GATEWAY STUDY OF
LEADERSHIP
TURNING
POINTS
SCHOOL OF
SOCIAL SCIENCES
Cultivating Mentors
Cultivating Mentors
Turning Points Series Discover nuggets of unconventional wisdom through the excerpts of student interviews with Rice University faculty. Copyright 2013 Rice University. All rights reserved. No parts of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the School of Social Sciences at Rice University. Requests for permission should be directed to ipek@rice.edu.
Other books in the 2012-2013 series II Natural Sciences: Choosing Academia Developing Skills Discovering Opportunities Embracing Leadership
Books in the 2011-2012 series I Social Sciences: Choosing Academia Finding Inspiration Fostering Curiosity Sparking Enthusiasm Overcoming Obstacles
Rice University School of Social Sciences
Gateway Study of Leadership TURNING POINTS
{series II | 2012 - 2013} Natural Sciences
Cultivating Mentors
Gateway School of Social Sciences Rice University 6100 Main Street Houston, Texas 77005-1827 U.S.A.
Turning Points Series PRODUCERS
Ipek Martinez, Alex Wyatt, Vinita Israni REVIEWERS AND EDITORS
Bo Kim, Leslie Nguyen, Nathan Joo, Hira Baig, Nitin Agrawal CONTRIBUTORS
The Turning Points, Series II is made possible from excerpts of faculty interviews conducted by 2012-2013 Gateway Study of Leadership (GSL) fellows, GSL codirectors and other Gateway students. 2012-2013 GATEWAY STUDY OF LEADERSHIP FELLOWS Daniel Cohen (co-director), Amol Utrankar (co-director), Nitin Agrawal, Hira Baig, Cynthia Bau, Sang Hee (Steven) Cho, Colleen Fugate, Rujia Jiang, Nathan Joo, Bo Kim, Haley McCann, Yoonjin Min, Trent Navran, Leslie Nguyen, Arik Patino, Rohan Shah, Andrew Ta, Sallyann Zhou.
A NOTE FROM THE GATEWAY DIRECTOR
The 2012-2013 Turning Points series shares excerpts from student interviews with the School of Natural Sciences faculty to bring a slice of life experiences to view for the Rice University community and beyond. In the fall of 2011, the School of Social Sciences Gateway program initiated Gateway Study of Leadership (GSL), which brought undergraduate fellows together to organize and lead interviews with the Rice School of Social Sciences faculty to discover career journeys and inspiration behind research endeavors, plus additional focus on their thoughts regarding role of academia in society. These candid conversations revealed many thought provoking life experiences and interesting stories and some had an essence of a “turning point� regarding the decisions involved in attending college, selecting majors, pursuing advanced degrees, encountering mentors, finding inspiration for research topics, and developing a refreshing new approach to handle
criticism in order to build knowledge and propel ahead. A collection of those excerpts formed the Series I of the Turning Points booklets. In 2012-2013 academic year, the GSL fellows organized and conducted interviews with the Rice School of Natural Sciences faculty exploring their initial interest in science, career decisions and additional focus on leadership in academia. The participating faculty members shared experiences and thoughts on role of collaborative nature of research in sciences, working with mentors, developing a variety of skills along the way, discovering of opportunities and ultimately embracing leadership roles when necessary. We gathered few excerpts from these conversations to share as the GSL Turning Points Series II, in five booklets titled: Choosing Academia, Cultivating Mentors, Developing Skills, Discovering Opportunities, Embracing Leadership. Ipek Martinez
CONTENTS
1.
George McLendon, Ph.D. Develop a Generation of Impact
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2. Matthew Bennett, Ph.D. 3 Be the World’s Leading Expert 3.
Brandon Dugan, Ph.D. Importance of Having a Mentor
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4.
Matthew Bennett, Ph.D. Working On Your Own
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5.
Brendan Hassett, Ph.D. Freedom to be Generous
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6.
K. Beth Beason-Abmayr, Ph.D. Mentors at Each Step of the Journey
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7.
George Phillips, Ph.D. Part of the Plan
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8.
Janet Braam, Ph.D. Be the Role Model
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9. 10.
