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Down with the Myth of the "Real" Scholar
Science is a wonderful privilege that I enjoy, and to me, scientific culture determines the quality of research, discovery and invention that we produce. Yet, as an academic culture we suffer from a persistent lack of diversity and many negative cultural trends, like valuing competitiveness and workaholism over collaboration and wholistic thinking. Collective culture is a choice. While as an individual I feel very puny and ineffective at making any difference whatsoever, I believe that collectively we have the power to completely change culture. I learned this the day I wrote my first and only blog article, the awesomest-7-year-postdoc. Little did I know how many out there felt as I do, and are working to bring change. And I am proud to be part of that global network --- it is where some of the best scientific ideas are coming from, because the best people know there is no science without scientists.
This page has links to several articles and resources I like, as well as links to several things I've worked on.
Scientists and Civic Engagement
Sciencefor2020: A Boston area science activism website created and curated by researchers at Harvard, MIT, and BU.
Dan Rather's SciAm Guest Blog (Now, more than ever, we must stand up for Science, Nov 2016)
Scientific and Work Culture
Uri Alon's Materials for Nurturing Scientists
Talk Videos ("A Nurturing Vision of Science") and the famous Sunday-in-the-lab song
Website with articles on how to run a motivated lab, mentoring, giving talks, and creating PI peer groups
Angela DePace's paper on mentoring methodology (Mol. Cell 2015) and Lab Philosophy page (webpage)
Anita Woolley's research on Collective Intelligence in Human Teams
Performance of human teams is strongly predicted by group equality (and women), not by individual IQs.
Gender Equity and Diversity
Lean In, by Sheryl Sandberg (a must read book for Male faculty and Chairs/Deans)
Prof. Nancy Hopkins, and the MIT Transformation, Technology Review Article, Aug 2017
We should all be feminists, TED Talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
For Computer Science: The Harvey Mudd study (pdf), the Grace Hopper (GHC) and Tapia Conferences on Diversity in CS.
Some of the Things I Work On
Science is a wonderful privilege that I enjoy, and to me, scientific culture determines the quality of research, discovery and invention that we produce. Yet, as an academic culture we suffer from a persistent lack of diversity and many negative cultural trends, like valuing competitiveness and workaholism over collaboration and wholistic thinking. Collective culture is a choice. While as an individual I feel very puny and ineffective at making any difference whatsoever, I believe that collectively we have the power to completely change culture. I learned this the day I wrote my first and only blog article, the awesomest-7-year-postdoc. Little did I know how many out there felt as I do, and are working to bring change. And I am proud to be part of that global network --- it is where some of the best scientific ideas are coming from, because the best people know there is no science without scientists.
This page has links to several articles and resources I like, as well as links to several things I've worked on.
Scientists and Civic Engagement
Sciencefor2020: A Boston area science activism website created and curated by researchers at Harvard, MIT, and BU.
Dan Rather's SciAm Guest Blog (Now, more than ever, we must stand up for Science, Nov 2016)
Scientific and Work Culture
Uri Alon's Materials for Nurturing Scientists
Talk Videos ("A Nurturing Vision of Science") and the famous Sunday-in-the-lab song
Website with articles on how to run a motivated lab, mentoring, giving talks, and creating PI peer groups
Angela DePace's paper on mentoring methodology (Mol. Cell 2015) and Lab Philosophy page (webpage)
Anita Woolley's research on Collective Intelligence in Human Teams
Performance of human teams is strongly predicted by group equality (and women), not by individual IQs.
Gender Equity and Diversity
Lean In, by Sheryl Sandberg (a must read book for Male faculty and Chairs/Deans)
Prof. Nancy Hopkins, and the MIT Transformation, Technology Review Article, Aug 2017
We should all be feminists, TED Talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
For Computer Science: The Harvey Mudd study (pdf), the Grace Hopper (GHC) and Tapia Conferences on Diversity in CS.
Some of the Things I Work On
- Science Culture: In 2013, I wrote a Guest Blog for Scientific American on challenging myths surrounding tenure-track life and on my personal efforts to be the best "whole person" I could be; this blog struck a chord with many people across many careers. More recently (April 2018), I gave a Talk: The Pursuit of Collective Intelligence: 3 Myths to Replace (video) in the Distinguished Lecture Series on Science and Engineering Culture at Cornell University, hosted by my colleague Hadas Kress-Gazit; this talk was first given at the RSS Women in Robotics Workshop (2017).
- Diversity in Computer Science: At Harvard I have worked for many years on initiatives at the undergraduate level. In 2011, as a tenure-track faculty, I co-wrote a white paper with Margo Seltzer (Whiitepaper, 2011) to raise a donor fund for women/minorities in CS. Thanks to a wonderful Harvard alumna, Anne Popkin '87, this 350K fund helped us with the founding of WiCS (with Anne Madoff and Amy Yin), GIIM (with Amanda Glazer, Vikram Sunder, Meena Boppana), and WECODE (with JN Fang). This fund also partially supports sending over 40 Harvard undergraduates to the Grace Hopper and now Tapia conferences every year. I am also a regular panelist/speaker at diversity events, e.g. the CRA-W Grad Cohort. My lab is very active in K-12 and Public-facing STEM events, especially those that promote diversity in STEM; our lab's startup Root Robotics is aimed at broadening and diversifying early education in programming and AI/Robotics.
- Tenure-track Retention and Faculty Diversity: In addition to serving on university level committees, I've worked on several grassroots reports and advocacy (1) A Report on Retention Loss of Tenure-Track Women at Harvard (report, nov 2016; crimson news article dec 2017). Also see recent Harvard Open Data Project article on faculty gender disparity by department, and Crimson articles on culture issues in the math department which motivated the founding of GIIM (article, editorial). (2) A Report advocating for Better Childcare at Harvard (report, spring 2015); As of 2017, the old Harvard childcare system is being consolidated and restructured, and there is space for a new daycare facility in Allston. I've also worked informally on parental leave policies. (3) I am part of the NSF-funded FLIP Alliance (Diversifying Future Leadership in the Professoriate), and serve on the graduate admissions and other diversity committees to improve the URM pipeline.