topics in biology, but they are sometimes too fundamental to explain to funding agencies and new students. These days, lipid research is not as “sexy” as other topics. But there are so many unanswered questions in lipidology. I strongly believe that lipid research is going to be the next “big thing” as new techniques such as cryoEM now allow us to appreciate lipids and membrane proteins with unprecedented clarity.Who were your key influences early in your career?Besides mentors and teachers at Columbia, I really enjoyed reading and studying the works by Drs. Mike Brown and Joseph Goldstein, Ta-Yuan Chang, and Scott Emr. While they were not my teachers, their work inspired and impacted many young scientists, including me.What is the best advice you have been given?I have been given many pieces of great advice during my career. The best one in my view is “Less is more.” I was once told, “You would be better off with a lab of six than twelve.” Initially, I did not get it because I thought that a bigger group would allow me to explore more directions and be more productive. The reality is that, as a little-known junior researcher, few experienced people would join my laboratory. Funding is also a major limiting factor. Supervising a large number of students is fulfilling, but it also takes away some of my own time to think critically about the projects. I have largely kept my group under six, and this allows me to better supervise and guide the trainees. People say, “Once your team has more than 15 members, you become a manager instead of a scientist.” My own experience corroborates that statement because I struggled quite a bit when my group reached 12 at one point.What hobbies do you have?I am heavily into sports, especially basketball and tennis. I follow the NBA closely, and Jeremy Lin is my hero. I still play basketball at least twice a week. I am the captain of a basketball team comprised of scientists working on metabolism (see image). We play real, refereed basketball games against local teams during conferences. As I am getting older, I have also picked up tennis. I watch coaching videos on YouTube but still need a lot of work on my forehand. Through sports, I learned teamwork and the spirit of fighting to the last second. If I were not a scientist, I would probably run a sports-related business.What has been your biggest accomplishment outside of the laboratory?I got married and had children relatively early. Both of my kids are now in college and they appear to be decent human beings. I have been extremely lucky because my wife did most of the heavy lifting in looking after the kids. It was still a struggle for me to balance work and parental duties during the early days of my independent career. I am very proud and happy with where we are as a family right now.Any tips for a successful research career?Everyone is unique. Knowing your strengths and especially your weaknesses can be crucial to your success. My undergraduate training was in medicine and health management, and my PhD work focused on genetics and cell biology, so my understanding of physical chemistry is rather inadequate. I am also very bad at developing new methods. To alleviate these deficiencies, I constantly monitor new methods in my field and I purposefully look for collaborators with strong chemistry backgrounds. I have benefited immensely from such efforts.     

Work life balance?

There is no perfect recipe to balance work and life in academic research. Everyone has to find their own optimal balance to derive fulfilment from life and work. Subject Categories: S&S: Careers & Training

A few years ago, a colleague came into my office, looking a little irate, and said, “I just interviewed a prospective student, and the first question was, ‘how is work‐life balance here?’”. Said colleague then explained how this question was one of his triggers. Actually, this sentiment isn''t unusual among many PIs. And, yet, asking about one''s expected workload is a fair question. While some applicants are actually coached to ask it at interviews, I think that many younger scientists have genuine concerns about whether or not they will have enough time away from the bench in order to have a life outside of work.In a nutshell, I believe there is no one‐size‐fits‐all definition of work–life balance (WLB). I also think WLB takes different forms depending on one''s career stage. As a new graduate student, I didn''t exactly burn the midnight oil; it took me a couple of years to get my bench groove on, but once I did, I worked a lot and hard. I also worked on weekends and holidays, because I wanted answers to the questions I had, whether it was the outcome of a bacterial transformation or the result from a big animal experiment. As a post‐doc, I worked similarly hard although I may have actually spent fewer hours at the bench because I just got more efficient and because I read a lot at home and on the six train. But I also knew that I had to do as much as I could to get a job in NYC where my husband was already a faculty member. The pressure was high, and the stress was intense. If you ask people who knew me at the time, they can confirm I was also about 30 pounds lighter than I am now (for what it''s worth, I was far from emaciated!).As an assistant professor, I still worked a lot at the bench in addition to training students and writing grant applications (it took me three‐plus years and many tears to get my first grant). As science started to progress, work got even busier, but in a good way. By no means did I necessarily work harder than those around me—in fact, I know I could have worked even more. And I’m not going to lie, there can be a lot of guilt associated with not working as much as your neighbor.My example is only one of millions, and there is no general manual on how to handle WLB. Everyone has their own optimal balance they have to figure out. People with children or other dependents are particularly challenged; as someone without kids, I cannot even fathom how tough it must be. Even with some institutions providing child care or for those lucky enough to have family take care of children, juggling home life with “lab life” can create exceptional levels of stress. What I have observed over the years is that trainees and colleagues with children become ridiculously efficient; they are truly remarkable. One of my most accomplished trainees had two children, while she was a post‐doc and she is a force to be reckoned with—although no longer in my laboratory, she still is a tour de force at work, no less with child number three just delivered! I think recruiters should view candidates with families as well—if not better—equipped to multi‐task and get the job done.There are so many paths one can take in life, and there is no single, “correct” choice. If I had to define WLB, I would say it is whatever one needs to do in order to get the work done to one''s satisfaction. For some people, putting in long days and nights might be what is needed. Does someone who puts in more hours necessarily do better than one who doesn''t, or does a childless scientist produce more results than one with kids? Absolutely not. People also have different goals in life: Some are literally “wedded” to their work, while others put much more emphasis on spending time with their families and see their children grow up. Importantly, these goals are not set in stone and can fluctuate throughout one''s life. Someone recently said to me that there can be periods of intense vertical growth where “balance” is not called for, and other times in life where it is important and needed. I believe this sentiment eloquently sums up most of our lives.Now that I''m a graying, privileged professor, I have started to prioritize other areas of life, in particular, my health. I go running regularly (well, maybe jog very slowly), which takes a lot of time but it is important for me to stay healthy. Pre‐pandemic, I made plans to visit more people in person as life is too short not to see family and friends. In many ways, having acquired the skills to work more efficiently after many years in the laboratory and office, along with giving myself more time for my health, has freed up my mind to think of science differently, perhaps more creatively. It seems no matter how much I think I’m tipping the balance toward life, work still creeps in, and that’s perfectly OK. At the end of the day, my work is my life, gladly, so I no longer worry about how much I work, nor do I worry about how much time I spend away from it. If you, too, accomplish your goals and derive fulfillment from your work and your life, neither should you.