Matthew Bennett, Ph.D. Students as Mentors
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Brandon Dugan, Ph.D. Fostering Independent Thinking
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11.
Brendan Hassett, Ph.D. A Supportive Community
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12. K. Beth Beason-Abmayr, Ph.D. 27 Help You Reach Your Goals 13.
Paul Padley, Ph.D. Taking the Initiative
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14.
Angel MartĂ, Ph.D. Cultivating a Mentor
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15.
Alma Novotny, Ph.D. Somebody I Wanted To Be
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16.
Matthew Bennett, Ph.D. Inspirational Mentors
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About the Contributors 41 Acknowledgements 45
TURNING POINTS ONE
Develop a Generation of Impact George McLendon, Ph.D. Provost, Rice University
I think our primary job is to develop a next generation of impact. Rather I prefer that to using the word “leaders,” which tends to be confusing because it tends to suggest a hierarchical model, which I don’t intend. A phrase that I’ve always liked, is to develop a generation of people who will live ‘lives of consequence’ that their choices (your choices) will enrich not only your own life and those of your immediate family and friends; They may also enrich a larger and more diverse community. I don’t think it matters that much in choosing how you wish to impact the world, whether you do that as a Steve Jobs business leader, or you do that as the best elementary school teacher in the world, or you do that as a sociologist, or you do that as a cancer researcher. It does matter that we’ve equipped you with more than a set of narrow technical skills. I 1
don’t trivialize technical skills; chemists without technical skills blow things up, so it’s really good to have good technical skills. Nonetheless, it’s not the technical skills that are likely to have a catalytic impact on those around you. It’s also your sense of values, it’s your ability to articulate opportunities and possibilities for yourself and others. There’s a whole set of soft skills that accompany the more technical skills that determine your ability to live the life you would’ve chosen.
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TURNING POINTS TWO
Be the World’s Leading Expert Matthew Bennett, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Biochemistry & Cell Biology, Rice University
As a graduate student, I felt like I had wasted two years of my life working on a problem that was not solvable. I was really upset, but at the same time it was very liberating. Once I had gotten over the hurdle of thinking everything was solvable in a finite amount of time and relying on my mentor to teach me how to do things I started looking at science a lot differently. I see in my students what I went through at that time. When they struggle with things I think they assume I have the answer. But I don’t always have the answer. In my view, what all graduate students should strive for as they’re learning to become scientists is to become self-reliant and develop confidence through expertise. I always tell my grad students before 3
they go in front of their thesis committees: “Be the world’s leading expert on your project.” And then before a critical meeting with their committees, I remind them that they are the world’s leading expert on this project – not the committee members. This can be hard for them to believe and internalize because for their whole lives they’ve been taught by these experts who know everything. But at some point, when a graduate student has been working on a problem that nobody has ever worked on in the history of humanity, they become the world’s leading expert – more than I am, more than committee is. Once graduate students realize this and embrace it, everything opens up.
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TURNING POINTS THREE
Importance of Having a Mentor Brandon Dugan, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Earth Science, Rice University
The first mentor I had was a biology teacher in high school who mentored me to push myself beyond what was required in the classroom. Then, I worked very closely with my undergraduate advisor at the University of Minnesota who encouraged me to explore all kinds of different educational options and encouraged me to get research experience as an undergraduate. Through that, I learned the value of having a strong mentor. When I picked a graduate school, I picked a place where I thought I would have the best mentoring, not necessarily a school based on its name. I picked a person to work with rather than a university.
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TURNING POINTS FOUR
Working on Your Own Matthew Bennett, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Biochemistry & Cell Biology, Rice University
I learned to work independently in graduate school. As an undergraduate, you’re given your assignments, you’re given books to read, you’re given classes to go to – take these tests, answer these questions. It’s all very regimented. Then, all of a sudden, you’re thrown into graduate school and you’re given a research project. As an undergrad, you’re given a problem and you know that there’s a solution to it that should fit into a page or so. And, knowing that there is a solution aids you in finding that solution. But in grad school you are given a problem that might not have a solution, and that is a whole different ballgame. When I was a graduate student I was actually given a problem that, as it turns out, might not have 7
a solution. That was a lesson to me- if I wanted to become a decent scientist I had to become independent enough to be able to set my own course. By that I mean I had to realize that my project was not going to work out the way my advisor and I had hoped and then choose for myself what to do from there. Once I took control of my own research path and stopped blindly following whatever my teachers were telling me I began to do much better.
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TURNING POINTS FIVE
Freedom to be Generous Brendan Hassett, Ph.D. Professor, Mathematics, Rice University
It’s interesting to imagine what it would be like in academia if there were not tenure, because there are really not that many examples. If you look at countries around the world, tenure is a very common institution and so there’s not that many examples of how life might be like otherwise. I know of only one or two countries where there is not a functioning tenure system, where professors work on fixed-term contracts. There are positive things and negative things. Tenure makes faculty less responsive to institutional imperatives. Often collaboration across departments is an institutional imperative and when the people involved are tenured, if they think it’s useful they’ll do it and if they think it’s not useful they won’t. In the university most hiring and tenure decisions are made at a departmental level, at least at Rice, and so faculty naturally are focused on the 9
needs of their departments, the teaching needs and research needs more than the institution as a whole. As long as most decisions about rewards originate from departments, the system may not reward collaboration. If you do something outside the department and it’s not supporting departmental missions then it’s not something that the department is going to take the initiative to reward in most cases. In countries without tenure professors are probably a little more guarded in terms of their interactions with other faculty. Tenure also gives you the freedom to be generous, because you don’t have to worry that if you share an idea with someone and the other person develops it you could lose your job. I think that it encourages free exchange of ideas and so it perhaps promotes collaboration from that point of view. There are different notions of collaboration. One is collaboration where two sides or academics get together and work on a common project. I think that that kind of collaboration is probably promoted by tenure. The things that the university tends to point to, which are interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary interactions, that is not necessarily promoted by 10
tenure. Sometimes tenure can help in that it provides you with enough security: you know you can spend a year of two learning about a new field if that’s something that is important to you. If you don’t have tenure taking the time to learn something outside your area of training as a graduate student becomes quite risky. This discourages people from taking chances.
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TURNING POINTS SIX
Mentors at Each Step of the Journey K. Beth Beason-Abmayr, Ph.D. Lecturer, Biochemistry & Cell Biology, Rice University
I had mentors from high school to college and in graduate school. There was my biology teacher in high school. I also had my chemistry and physics teacher. I was very close with her, and she was very encouraging. So they were the ones that got me interested in studying science in college. As an undergraduate, I became very close to two professors: my physiology professor, who is the one I actually worked for as a teaching assistant, and then my genetics professor who I worked with in the lab my senior year. Those were my two primary mentors during college. They were faculty members; I didn’t necessarily have many peer mentors. When I was a Teaching Assistant (TA) for the first time I was the only undergraduate TA--all the other TAs were 13
graduate students, and I worked closely with several of them. I still remember the one that I worked with the first time I taught: she was working on a master’s degree, but she was doing a non-thesis master’s because she wanted to go straight into teaching. She was really good and very patient and answered lots of questions. So there were a couple of graduate students, but it was primarily my two professors. From high school to college and then to graduate school, mentors played an important role. I really don’t know what direction I would have gone in if I hadn’t had the experiences I had as an undergrad. I probably would have gone to graduate school, but I might have ended up in microbiology instead of physiology. My relationships with my mentors, especially my physiology professor, had a huge influence on my career path. And it was a personal relationship, it wasn’t just, “Oh, ok, I took a class with you, you were at the front of the room of fifty or more students, and I recognize you but I don’t really know you.” By working as a teaching assistant with him, I was able to get really close with him. We have stayed in touch, and I have seen him a couple 14
of times in the last couple of years. It is a very special memory.
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TURNING POINTS SEVEN
Part of the Plan George Phillips, Ph.D. Professor, Biochemistry & Cell Biology, Rice University
There was a physics teacher in high school and half the kids liked him and the other half hated him. What he did was that he said some things that were contradictory but it all sort of made sense after I got to know him a little better. On laboratory day he was nowhere to be found. He would put the kits in the lab and split. So, everyone was pissed off and thought he just went to smoke in the teacher’s lounge and goofing off on lab day. But, the next year I was a teacher’s assistant for him and he explained it to me. He said, “George I want you to split during lab day, if you’re there and you do it for them and you show them how to do it, they won’t learn nearly as much if they have to figure it out all themselves. So, don’t help them.” This was part of his plan: there’s the kit, do the experiment. That again, made half 17
the kids crazy. But then again, I see the method to his madness. He teaches you to be proactive and teach yourself. It’s just a modern teaching method. You want interactivity, you don’t want someone just performing in front of you. Professor Georgenson was his name. I think he was an important part of my early development.
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TURNING POINTS EIGHT
Be the Role Model Janet Braam, Ph.D. Professor, Biochemistry & Cell Biology, Rice University
A couple of the professors helped me as an undergrad. The professor who let me feed frogs was inspiring both in the classes he taught and in his lab. I went to him for advice when I thought about going to grad school. He encouraged me, and that was helpful. I’m comfortable being a role model and a mentor to people who are interested in a career in science. I very much enjoy my career and would like to provide guidance to students who might aspire to a similar career. I know what it’s like to go through the challenges and can provide advice about how to persevere, not give up. I think it is important to be a role model for young women, so that they see women, like themselves, as scientists and leaders. 19
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TURNING POINTS NINE
Students as Mentors Matthew Bennett, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Biochemistry & Cell Biology, Rice University
As a Rice undergraduate, going to classes and talking with professors is very valuable. But what I think is equally (or maybe even more) valuable, is the fact that you’re with other students who are really smart and share your interests. There’s something about being together with other smart people that seems to make you smarter. The students here at Rice really push each other to do better. You can learn a lot about how to work and learn and live, not from the professors, but from other students – from your friends and your colleges. I think the lessons that you learn from your peers will stay with you longer than anything we as professors teach you. Both classroom and extra-curricular activities should be emphasized. But, I still want the pre-med students to learn their biochemistry. 21
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TURNING POINTS TEN
Fostering Independent Thinking Brandon Dugan, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Earth Science, Rice University
My leadership role is the way I mentor my students, undergraduates and graduates, is that I try to get them to develop professionally. Very rarely do I tell a student that you have to do this. Instead, I will say “Here are two or three things that I am very interested in doing research on, and how do you think you can contribute to these? Why don’t you read this information and come back to me with some ideas.” I always try to push the student to come up with their own ideas and then I try to guide them, rather than me dictating exactly what they do. I let them develop professionally and personally. If there are struggles, I may give them a few seeds and say why don’t you start on this and see what interests you, but primarily I like the students to run on their own with a little guidance from me and if they veer 23
off in the wrong direction I’ll try and steer them back or ask questions to help them steer themselves back. I want students to be creative, motivated, and let them make their own decisions. My role as a mentor and leader is to let them make some decisions, let them try to decide whether those decisions are good decisions or bad decisions, and try to discuss why they are so the students understand why they’re doing what they’re doing rather than doing something that they’re just told to do. I really try to foster independent thought versus just following orders.
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TURNING POINTS ELEVEN
A Supportive Community Brendan Hassett, Ph.D. Professor, Mathematics, Rice University
A big influence in my college life was the other people who I went to school with. Probably a bigger long-term influence than the faculty. When I was a freshman I was actually in a humanities program, and one of my roommates was actually supposed to be the math person. He had done a lot of math contests, mathematical modeling contests, as a high school student. So he and I, we talked a lot about math and took a freshman calculus class for math majors together. He’s a professor at Duke now, so we still keep in contact about mathematical things. My sophomore and junior year roommate was more into computer science and is now doing mathematical computer science. He was tenured at MIT, then he moved back to the Yale computer science department. He recently won the Nevanlinna prize, which is the biggest prize 25
in mathematical computer science internationally. Having these people around, rooming with them, late night sessions talking through things that we were doing in our courses, this had a real big impact. It’s important to have a community of people who are interested in these kinds of questions. It’s hard to do research in mathematics as an isolated individual. I was lucky that in my class there was a number of people who went on to be mathematicians. Another one of my classmates is a professor at Brown. There is also a professor at Indiana University. There were quite a few people who continued to do mathematics at a fairly high level and we enforced each other quite a bit.
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TURNING POINTS TWELVE
Help You Reach Your Goals K. Beth Beason-Abmayr, Ph.D. Lecturer, Biochemistry & Cell Biology, Rice University
I would like to see myself as a mentor. I don’t think my role is to just “tell them,” so I don’t see myself as a passive lecturer that delivers the information. I see myself more as a coach – “Okay, here are your goals, here is where you want to get to, what can I do to help you get there?” Obviously in the lab, it is very interactive because you are doing experiments, but I have also changed the whole way I do the lecture components of my courses, especially the advanced lab. This past Fall, so Fall 2011, I was part of a pilot program at Rice for Scale Up, which stands for Student Centered Active Learning Environment. Basically instead of just giving a Powerpoint lecture and talking to the students and saying, “Ok, here is the background, here is what you are going to be doing, etc.” It is much more interactive now. So 27
they sit at round tables, they work as groups, they solve problems, they do calculations, they have discussions--we use “clickers” so they participate and it helps me know, this is what they understand, this is what they don’t understand. They do it anonymously so no one feels embarrassed if they get the wrong answer. These changes have made the class better, and I think it makes the students feel more comfortable when they get to the lab. So I see it more as mentoring than just “I’m going to tell you what you are going to do and I’m going to watch you do it.” It is more, “Ok, what can I do to help you?” Much more engagement. I realize that a lot of the students are in there not because they want to be, but because they have to be because it is required, and some of them are never going to set foot in a lab again. So my teaching colleagues and I try to emphasize the whole process of science, not specific techniques or specific procedures or not “you need to know how to do this”, but more, “can you follow something that is written? Can you communicate what you did and what your results are with your teammates? Can you work with other people to solve a problem? Can you write up that information? Can 28
you communicate it?” These are critical-thinking skills that they can apply to any career field. I have learned a lot from the students. A lot. I tweak my courses every semester based on student feedback. I will ask them, “Okay, is there something you guys would like done differently?” and I have changed things such as the type of assignment or the due date based directly on what they have told me. So that is another piece of advice I would give to students as they fill out course evaluations: don’t just say, “Oh, I liked this class” or “this class was a lot of work”; give something specific – “if you could change the class, what specifically would you do?” They have really had some good suggestions on ways to improve their ability to learn in the class. I want the students to realize that I am dedicated to education. I am not here to just deliver a mandate and say this is what you have to do. If there is something specific that I can do that will help you learn better, please share it with me.
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TURNING POINTS THIRTEEN
Taking the Initiative Paul Padley, Ph.D. Professor, Physics & Astronomy, Rice University
I was unusually successful as an undergraduate researcher. The research I did as an undergraduate was noticed by the entire Canadian particle physics community. So I could, by the time I was applying to graduate school, go wherever I wanted on the basis of that research. And so I went to the University of Toronto, the preeminent place for physics in Canada. I had this amazing experience under my mentor, Bill Friskin. I enrolled in his class. We hit it off. And it just turned out he had stuff to work on that just fit me like a glove and I could really do well. I know for a fact that when I was coming on the market for a post-doc job getting my PhD, somebody who had seen my undergraduate research knew this research institute in Vancouver called TRIUMF was looking for somebody. And he took the initiative in contacting him and said I saw 31
this guy doing his undergraduate research and you should look at him. That undergraduate research got me my first post-doc job. It’s just luck. He had a project and it was someone that I hit it off with. I visited Bill Friskin in Toronto in the fall because I was giving a seminar up in Toronto. We went out to dinner together, and I could see why I enjoyed working with him, I mean it was still there, that chemistry was still there. I think that’s what I advise students, I tell them to put a lot a weight on the chemistry they have with their potential supervisors. Because you could be at a great place with a great person but you just don’t work well with them. And then you maybe able to go to another place where there’s someone there that you really work well with, and that just makes you more productive.
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TURNING POINTS FOURTEEN
Cultivating a Mentor Angel Martí, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Chemistry, Rice University
I had many good mentors throughout my life—two of them were my doctoral advisor, Jorge Colón and my postdoctoral mentor, Nick Turro. Jorge taught me how to look at science with curiosity and intuition. He used to say that the trick was to recognize when a route was a dead end or whether it was something worth it to be pursued. He also mentored me on how to write scientific manuscripts. I remember spending hours and hours in his office editing a manuscript. He would go sentence by sentence explaining what were good arguments and what were not. After more than 40 manuscript published I can say that my writing was essentially shaped by those meetings. My postdoctoral mentor, Nick Turro, was also very influential on my philosophy about how I should be in science. He’s a very important person in the area of photochemistry. 33
So if you want to emulate someone, he’s a very good person to do that. He always said that you should always look for the big challenges. You should always try to find answers to problems regardless of the techniques that you had to use. There’s two ways of doing research. You can own a technique that you only know how to use, and then you can apply that technique to all of the problems that you can think of. For example, if you’re an expert in laser spectroscopy, then you can use laser spectroscopy to solve problems in materials sciences, to solve problems in bioengineering, to solve problems in other areas. But then your research is focused on a technique. There’s nothing wrong with that. My advisor would always say that the kind of research that you want to be in is the kind of research that is focused on the problem and not the technique, because the technique is a well that will get empty after many, many years. You can do so much research with that technique, but once you have done all of these areas, then what will you do? But if you focus on a problem, things are different. The trick is to focus on the problem and look at it from the outside, and try to apply all of the techniques that you can 34
think of to solve that problem. Instead of focusing on the technique, you will focus on the problem and use a variety of techniques to try to solve it or try to address it. That’s a more problem-focused approach, and I kind of like this.
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TURNING POINTS FIFTEEN
Somebody I Wanted to Be Alma Novotny, Ph.D. Lecturer, Biochemistry & Cell Biology, Rice University
The first person I ever ran into that was somebody I wanted to be was a woman named Sally Hughes Schrader. She was a professor emerita at Duke when I was there, and the thing that I liked about her was that she loved what she was doing and she had a wonderful time. At that point she would’ve been an emerita professor, so she would have been retired, and she was still observed to do things like run through the parking lot balancing an umbrella by its point, laughing at her own jokes, and being very involved with what she did. She was interested in cell division and she grew her own diffuse kinetochore chromosomes in mosses at her back door. To me, that was a model for how you went into science and had fun. My major professor was also always very supportive, and that was Michael 37
Forman, who is a great guy. I also babysat for him. My experience in science hasn’t been nearly as fractured as most people’s have been, and it worked out well for me.
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TURNING POINTS SIXTEEN
Inspirational Mentors Matthew Bennett, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Biochemistry & Cell Biology, Rice University
I started out at the University of Michigan out of high school as a Music and then a Linguistics major. I did terribly – those weren’t the fields for me. I ended up dropping out of school and I worked in various factory jobs for a few years until I started working as a computer programmer in the mid 90s. I had taught myself how to program HTML. And this was the Web 1.0 – I was there at the beginning. I started doing that and making a decent living. About a year and a half later my salary declined because other people figured out how easy it was to program HTML. So I decided it was time to go back to school and that’s when I went to Georgia Tech - where I got a degree in Physics in 2000. I then continued at Georgia Tech to work on my Ph.D., also in Physics, and I completed that 39
in 2006. After my Ph.D. I became a post-doc at a Bioengineering Lab at UC San Diego where I started working on Synthetic Biology. I was at UCSD for three and a half years before I got my job here at Rice in the Biochemistry and Cell Biology Department. After I had dropped out of Michigan, in order to get back into school at Georgia Tech, I actually had to take a few classes at a community college to meet the transfer requirements at Georgia Tech. While I was at this small community college outside of Atlanta, one of the math professors there took an interest in me and really inspired me. I owe a lot to her because she gave me a lot of guidance and advice on both my life and my career, and I have always been very thankful to her for that. I strive to do the same for undergrads that come through my lab. I try to be very active in helping them with their career and their education. I don’t know if I’m as successful as my mentor was with me, but that’s something I strive to do with undergrads here. And it’s one of the reasons why I really love Rice – there’s a great culture of that sort of mentorship. 40
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Dr. K. Beth Beason-Abmayr is Lecturer and Laboratory Coordinator in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Rice University. Dr. Beason-Abmayr earned her B.S. in Microbiology from Auburn University in 1990 and her Ph.D. in Physiology & Biophysics from the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 1996. Dr. Matthew Bennett is Assistant Professor of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Rice University. His research involves synthetic biology and the dynamics of gene regulation - from small-scale interactions such as transcription and translation, to the large-scale dynamics of gene regulatory networks. Dr. Bennett received a B.S. in physics from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2000 and a Ph.D. in Physics from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2006. Dr. Janet Braam is Chair and Professor of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Rice University. Her primary research interests involve environmental stress responses in plants, the role of the circadian clock and epigenetic regulation in plant defense, autophagy regulation, and chloroplast biogenesis and maintenance. After receiving her B.S. from Southern Illinois University – Carbondale in Zoology in 1980, Dr. Braam received her Ph.D. from the SloanKettering Division of the Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences in Molecular Biology and Virology in 1985 and was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University School of Medicine.
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Dr. Brandon Dugan is Associate Professor of Earth Science at Rice University. His research interests involve hydrogeology, marine geology, and sediment mechanics. Dr. Dugan earned a bachelor’s degree in geological engineering from University Minnesota in 1997 and a Ph.D. in geosciences from Penn State University in 2003. Additionally, he completed a Mendenhall post-doctoral fellowship with the U.S. Geological Survey. Dr. Brendan Hassett is Chair and Professor of Mathematics at Rice University. His primary research interest involves mathematical research in the field of algebraic geometry. He earned a B.A. in mathematics from Yale University followed by his M.A. and Ph.D from Harvard in 1994 and 1996, respectively. Dr. Angel Martí is an Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Bioengineering at Rice University. Dr. Martí’s primary research interests involve the design and synthesis of multifunctional molecular constructs for the treatment and diagnosis of amyloid forming diseases. He received his B.S. in chemistry from the University of Puerto Rico in 1999, and his Ph.D. in Inorganic Chemistry from the University of Puerto Rice in 2004. Additionally, Dr. Martí was a postdoctoral Research Scientist at Columbia University from 2004 to 2008. Dr. George McLendon is the Howard R. Hughes Provost and Professor of Chemistry at Rice University. His primary research interests involve inorganic and physical biochemistry. Dr. McLendon earned his B.S. from the University of Texas at El Paso in 1972 and his Ph.D. from Texas A&M University in 1976.
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Dr. Alma Novotny is a Lecturer in Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Rice University. She earned the George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching in 2012. Dr. Novotny earned her B.Sc. from Duke University in 1968 and her Ph.D. from Purdue University in 1972. Dr. Paul Padley is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Rice University. His primary research interests involve experimental elementary particle physics. Dr. Padley completed his undergraduate studies at York University in 1981 and received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 1987. Dr. George Phillips is the Ralph and Dorothy Looney Professor of Biochemistry and Cell Biology and Professor of Chemistry. His primary research interests involve relating the three-dimensional structure and dynamics of proteins to their biological functions. Dr. George Phillips earned a B.A from Rice University in Biochemistry and Chemistry in 1974. He then furthered his education at Rice University by earning a Ph.D in Biochemistry in 1976. He also did some post-graduate work at Brandeis University.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Special thanks to all Rice University School of Natural Sciences faculty who made this project possible by sharing their career experiences and educational life stories with the Gateway students through one-on-one interviews. Much appreciation goes to School of Natural Sciences Dean Daniel Carson and his staff, especially Ms. Pamela Jones for the continual support, and School of Social Sciences Dean Lyn Ragsdale for her counsel and encouragement, and Alex Wyatt for embracing the overall Turning Points project and developing the web presence at http://turningpoints.rice.edu. Our heartfelt gratitude to the Gateway Associates and supporters of the Gateway programs for making projects like this possible. Many thanks also to the current and past Turning Points team and Gateway Study of Leadership fellows for the tremendous amount of time and effort in bringing this series to life.
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